Yikes that's scary: http://www.sgcarmart.com/news/writeup.php?AID=70

Why would you want a car in Singapore?! how much would you pay to the occasional cab?

just checked online, if i walked from downtown to the airport it would be 2h :)

Status.

Yes, I knew this 10 years ago in college. And Singapore is considered a pioneer in intelligent transportation back then. Not sure if this is still the case.

Still is. In fact you don't even need a car to get around the country. People there get a car because they can.

A car that can often cost over 100k USD.

100K USD only gets you a Toyota. Double that for an E-class.

Does the price scale linearly or is there a high barrier to just get any kind of car anyways? If Singapore puts up a high initial barrier, the cost of the car is sort of secondary, or do they also have high import duties and luxury taxes on top of that?

If its just high registration costs, you'd expect to see a lot of higher end cars since there is not much point to pay $50K just to buy a $20K car.

It's mostly the import taxes... A Ferrari 458 will run you almost 720K USD (about 3x of what it is in the US). And you see them quite frequently.

China has high taxes on luxury cars, so they really are 2 or 3X the cost of the states (especially if imported). However, at least outside of Shanghai, registration costs are low (well, in Beijing we have the lottery), so you'll still see a lot of low end Chinese brands flying around.

When I was in Singapore, I got the impression that it was very different there, all the cars were quite nice.