Today’s automotive world offers a bewildering array of choice in trim levels, options, price and everything else.
Henry Ford famously sold his pioneering Model T in any colour the customer liked – as long as the colour was black. The days of zero choice are now long gone with the range of options for today’s cars truly bewildering.
Mini, the sporty British brand owned by BMW, boasts that that the range of options available for its iconic small hatchback amounts to more than 10 million combinations, and as a result it is hard to find two Minis that are precisely alike.
To accommodate this sprawling diversity, the vast majority of Minis are built to order, with work on the assembly line dictated by the selections of individual customers. The company has honed this complex process to a fine art, co-ordinating deliveries from its suppliers so that a truckload of differently upholstered seats, for example, can be unloaded in the same order as they’ll be needed on the line.
Mercedes 350 Bluetec
Another measure of today’s amazing automotive diversity is the gap in price between the entry level and the most expensive edition for any given model. The most expensive Mini to date is the “Inspired by Goodwood”, a 1,000-model limited edition costing a whopping £41,000 –largely due to its hand-finished, Rolls-Royce-inspired interior and paintwork. A basic Mini First, by contrast, costs just £11,870.
That’s not the biggest gap you’ll find across a single model, however. The plush Mercedes S Class saloon starts at £61,410 for the entry-level 350 BlueTEC model. But that substantial outlay sounds like a bargain next to the S65 AMG L edition of the very same car, which comes in at £165,060 – that’s an eye-widening £103,650 difference in starting price across single model range.
And that yawning gap might get wider still after consulting the options list, where an additional £9,815 will add fine Aniline leather and lashings of wood to the already sumptuous S65.
At the other extreme, Renault offers one of the most astonishingly basic options on its tiny two-seat electric car, the Twizy. By default, the little urban runabout comes without doors, but you can buy them as extra. Optioning a pair adds £545 to the Twizy’s £6,690 starting price.
Korean car maker Kia, meanwhile, is doing its best to go back to basics. For many of its new models, it offers a simple sequence of trim levels with little further for the customer to ponder. Kia is currently enjoying a sales boom, which suggests that less may indeed be more in the complex world of car buying. But even Kia stops short of Henry Ford. The key remaining choice on even Kia’s slimmed-down menu is a plentiful selection of colours.
