Be Excellent To Each Other

Entirely unrelated to the actual discussion, but the DB9 shares a lot of components with a Mondeo.

Carry on!

And the Bugatti Veyron has parts from a Skoda. And the Ford GT engine is from a pickup truck. As is the Viper, I think.

That is true, but only to a point. A £150 case that is engineered like an F1 car is worth it, a £150 case that shouts "LOOK AT ME! I COST £150 !" is no better than a £30 case.

Unless "triple filament LEDs" and a paint job have some cooling/efficiency powers that I am not aware of.

And the Jag XJ220 engine is from a Mini!

There's not many chassis (how the hell do you pluralise that?) in the world either are there? Seat, Volkswagen and Audi are all basically the same design underneath.

Well yeah because they're all owned by Volkswagen Audi Group... Don't forget Skoda as well.

Aston Martin were owned by Ford, hence the cost cutting by sharing parts with cars from their mass produced ranges.

I suppose even in a extreme high end ultra expensive car, there's only so much you can spend on say, the air vents and the screen wash bottle.

Exactly! As for the Skoda parts in the Veyron, I'd say there are VAG parts in the Veyron, not necessarily parts you'll only find in a Skoda.

HYPERBOLE!

A mate of mine failed an MOT on a Ferrari he was testing because the battery retaining bracket was broken. It was made from carbon fibre and Ferrari wanted (IIRC) £800 to repair it (labour included at some fantastic rate per minute of an engineer in rossi red overalls sucking air past his teeth). He fabricated one from a piece of scrap steel and charged the guy £50.

History does not record how a carbon fibre bracket was broken. I think it was the retaining bolt, rather than piece of carbon fibre itself, but it had to be replaced as a unit.

Actually, the car analogy is quite apt.

For instance, a DB9 has stuff like cut crystal ashtrays, and solid silver fountain pens that pop out of the dash when you need it. When you turn on the ignition, the LED says "Power Beauty Soul". When you plug in your iPod, it shows the Aston logo.

All of which have nothing to do with the actual functionality of the car. So it can go one of two ways, it can help you try to justify spending 100 grand on a car which functionally does the same as something half the price, or people can go "useless frippery" if you show it all off.

If you are showing off the LED dash and not the six litre V12, then you are doing it wrong.

Ferrari are just Ferrari!

Definitely, this. But I maintain that the AlienWare case in question has a well-oiled V12. Couldn't give a shit about lights and that.

Bentley sell a special watch as part of the after sales for owners, charging about £400. The owner can personalise it for extra quids.

Mate of mine is a jeweller, he knows that the wholesale price for that model, without the Bentley logo, is 50 quid.

Actually, come to think of it, watches are my weakness. I would spend two grand on watch that is just as functional as a Sekonda.

Indeed, those are cases I would be immensely proud of.FTFY. I loves them cars I do, even if they do look like a boy racer's wet dream.

The engine in a 6R4 was a Rover V8 with two cylinders chopped off to make it fit.

I remember seeing Will Gollops Bi-turbo 6R4 when he was rallycrossing it. Bloody thing was awesomely quick.

I was ranting to MyFinger about this over IM last night. The way I see it, some products are "premium" and some are "luxury". With a premium product, the extra costs are associated with tangible benefits -- performance, built quality, robustness, etc. I think Apple is mostly a premium brand, for example.

With a luxury products you are buying intangibles, primarily either the warm fuzzies you get from owning something ostentatiously expensive or warm fuzzies from showing people your stuff. It's easy to sneer at that factor, but hundreds of firms, from designer clothing to high end analog watches to a lot of high end cars, turn over hundreds of billions a year in sales. From an economics point of view, this is important, even if from a sociological point of view it all looks faintly vulgar.

High end cars are generally premium and luxury, I think. Obviously a Ferrari will outperform a Mini but consider that a Mitsu Evo XII will trouble Ferraris and Porsches that cost five times as much.

True.

I'm an Aston Martin guy, not a Ferrari guy. Old money class over new style bling any day.

This is dangerous territory! A Ferrari isn't really luxurious, barring some models. Generally they're dedicated performance machines (premium). The Evo doesn't even come close, regardless of whether or not it can get around a track nearly as quick or not, for driver experience, as a proper driver's machine, etc.



And Ferraris are not bling. If anything I'd say the Astons are more showy and less driver-focused. I've been lucky enough to drive one of the new Astons (DB9) and a Ferrari 360, and I honestly felt the Aston was like my dad's Mondeo with a nicer interior and a hefty kick (admittedly, pretty fucking hefty). The 360 was absolutely mental.

That's not to say that I don't think the DB5 is the most beautiful car ever made.

(Hell, this thread got hijacked didn't it?)

I've recently driven an Audi R8 at speed on a track. Now admittedly my basis for comparison is a 1.2 Polo, a 1.3 Corsa and my Dad's Suzuki, but it was an absolute dream to drive. Comfortable, quiet and fucking quick. Seriously, I was up to 120mph and it felt like 60.

I don't know where I'm going with this...

