The Days Of Affordable Sports Cars Are Almost Over

Oh, well, it might be, to be fair: but you know, headlines, opening lines, they’re meant to be dramatic. Big up the worst case. Glass half-empty. You know how it is.

There will always be sports cars, I guess; although car industry regulators are not exempting them from becoming cleaner. And that is the problem for the affordable performance car, because a fast low-emissions car isn’t easy to make.

As it stands, if you produce a lot of cars, their average exhaust CO2 output will have be a lot lower (95g/km on what’ll then be the ‘old’ NEDC drive cycle fuel economy and CO2 calculations), across the board, by 2020, than it has been previously.

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senft - 4/9/2018 5:41:30 AM

+1 Boost

Ah, inexpensive sports cars have been dying forever. Me, I'm an old guy. In my youth, sports cars were wee bodied things with pedestrian engines more powerful than the wee bodies needed. Light weight, low center of gravity and relatively powerful engines yielded pretty good performance. Think MGA, MGB, TR4. And our 60s muscle cars were approximately the same: Conventional cars chopped down with sexy bodies and over-sized engines. (Of course, true handling was missing here in the nation of interstates...)
Point is, the formula is, or should be, simple for a manufacturer if they cared. You don't build a bespoke vehicle -- that's impossible financially. You take something low end, chop it down, etc. -- costs for the host vehicle get amortized. That's how the Miata started -- built off the existing mass market 323.
Then again, there's also the Porsche philosophy: You want a cheap sports car? Buy used.

MDarringer - 4/9/2018 8:15:17 AM

-1 Boost

So much depends on the definition of "sports car" as well. If your definition includes a car like a GTI or a base Mustang that can wallop a Miata or a Fiat 124 at the track, then sports cars are not endangered. And so on...

MDarringer - 4/9/2018 8:45:52 AM

-1 Boost

@56 Not surprisingly you missed the point.