Well, they're quoting him, and people get impressed by big numbers...
Veyron is a kind of research experiment for VAG. It might be $2M for an example, but they lose something like $1.5M per car.
It's just like the Lexus LFA being a test bed for carbon fiber manufacturing techniques.
Top person would need to own ~30k cars, and rest can own just an average of 8 for combined arithmetic mean of 84.
Essentially all this number tells us that 400 people who own Buggati collectively own ~33600 cars total.[0] For example Jay Leno alone owns 886 vehicles according to his wikipedia page. [1]
[0] This has assumption that no one owns, more than 1 Buggati car which is probably incorrect, so I expect actual number of cars owned by Buggati owners to be in the ballpark of 24-26k.
Image Fred Everyman. For some reason, the only car he can afford is a Bugatti Veyron, and he needs a car to get to work. How much does this cost Fred?
A basic new Bugatti Veyron seems to cost about $1.55 million. A normal car loan is for 3 or 4 years, but let's assume Fred can get a 30 year loan. He's got pretty good credit, and he ends up with a 4% interest rate. Unfortunately, Fred also needs auto insurance, which for a Veyron will run about $50,000 per year.
Fred's loan payment is about $7900/mo, and his insurance payment is about $4166/mo. Oh, and a Veyron only gets about 7mpg in a city, so we'll say his monthly gas bill is another $300.
Add that up, and Fred needs to make $12366 per month, post-tax, just to pay for his car (not counting tires, tune-ups, fixing the paint after people tag it). In order to have $12,366 of monthly net pay, Fred needs an annual pre-tax salary of around $315,000.
So a $315,000 yearly salary will allow Fred to own his Veyron in 30 years. If he wants to eat food or live somewhere, though, he'll of course need more.
(Warning: I almost certainly made at least 3 major mathematical or accounting errors in there somewhere).
One reasonable and fair way to interpret this is that Bugattis are among the least desirable vehicles known to the planet, and only of interest to hyper collectors interesting in obtaining "complete sets".
The article talks about the Bugatti Veyron. According to Wikipedia only 405 were sold [1]. The owner of the largest private car collection (7000 cars) has one of them [2]. The average is a pretty uninformative number, just like the average valuation of a YC startup.
No, just a few millionaires. I'm obviously stereotyping but I've found I don't even get along with non-wealthy people that are super image conscious. To me it's a sign of a weak mind to get so wrapped up in consumerism.
I happened to meet a Chinese-Malaysian billionaire. He had a few cars: One Mercedes, one BMW, and one Perodua Kancil, which is a little shit-box. They drove the Kancil most of the time around town.
I am not sure why people are giving so much importance to this. A Bugatti owner is likely to be very rich with several business interests. Such business interests often require lot of transportation and people end up buying many cars.
I dont think by 84 cars it actually means a person owns a giant parking lot in front of this house and picks a car at random each day. He might have 4 cars at his home and others at different places in the world where he has to travel often.
I believe that's why car rental places exist. Unless you seriously need to have the same car at all of the locations you travel to, which is not rational.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 86.9 ms ] threadFirst you get the money, then you get the Bently, then you get the Bugatti
Veyron is a kind of research experiment for VAG. It might be $2M for an example, but they lose something like $1.5M per car. It's just like the Lexus LFA being a test bed for carbon fiber manufacturing techniques.
Essentially all this number tells us that 400 people who own Buggati collectively own ~33600 cars total.[0] For example Jay Leno alone owns 886 vehicles according to his wikipedia page. [1]
[0] This has assumption that no one owns, more than 1 Buggati car which is probably incorrect, so I expect actual number of cars owned by Buggati owners to be in the ballpark of 24-26k.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Leno
Source: I own an oldish budget friendly Nissan, which clearly makes me an expert.
Image Fred Everyman. For some reason, the only car he can afford is a Bugatti Veyron, and he needs a car to get to work. How much does this cost Fred?
A basic new Bugatti Veyron seems to cost about $1.55 million. A normal car loan is for 3 or 4 years, but let's assume Fred can get a 30 year loan. He's got pretty good credit, and he ends up with a 4% interest rate. Unfortunately, Fred also needs auto insurance, which for a Veyron will run about $50,000 per year.
Fred's loan payment is about $7900/mo, and his insurance payment is about $4166/mo. Oh, and a Veyron only gets about 7mpg in a city, so we'll say his monthly gas bill is another $300.
Add that up, and Fred needs to make $12366 per month, post-tax, just to pay for his car (not counting tires, tune-ups, fixing the paint after people tag it). In order to have $12,366 of monthly net pay, Fred needs an annual pre-tax salary of around $315,000.
So a $315,000 yearly salary will allow Fred to own his Veyron in 30 years. If he wants to eat food or live somewhere, though, he'll of course need more.
(Warning: I almost certainly made at least 3 major mathematical or accounting errors in there somewhere).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugatti_Veyron#ref_1
[2] http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/the-biggest/the-10-bigge...
I dont think by 84 cars it actually means a person owns a giant parking lot in front of this house and picks a car at random each day. He might have 4 cars at his home and others at different places in the world where he has to travel often.