whew, man. Hasn't this become a slug fest.
It is much easier to make a prototype and a one-off system than it is to make a production of turbo's. Especially when you're a small company which usually ends up pawning out work to independant fabricators....it creates a lot of headaches and I personally am glad that I have never had to do this. Making one-offs is hard enough.
In a perfect world, turbo systems that are built for people would be test-fitted and dyno'd, but the amount of labor that is involved is just not feasible.
The reason prices run so high is pretty simple. There is low demand for turbo systems on bikes. You look at a Mazda Miata, there is 100's of thousands out there. You build a system for it, you will get a lot more orders for it.
The other thing to consider, most bike turbo makers are using HIGH quality parts. $250 BOV's, external waste gates, etc. Many cheap car kits are using stock internal waste gates on turbo's, no BOV, etc. I'm quite happy with my "cheap" BOV and internal waste gate....but then it takes more knowledge and effort to tune them properly.
I keep playing with the idea of doing it for a living, but I've already sold just one kit so far....and I lost a lot of money on it (it was my old system that I had no more use for it...) and the guy I sold it to is pretty mechanicly inclined, but it has still eaten up a LOT of my time trying to make sure he had all the information he needs for it. If I had to do that with several people at once, I wouldn't have any time to make systems, I'd be on the phone constantly
Even a poorly made system is an acheivement, although you don't feel that as a customer when you shell out the big bucks, but there's not nearly as much profit in the kits as you might assume.....it doesn't change anything, but understand that this isn't some simplistic equation. There is a lot involved in all this, more than is obvious by the unitiated.
