Re:Renting Horsepower
by lopiar_zen on Thursday May 04, 2023 @03:38PM
(#35821001)
That's absolutely false. You are painting the picture as if the car maker will sell you a high performance model (with all the necessary parts for performance) at a lower cost. No they will sell you that model with all their profit margin and then charge you extra monthly for the performance.
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Re:Renting Horsepower
by konschubert on Thursday May 04, 2023 @03:42PM
(#35821058)
this is untrue in a competitive market
And yet here we are. If they won’t compete with each other, regulation would seem the answer to this crap (as the original poster proposed).
This is often raised as a caveat when a business does something anti-consumer.
Maybe it's worth accepting that businesses will not behave as you expect.
Markets which require billions of dollars to compete in are not truly competitive. They may be competitive in a regulatory sense, but not in a practical one. And these markets have huge amounts of regulation as well that limits competition on top of the financial limitations on competition.
Re:Renting Horsepower
by konschubert on Thursday May 04, 2023 @04:14PM
(#35821460)
The slim margins in the automotive sector would like to have a word with this argument.
The 14.8B € profits in 2022 would also like to have a word with your "slim margins".
Slim margins say nothing about competitiveness. You can lose money in uncompetitive or competitive markets. You can have huge margins in competitive ones.
Also I don't think the 10.5% profit margin of Mercedes is low - the average for the S&P 500 is 11%.