add-ons are crazy expensive

Still stock and it's killing me, but I just came from buying parts for a fox body for the past ten years so it's a bit of a shock when I price stuff for this one. Some day I will have enough money to not care about spending it to go a little faster or the prices will come down I suppose. Either way if they can charge it and people will pay for it then it only makes sense they will continue to charge that much.

Comparison to prices in the 70's need to be made properly for them to have anympletely invalid. Maybe the hood pins are 7.5 times more than back then, but average salaries were also not even close to what they are now. Its called inflation. $8 in 1970 is about equivalent to $45 now. Yes, the aftermarket parts may have risen a little more than inflation, but thats life. Some things have not risen as much as inflation. Gasoline, up until this past year, was one of them. Even with the recent spike in gas prices, we were paying less for gas that we were in the 80's, relatively speaking. At the beginning of this decade, we were paying less than ever before in history for gasoline.

But back to the point of the topic, $400+ for an axleback exhaust system is a bit unreasonable, especially when for the SN95's, a full catback exhaust system would be the same or less for systems from the same company. Other than that though, if it hadn't been brought up, I wouldn't have thought aftermarket prices were all that unreasonable.

fartingchicken said:

Yup, I know about inflation, but I also know that technology has made products cheaper to produce, not to mention China. I bit of chromed steel doesn't cost them but a fraction of the sale price.

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:Word:

If Pypes and SHR can sell their products for the prices they do, so can the rest of them. Both make great quality products, and compared to the other guys out there, they're small fish.

blacksheep06 said:

The s197 is a hot item with a lot of enthusiasts and the aftermarket knows just how enthusiastic we are about these cars. That's the reason for the prices on this model.

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Ayuh.

The question was not, "Are they worth it?" It was, "Why are they so expensive?" The answer is, "Because buyers will pay that much for them!" It does come from enthusiasm, true enough. If Mustang owners would stop paying outrageous prices for insignificant doll-up junk, the manufacturers of $100 headlight splitters (really? really!) would either lower the profit margin or stop making them.

Serious modifications may not be quite the same, but it's only a matter of degree, not quality. How many would fully utilize $600 adjustable struts/shocks? Not very many, but there is a kind of status in having D-Specs, and that's worth it to some.

Not to say there is anything wrong with that. Every little bit of commerce helps the economy, even if what you bolt on your car was made in China by slave labor.

Mods cost

Like the guy in "The Road Warrior" said, "Speed is just a matter of money - how fast do you want to go?".