Just FYI, on that car, the auto tranny is available on the base trim level but not at the same price! It comes in a package with air conditioning and cruise control. The formatting in MacDoc's post is off. The radio, floor mats, etc are on the manual-tranny version.
I'll pretty much guarantee that auto tranny + air conditioning will add at least $2000 and probably $3000 to the price tag. No one will buy the absolute base model with manual transmission and no A/C. It is called a "loss leader". Nissan is not making money on those. It's a hook to get you in to the dealer where you will be up-sold to a higher trim level (or a Sentra).
This car is the equivalent of a scooter (and not MacDoc's fancy maxi-scooter) in the motorcycle world. It is not the equivalent of a CBR600.
And yes, I realize that the Nissan, cheap as it is, is a more complex vehicle than a CBR600 is.
A lot of it is production volume. The bikes that we see here in North America are all built in tiny production volumes by automotive standards. The entire production run of a good many up-market bikes (be it a CBR600 or a V-Strom or most anything else) is often 20,000 - 50,000 units total worldwide of all model years of each vehicle generation. Toyota sells 400,000 Camrys every year in the USA alone and they stay the same for several years. If you spend $20 million for that bike model on engineering, tooling, compliance with standards, etc that's $1000 per unit JUST FOR THE DEVELOPMENT. The Camry may have cost $500 million for development and tooling ... but divide that by 2 million units over the model run and it's only $250 per vehicle.
Don't forget also that if we use Honda for the bike example, they have some successful up-market models (CBR600) and their share of duds (DN-01, anyone?) and the sales of the successful models have to pay for not only their own development but also to subsidize the duds ... It cost them (order of magnitude) just as much to develop the DN-01 as it did a CBR600. So now it's $2000 tacked on to that CBR600, because the sales volume of the DN-01 couldn't possibly have covered but a fraction of what it cost them to develop that turd. (Sorry to anyone who owns one ... but the chances of anyone reading this and owning a DN-01 are pretty slim!)
Standardization in the automotive industry helps, too. It's much more extensive than it is with motorcycles. One of my customers builds the timing belt tensioner for every in-line-configuration VW diesel engine worldwide. Every VW diesel engine of an in-line 3 or 4 configuration uses variations of this tensioner and those engines are used in every VW, Audi, Seat, or Skoda with a transverse engine and a good many of the Audis with a longitudinal engine. It is a variation of a design that has been in production for a couple of decades. The parts that go to the engine assembly plant or to the dealer's service-parts desk or to most aftermarket channels (all of the good ones, there are some inferior copies) all come from the same source. The VW Group builds millions of cars every year, probably 40% of them are diesels ... do the math.
Honda Motor Corporation worldwide builds approximately 4 million cars and "trucks" ... and about 15 million motorcycles. The majority of those 15 million are not Gold Wings, CBR600s, etc. They are names we've never heard of ... Sonic, Wave, Airblade ... little single cylinder bikes on which the whole continent of Asia gets around on. The CBR125 and the Grom piggyback onto the engineering of those bikes. Simple, no-nonsense, and most certainly cheap, and built in HUGE production volumes. Those are the equivalent of the Nissan Micra in the marketplace and they are priced accordingly. The bikes that we consider desirable in our market ... are built in comparatively tiny volumes - so they cost more!
