A car with a window crank? No way!
IRVINE, Calif. -- For fun, Mike Redmon tools around in a stock 1970 AMC Javelin, a sporty coupe that came equipped with the then-luxurious options of power steering and brakes, an AM/FM radio — and not much else.
By contrast, his son Brandon bought a Dodge pickup crammed with so many standard features he says it took weeks to discover them all.
"I didn't even know there were fog lights," he sheepishly admits as they stand around at a car show in this Orange County community.
Many people contemplating an entry-level small car for the first time in a while — such as gas-price-conscious buyers trading down or parents shopping for their 2008 college grad — may be surprised at the features on today's models.
The stripped-down, entry-level econoboxes — such as Pintos, Vegas and, yes, venerable Volkswagen Beetles — and their "strippo" price tags are long gone. New cars today come brimming with just about everything a buyer could expect — from air conditioning to air bags — standard.
"When you put a 20-year-old into a car with a manual (crank) window, they act as if it came from the Stone Age," says Jesse Toprak, industry analyst for car buying site Edmunds.com.
The evolution is putting the brakes on profits, however, for an auto industry already coping with the economic slowdown. In the past, automakers sold stripped cars to buyers who saw them as the alternative to buying a fancier used vehicle. The cheapest models were offered with razor-thin profit margins on the assumption that most customers would add some higher-margin options and pad the bottom line.
Now, to compete for buyers, even low-end cars come loaded at the base price. Sometimes the extras include pretty fancy stuff: Suzuki told USA TODAY Thursday that its entry-level crossover, the 2009 SX4, will be the first vehicle under $16,000 to have a navigation system as standard equipment. It arrives in August.
"A lot of things that used to be optional equipment are fairly standard now, like air conditioning and automatic transmissions," says Art Spinella of CNW Marketing.