Fella, I used to work in Alderley Edge. Ferraris are bling. They aren't designed to be bling, but the kind of people who buy them do so to get noticed. Astons owners aren't so gauche.

Disagree. They're just not as rich.

£190k for a Vanquish, isn't it?

Cristiano Ronaldo had a Ferrari. So does Wayne Rooney and Rio Ferdinand. And Kerry Katona. (And she has a Lambo as well.)

The chap at the Race Day I was at said you can get an 03 plate Vanquish for around £30k.

Not sure if he was bullshitting us though

Ferraris aren't called 'footballers' cars' for nothing.

Hey, you can't do anything about the wankers who buy your product!

I don't think there's really any expensive car which is immune from that, loads of them have Aston Martins for instance. Face it, if you think that by choosing just the right brand of obscenely expensive car you won't look like a flashy berk then you are pretty fucking deluded.

This is true, although I'm not sure about 30k. My dad is looking to sell his TVRs and pick one up. I tried to make him get a 355 instead but he's not interested

It's worth remembering that no matter how cheap you can pick up a super car like this, running costs, parts and servicing are still going to be absolutely sky high.

edit: http://pistonheads.com/sales/list.asp?s=418

More like £45k.

Must have been a trade price, maybe with some endorsement deal or similar.

Perhaps! He might not have meant the Vanquish. There are plenty of Astons in the £30k price bracket. I'd also like to add that my dad isn't a flashy cunt, he's all about the automotive pleasure and getting his hands covered in oil. And that.

No, it was defo a Vanquish. My brother drove it.

And someone stalled the Lambo Gallardo. I laughed.

D'oh! I thought the Gallardo was too refined for a Lambo. I always think of "insane and impractical" when I think of Lambo, but the Gallardo was really civilised. Ferrari 360 all the way!

Am I right to lust after an Omega Speedmaster?

The R8 V8 sounds fucking awesome when you give it some beans. I want one.

Saw a Nissan GT-R driving around for the first time the other day, but it was being driven slowly around a roundabout. I want to hear the noise, man! The noise!

Ferrari are both premium and luxury, dependent on the model. The 430 is a luxury motor, the 430 Scuderia is a premium motor designed for proper tracking.

This belongs in here, I feel:

http://maybeyoushouldntbuythat.com/

The floating bed is amazing. Properly sci-fi.

Someone once told me that 'Everything you own should be beautiful, practical or both'.

Obviously that doesn't appy to everything (media for example) but I think it's a pretty good rule to stick by.

My Linux desktop was/is ugly as fuck, old and pieced together from hand me downs. Practical as fuck though.

And whilst bringing up macs is probably going to start a fight, I consider my little ibook to be both. Its the most useful thing I've ever owned (Unix without the constant fiddling! Woo!) and it is beautiful. I can't imagine many other laptops that four years down the line would still look lovely.

Things you are going to use everyday for years should look aesthetically pleasing to you when possible. And it's worth paying a premium for it.

It's the same reasoning to why I spend £10 a time on moleskine notebooks.



Sure I could have just used the free notebooks from the stationary draw, but they I wouldn't have finished filling a single one. It cost me £60 but I've got all my thesis notes in 6 of them on a bookshelf. Worth every penny.

Thats about it though. Otherwise I'm a pretty cheap bastard.

"Nothing will make your erecticle dysfunction as a result of magnet poisoning quite as exciting as floating inches above the ground. "

I have about 8 of their sketchbooks because the paper they use is amazing. I've got a couple of the notebooks as well (they can be bought much cheaper online) but I use a Montblanc Meisterstuck 149 fountain pen and I find the paper a bit low quality for writing with that, as it can bleed into the paper and it looks a bit shit.

I'm a little dubious of "magnet poisoning", mind. There may be some basis behind it I'm unaware of, but I'm pretty sure it's not called that.

I think he's being funnee.

However, given that people do get all sorts of badness from living under power lines, I'd be a bit dubious about resting my cods on a giant magnet.

But it's like the future, man!

You have made a poor choice of planet to reside on, in that case

Shush you, with your science. Anyway, Earth magnetism is clearly different. We're all acclimatised to it and in any event the lines between the magnetic field bits are further apart.

This is true of every single one I've seen (I'm up to about 4 unique I think, and have seen the same one a couple of times). Apart from the one that the owner was squeezing every last drop of petrol into that he could.

While GT-Rs are comparatively cheap, are they worth the siginificant extra over a 350Z? Because they're just pimped 350Zs.

No. No they are not.

Oh, of course not. But they are *really*.

King Wrong strikes again!

Apart from everything else, they're much better looking, of course. The 350Z looks horrible.

Apart from being AWD, of course. And everything else.

-edit- I'm wrong about this. I was thinking of the Skyline. Everything else, though.

-edit edit- I'M RIGHT ACTUALLY! Thanks Wiki.

Yeah, but other than all that. You know, really they're basically the same car, but one's had some money spent on it.

See?





PS - Yes, I am *really* just trying to wind you up.