For example, I, as a commuting college student, have a 2014 Honda Civic Si (a $20k compact fuel efficient sedan). Standard features include backup camera, phone hook up with Pandora radio, and pretty much any other phone features, including text response. Multimedia screen that you can customize (You can change the entire dash light color and style). And a lot of other cool stuff, like push button start. However, my mom, who just bought a car that had a sticker price of close to $75k before options, didn't have any of this stuff. Just the option for phone hook up and multimedia functions was close to $3k. And then it was like another $1k just for the push button start. In the end, she spent almost $6k just on options which come standard on a Honda Civic. This gets me wondering, why are companies like Mercedes, BMW, and Audi charging an arm and a leg for options which come standard on such basic cars? Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing them, I'm in the process of buying a 2010 BMW M3 and already have a classic BMW 3.0csi, I just don't get why they charge so much. The technology in my mom's car doesn't seem that much more advanced or to work better than mine. Can anyone explain this to me?