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Comment by jvehent | Hacker News Reader

There is only a finite number of people willing/able to spend $60k on a recreational vehicle.

It’s not a “recreational vehicle”, and people said the same thing about the Roadster, Model S, and Model X. They’ll still be saying it when Tesla is selling $1000 electric scooters: “Not everyone can afford a thousand dollars for a toy motorcycle!”

It's a $7.4 billion dollar market in North America. All cohorts are finite, but that's still a lot of dollars available to capture.

https://www.statista.com/outlook/1060000/104/luxury-cars/nor...

Plus Tesla just had a 6 billion dollar quarter selling the more expensive teslas. Wait till they sell the cheap version.

There are also a great number of people who have never spent more than $35k on a car who are buying a M3.

> There is only a finite number of people willing/able to spend $1k on a mobile phone.

A small modification.

The two values you're comparing differ by 60x.

Is a car 60x more useful than a phone? (Honest question, and probably varies by user. Though most cars last longer than most phones.)

Well, the point is that it’s 60x more expensive.

The question is - does the price match the utility - does the 60x cost device provide 60x utility?

Were these developers, I'd ask if the $900k developer is 60x better than the $30k administrator.

Were these knives and forks, I could ask YouTube.

There is only a finite number of people.

It's $50k

$60k is not a lot of money to spend on a car in this day and age.

This is an absurdly out of touch comment. The vast majority of cars sold in the US aren't even close to $60k.

The average new car is only $37k and only about 30% of car purchases are new cars.

Agreed. $60K is well into Mercedes E class, BMW 5 class, Audi S class territory. "Not that much" for the average US carbuyer, not so much.

You've just listed a group of $100,000+ AUD cars there. Just as a point of interest.

Right, exactly - but yet to listen to the grandparent comment, "that's hardly much money to spend on a car these days".

To highlight where I'm coming from, $37k USD is around $52K AUD, which then if you consider onroad and dealership costs, lands you in the ballpark of $60k AUD.

Which is what you spend on a Kia Stinger, which while isn't an entry-level car, certainly isn't a Euro.

https://www.carsales.com.au/demo/details/Kia-Stinger-2017/OA...

So $60K USD isn't an expensive car, because an average-priced $37K USD car is nearly $60K in AUD? ...what?

Also, even the average new car price being $37K USD seems high to me, given the preponderance of sub-$20K cars I actually see on the road (Civics and Corollas). I could certainly be out of touch in the opposite direction, but I wonder if that's a mean or median average, and whether it includes vehicles that are typically more expensive like SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks.

Apologies, I'm not from the United States.

You probably have class warfare in your country, too. You didn't say anything about the average consumer, but they're criticizing you as if you had.

Very much so. However it could be noted that the 'average' Australian income is in the area of $80k/yr ( https://www.livingin-australia.com/salaries-australia/ ) and the purchase of a $60k car is not uncommon at all.

Don't worry -- what usually happens is that someone will show up to complain that the average person in the 3rd world has a much smaller income, therefore you are out of touch.

Here's a fun little site estimating the price. Things cost a bit more in Australia :/ https://onestepoffthegrid.com.au/much-will-tesla-model-3-cos...

As a fellow Aussie, I still find it ludicrous that $60,000 AUD isn't much to spend on a car. Obviously only an anecdote, but I don't know anyone who has bought a car that even approaches that price, let alone for that to be the norm.

Did you happen to price up an SS commodore before they stopped selling them? Or look at the price of a Landcruiser? Very expensive vehicles yet the roads are plastered with them.

We're talking new cars here, so the 30% figure isn't relevant. It's not fair to compare the 70% of used car sales to the $60k price here, since that's a new car price.

So if the average new car is $37k, how many are in the range of $60k? The luxury segment alone is more than 10% and one of the fastest growing, and generally starts above $40k. And the $37k average isn't far from that, so I'd assume that there are tons of cheap cars pulling the average down, but also that there are probably a lot of very expensive cars pulling the average up. So while $60k for a new car is high, it's not like a crazy 1% super luxury purchase.

I think you might be the one out of touch here...there are a LOT of wealthy people out there buying new cars for whom $60k is a drop in the bucket. For example: the very story that we're all commenting on!

$10K is my limit to spend on a car. You can get a good used car for $10K if you look around a bit.

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