Mxsmanic wrote:
Mark writes:

Relatively speaking the price of an airplane today
is much higher than they were in the 1970's as
compared to the value of a dollar and average wages
back then. And really, if you look at the price of
complex automobiles with all the bells and whistles
there really is no justification for planes to be priced
so high. There just isn't that much more technology
or material.

A shrinking market, ever-increasing potential liability in a society obsessed
by frivolous litigation, and the high cost of certification probably all
contribute to the prices of airplanes. These factors are absent or nearly
absent for automobiles, which have a huge, expanding market, relatively
insignificant liability issues in relation to the market size, and virtually
no certification requirements.

Actually the automobile market has all those concerns, which is why you don't
see new, low volume cars like the Morgan in the USA. They can't afford to
meet all those requirements at their volume level. One Morgan executive
once commented that the US crash testing requirements alone whould require
most of a years production.

It is the huge volume of mass produced cars that spreads those costs over
so many units that the compliance cost per unit becomes trivial.


--
Jim Pennino

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