Lexus dealer causes me much amusment

[handscombmp]

To be honest all dealings with the deal and manufactur are over priced.

It's sat navs are the worst.

I've got one in my Audi S5 which i paid about £1500 for (i really don't know what i was thinking that day. The car had already cost me enough) and it's know where near as good the £200 tomtom ones. You can't even enter a full postcode!

And i dread to think how much the maps go for.
My neighbour tried to get one for a Jag X-Type and he was quoted £400!

[Zak33]

(have worked for BMW in the past), what I would love to know though is who it taking the profit?

in the 90's an esitmate was made by outside motor tradew accountancy firms, that

BMW Worldwide sold 10% of their entire stock in the UK (cars AND parts)
But that 10% of sales accounted for a vastly disproportionate % of thier global profit.

The other 90% of global sales was probably making up under 45% of the profit. That's shocking.

And that's why people used to drive their BMW to France for a holiday, and have a major service done there, such as cam belt, all fluids, disks etc.. becuuse the SAVING in parts and labour prices were enough to PAY for a weekend abroad on holiday, while driving a left hooker courtesy car!

[[GSV]Myocardial]

I phoned a Landrover main dealer couple of weeks back to find out the price of a radio casette player for a Defender TD5 which is a slightly modified BMW radio and was quoted the price of £287.50 + VAT and I had to go pick it up.

There's nothing fancy about a Defender radio, it plays the radio and tapes, so I'm now trying to get one off the bay for less than £25 shipped.

[Zak33]

it's a cruel circle for the factory... they make a car.. and have to make parts for it.. incase there is an insurance claim for a stereo... and they need to make enough to fulfill that requirement for a long time.. because someone, someday might want a new fatory OEM stereo on their insurance claim.
So.... te factory sits with a few of these units, for years.... and they still owe them big dough to stock and make a timy proportion of.

In the PC world such things dont exist... you'd not expect nvidia to hold a heatsink for a Ti200 incase yours was damaged by fire, now would you?

[Konan555]

I simply don't believe that leaving out the air-con (and perhaps fitting blanking plates) would be that difficult to do or change their cost structure that much.

Not to disagree with the notion of change to cost (I have no idea what it'd change), but just to satisfy some geeky urge.... I wonder how expensive it is to revise an engine management system these days?

In the early electronic systems, air con just upped the idle and ran a little rich (or in the case of my tractor engine, just pulls on the throttle cable a bit ). By the mid 90s, the ECU would make more direct changes to compensate for the compressor, such as including cutting the clutch at WOT.

The developed engine maps go through months of testing in all sorts of climates and are extraordinarily complicated. With the level of integration of ancillaries like aircon into modern management, it might be quite a task to develop a system for the rare non-aircon order.

[Saracen]

Not to disagree with the notion of change to cost (I have no idea what it'd change), but just to satisfy some geeky urge.... I wonder how expensive it is to revise an engine management system these days?

In the early electronic systems, air con just upped the idle and ran a little rich (or in the case of my tractor engine, just pulls on the throttle cable a bit ). By the mid 90s, the ECU would make more direct changes to compensate for the compressor, such as including cutting the clutch at WOT.

The developed engine maps go through months of testing in all sorts of climates and are extraordinarily complicated. With the level of integration of ancillaries like aircon into modern management, it might be quite a task to develop a system for the rare non-aircon order.

Fair point.

But personally, having expensive and power-sucking aircon on a performance car, and being expected to pay through the nose for something I emphatically didn't want, is a step too far for me. It wasn't the only factor, but it was a big part of my decision not to buy.

It's only a personal belief, but I still think the motivation was simply to increase the car price and resulting revenue stream. It probably did, too. But not from me.

[Howard]

The developed engine maps go through months of testing in all sorts of climates and are extraordinarily complicated. With the level of integration of ancillaries like aircon into modern management, it might be quite a task to develop a system for the rare non-aircon order.

Why would you develop a system for something that doesn't exist, though?
Surely you'd use the same system but just not use the 'air con' section of the map?

It's the same with poverty spec cars and their dashboards.. Why re-mould the dashboard when you can just put switch blanks in.

[Konan555]

Why would you develop a system for something that doesn't exist, though?
Surely you'd use the same system but just not use the 'air con' section of the map?

It's the same with poverty spec cars and their dashboards.. Why re-mould the dashboard when you can just put switch blanks in.

You can certainly make a system work without a part of it connected. I never bothered connecting up any of my air conditioning and it all works fine. I can tell you that it's still an Air-Con ECU and that if the car had come without it, the ROM would be different. Yes, they do go to the effort of designing different systems rather than having a ubiquitous one and leaving parts redundant... and this was 20 years ago.

I suspect on a BMW now, we're not just talking about maps (fuel maps being a very simple part of anything from around 1995, when people play with 3rd party management systems they don't perform anywhere near the complexity of functions that the OEM system would have). The car's packed with interconnected firmware and management systems. Traction control, power steering, engine management.... they all talk.

I'm not saying it's not a relatively simple thing to remove air con. I'm saying some accountant worked out the cost of testing both cars and doing it on the production line vs adding it to every car and advertising it as 'as standard' or 'free' in Saracen's case.

There are all sorts of hidden costs worked out by men in grey suits. What about the change in car weight? We're going to be looking at springs for the car with air con and the car without....