Comment by kjellsbells
Comment by kjellsbells 18 hours ago
For your use case, the Citroen Ami is comfortably sub 10k.
But perhaps you are making a larger point about "things I consider unnecessary adding $$ to the base cost of every vehicle." I would say, to that, that
- your governments and voters consider them important for societal reasons, e.g. airbags so you can walk away from a crash, or cameras to help crushing a child when reversing. Presumably you are ok with this..or not?
- the car manufacturers in the EU are politically powerful and absolutely fearful that if the EU allowed the full range of global vehicles into the European market, they would be crushed overnight. Why buy a VW when you can get any number of Chinese minis, or Indian econoboxes, or even a cheap kei car. I guarantee that China keeps Daimler-Benz and VW execs up at night and that they have the full support of their workers when they spend money to lobby against low cost foreign imports...
> the Citroen Ami is comfortably sub 10k.
It’s a quadricycle and not a real car, though.
Also I’d bet that VW/etc. executives are more fearful of Chinese equivalent’s of their mid/high-end models which cost the same as Europran manufacturer’s budget options.
Not tiny/ultra-budget/featureless vehicles which wouldn’t be that popular in Europe.
The issues with the Ami or anything similar or most cheap barebones models is that you can get a much nicer used car for the same price.
Modern cars are also much more reliable and last longer than they used to several decades back reducing the demand in the budget segment.