I feel like they just completely missed on this. They tried to capture the cel-shaded style of the games but everything looks low-budget as a result. Pandora is a backwater, if you’re going to do it live action everything needs to look like it’s been sandblasted and sun-bleached for a decade and repurposed at least twice. Everything just seems too clean.

The dialogue is bad. Can’t really blame the actors for that, but I also struggle with all of them in their roles except Jack Black (I actually don’t mind that casting).

Also, unless this is set between 1 and 2, I’m not sure how Krieg and Tiny Tina ended up on an adventure with Roland and Lilith.

The early 90s was mostly a perfect storm for fuel economy.

You had the computing power available to make use of CAD and develop more aerodynamic designs with less significant overhead (i.e., doing it by hand).

EFI technology had matured and carburetors were broadly defunct, allowing more efficient operation in a broader range of environments.

The US had updated its archaic lighting regulations to allow for more aerodynamic headlight shapes.

A lot of the safety technology that adds weight to modern cars either hadn’t been developed yet or hadn’t trickled down to the average vehicle.

So you had a confluence of more efficient engines, more aerodynamic vehicles, and cars that were still small and relatively lightweight.

Extra cost for no real benefit

The kicker is we already do the “price at point of sale including taxes” thing at gas stations. If it’s $3.09 or whatever per gallon, that’s including state and federal sales tax.

We already see the line item thing on most receipts anyway. We basically do everything except roll the sales tax into the sticker price.

Between needing to be able to service warranties on new cars and parts commonality across different models, it makes sense for a manufacturer to contract their suppliers to continue to produce parts outside what’s needed for initial production (to a point).

After all, if a warranty outlier or defect develops down the road, it’s a lot more expensive to reinstall old tooling and restart production than to just have extra parts on hand.

The aftermarket also plays some role, especially when you get into vehicles with longer service life applications (trucks, emergency vehicles, taxis, etc.)