The new Porsche Panamera Turbo (the pretty one) is in its roll-out phase around the world. Here in America, it’s new starting price is a high but justifiable $151,000. In India it’s a good whoa my god, is that a typo.
What you will quickly come to understand in just a moment is that cars in America are cheap. They are crazy cheap. I mean, they’re expensive to us and we can’t buy the really ultra cheap stuff that’s sold in the world’s poorest countries. But we Americans spend comparatively little for what we get when compared to the rest of the globe.
I say this because while Porsche sells the new Panamera Turbo at around $151,000 here in the United States, the Panamera starts at a touch over $294,000 in India.
It’s technically 1.93 crore, as the excellent Indian Autos Blog reports. A crore is ten million rupees, one rupee converts to about one and a half pennies in US dollars.
What’s wild is that Indian Porsche buyers can’t even go for a base model Panamera, as Porsche doesn’t offer it for sale over there. We Americans can swing into a showroom and pick up a base Panamera for $86,000. We could buy a Panamera Turbo and almost afford two more base Panameras for what the cheapest Panamera in India costs.
Again, we have so much less tax and associated other costs on our cars compared to those around the world. Not that it feels that way, but we have it easy.