But how do you really feel?
I'm not sure what was misleading about it. They stated it was a custom build. They said it was all one off and custom engineering. They said it was not for general consumption but was an exercise in "what if" for the owner of Ridetech. Unfortunatly, if you dropped off any car at a shop and asked them to spend 3000+ hours working on it, the price tag would likely come out similar. That was the point I was trying to make. The Hot Rod article was all inclusive. IMO, I don't think the Charger article in PHR was.
FWIW, I have seen follow up posts from Brett Voekel on some web forums talking about it. He has reinforced the whole idea that this was his engineering wet dream. He turned his guys loose on it and is going to try to amortize some of the hours of work on that car by turning some of those pieces into products. He also stated that the basic Factory Five kit could certinaly be built and completed for $50-60k. I also think that the whole point of the Hot Rod article, given the rest of their demeanor, is that this is a Street Rod, that gets rode hard and put up wet, compared to all the other $100-200k Street Rod builds that have chrome plated everything and get polished with a cotton diaper after being pushed out of their insulated trailers. You also have to understand that Brett did not write a check for $300k just to build that car. He horse traded for a bunch of parts, used stuff lying around in the shop and in an R&D mindset, retained all the design aspects of the custom work. The $305,000 figure was thrown out there so anyone who wants to walk in to Ridetech and say build me exactly what you have, knows what they are getting into.
By contrast, if you walk into the muscle car resto shop that made that Charger and ask them to do yours exactly like it for $25k, somehow, I don't think they will.
