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They're available right now.

http://www.autotrader.co.uk/search/used/cars/nissan/leaf/postcode/n11en/radius/1501/sort/priceasc

It's rumored that Toyota and Honda have been selling their hybrids at a loss, mainly to keep their CAFE average in conformance as they were selling more SUVs

I will see your a rumor and raise you a cite:

According to the Japanese newspaper Nikkei (via Green Car Congress), each hybrid that Honda and Toyota sell earns the respective company about $3,100 in profit.

In fact Toyota has been meeting this persistent rumor with the same answer - they are turning a profit on the Prius - since 2002.

It's the difference between a reputable used car and a cut and shut job. One will keep going for years. The other may just break in half and kill you. Trust your local nerd. Don't by Flashed computers.

There are two sets of costs: non-recurring and recurring. The non-recurring costs include all of the engineering effort, R&D, putting together the production facility, etc. The recurring costs are those that you incur for each unit produced.

I find it highly unlikely that the recurring costs are more than $2.1M for the car, unless it was made of solid iridium or something. (Annual production of iridium is something like 3 tons.) I wouldn't find it surprising at all, though, if Bugatti had sunk quite a bit of R&D money into developing the tech in the Veyron, and perhaps a bit of dough on the production facility.

Wikicars says this:

After the release of the car, it has been reported that while each Veyron is being sold for £840,000, the production costs of the car are approximately £5 million per vehicle. This is not the price to produce one vehicle, but rather the cost of the entire Veyron project divided by the number of vehicles produced at that time. As Bugatti, and therefore Volkswagen, are making such a loss, it has been likened by automotive journalist Jeremy Clarkson to Concorde; in that they are test-beds for advancements in technology and developed as exercises in engineering.

So far, the oldest article I've seen claiming these numbers is this one from early 2007. By the end of 2006, fewer than 50 had been produced. If we assume this number applies to the first 50, then that means the total cost to that point was a cool £250million. Yow!

Since then, though, another 150 have been produced. I highly doubt that it cost another £750million. In fact, this article points to most of the costs having been R&D costs with this quote:

The seven-speed semi-automatic gearbox took 50 engineers five years to complete while with all the research and development involved,

That's 250 man-years. If you assume each engineer costs $250K/year for labor, benefits and overhead, that's $62.5M in labor costs developing the transmission alone. Throw in all the machine work and parts and everything else, and I'm sure you easily get up to $100M development costs on the transmission alone.

People keep throwing that £5 million per car number out there, but I seriously believe it's way out of date.

I can't read all that. Can you summarize it in a few sentences, preferably using a car analogy?

So your car has a really bad super-ex-carfriend. And this ex-carfriend has not been leaving your car alone. Like your car always sees this ex-cf on the road when you're on the highway. Well, one day your car starts getting all these service calls from like multiple different auto-repair shops all asking if they could stick their dipsticks in her oil reserve. Well, when your car goes online, she finds a false picture of her and her phone number and name and address and all that on her. When she calls cars.com, they say her ex-cf made it and instead she sues cars.com ... you know how cars get.

So how'd I do?

Forget about Japan, how about cars from the UK? Used cars, especially sports cars, have shocking insurance rates (think 6k pounds per year) so they are cheap. Check it out:

http://atsearch.autotrader.co.uk/WWW/cars_search.a sp?modelexact=1&lid=search_used_cars_full&make=TOY OTA&model=SUPRA&min_pr=75&max_pr=&mileage=&agerang e=3&postcode=sw1a+1aa&miles=40&max_records=50&sour ce=0&photo=1&sort=3&ukcarsearch_full=SEARCH