@CoolMinivan-Nobody said in Being disappointed is a primary emotion of a car enthusiast.:
@High_fidelity Unfortunately, the ability for these things went away when they decided everything must be in packages.
Which is another thing that needs to go TF away.
If I want to order a Base Model "xxxxxxx" with the biggest engine sold in them, the best suspension, and the big brakes without all the fluff and BS I damn well should be able to.
A lot of that comes down to production line efficiency. Every option needs to be bolted into a car, usually by the same guy who bolts in the other options for the same thing, and some of them take longer to fit than others. So manufacturing guys wind up with a bunch of rules like “no more than three cars in a row down the line can have cooled seats because they’re more awkward to fit and the seat installer gets too far behind, and then after every group of cooled-seats ones you need to have at least twice as many non-cooled ones so they can catch up. If cooled seats get more common than 33% take-up we’re going to need to physically reconfigure the line and also add labour, so marketing will need to show they can make enough money from the option to justify that cost”.
That’s hard enough to manage with a restricted number of choices bundled in combos - if you make it open season on options, it gets impossible. When I was in the auto industry years ago, our marketing people came up with the brilliant idea on a new vehicle I was involved with that it would have no trim levels or packages at all, and every option would be individually orderable, and manufacturing were like “ok, but if you work out the actual numbers, that comes to over a million possible permutations of labour-affecting options on a car we’re going to build under a hundred thousand a year of. No way, not if you care at all about cost”.
Otherwise you need to allow for enough production time and space for every car to have the hardest to install version of every option, and that means all the cars without that option wear the cost too.