True Cost of the NSX

[gdae]

I’ve looked around and I can’t find anything concrete. So:
Anybody ever calculate the per-unit production cost of the NSX? It has been reputed that even though the car was expensive, Honda spent such an insane amount on R&D (63 prototypes!), design, tooling, and construction that it lost money on the car. I’m wondering how much, and really, how much would the car have cost if the Civic drivers hadn’t subsidized the rest?
Did that 90K car cost 100K to make? 125K? 250K?
I guess the root of the question is how much Honda spent on NSX development, since production numbers are known.

 

[gdae]

Ok, looked into it further. In this thread

http://www.nsxprime.com/forums/showthread.php?t=32873

the 1B number was thrown out there as a cost of development. Assuming this is correct and 19,005 cars produced the development cost for each would be $52,617.73. This figure does not include the actual cost of making the car.
Hmm.

 

[jond]

One of the tricks is dealing with inflation and the value of the dollar when talking about the NSX and how much it cost or how much it cost to make it. The reason is it was made for 1.5 decades.

In 1997, a new NSX cost the same as an average sized house. In 2005 it cost the same dollar wise, but that would only buy 1/2-1/3 an average sized house in 2005 dollars. When talking about 1991 dollars, I have no idea.

So when you find the number, take this into account.
Regardless, I'm curious to hear how much too. I know it cost more to build then they sold it for. Not sure by how much.

 

[mc-ca]

It gets much worse if you factor in the cost of capital. If Honda spent $1B in 1990 to design the car and produce the tools, it's cost of capital has to be at least 10%. This means they need to allocate $100M to cover the cost of capital. Over 15 years its $1.5B. Divide this by 19,000 cars and you need a capital charge per car to be $80K. Then you need to add in manufacturing costs, warrentee, dealer discount...

This is why the auto business is so volume sensitive. If the NSX sold 190,000 units, the capital costs would be $8K/car and it could have made good profit.