That is indeed a fine ideal.
Factory turned a really nice healthy profit in it's first 12 months under Ineos ownership.
I think price creep was already apparent from early days to first confirmed pricing:
View attachment 7795765
I do recall a lot of skepticism when they first announced those prices. But I always thought they got pretty close to go from 45k ballpark "back in the day" before they even had their suppliers finalized, to only 49k as of May of this year (
https://www.carwow.co.uk/news/5433/ineos-grenadier-4x4-price-specs-and-release-date#gref) after many of those supplier decisions were made and prototypes were out running around the world. The price creep after that is just a reality of our economy and world right now. Our governments turned on the money printers over the pandemic, and something like 30% of all the money in existence has been created in the last 18 months (That may not be 100% accurate figures, but it gets the gist of it; i'm also not trying to start a political discussion in this thread about whether they should have or shouldn't have done that; they did, and supply and demand then comes into play). Couple that "money printer goes brrrr" approach with the highest corporate profits ever in that same time period -- not to mention the millions of workers who are now dead or incapacitated, creating worldwide labour shortages (more $$$) -- and we've got ourselves a highly volatile economy right now. Well, not really volatile as that suggests things go up AND down, and we're only seeing the "up' in most things! But jokes aside, we have a situation where price creep on everything is inevitable. And in manufacturing, these things tend to be delayed in terms of their impact. A 15% increase in the price of a widget in May of 2022 might not hit the Grenadier until they go to re-sign the contract with the widget supplier in February of 2023. And it snowballs -- the February price increase has to cover the extra costs the supplier incurred from May '22 to February of '23 where they were locked into Price $X with Ineos, which they arrived at by Costs $Y for them with a profit margin, but their costs over that contract increased so they are actually $Y + 15%-25% across the board which means they've lost money on this contract, so they need to jack the February '23 prices even higher to recoup their losses.
It's going to get worse before it gets better, I think. More price increased for the Gren are inevitable in the future for as long as we have this high inflation environment (Get 'em while they are cheap folks!). And the overall point is everyone is in that boat. Ineos could have followed the lead of other manufacturers yesterday and jacked prices by 22%, and they would have been justified in doing so based on the industry averages and supplier price/costs; our conversation would largely be the same (as there is now, there would lot of frustrated people, which is totally fair as one thing that has NOT increased by double-digit percentages are our wages!). But they didn't do that, they kept it at less than half the industry average. That strikes me as a relatively decent decision that lines up with the spirit of this project -- but I also fully admit to having drank the Kool Aid on this one!
There's no way the price wasn't going to go up, in the same way there's no way you're going to pay the same for milk, cheese, and eggs as you did last year. My perspective is that it didn't go up as much as I would have thought/expected given the industry as a whole, and I'll take that as good news.
I'm reminded of the incredibly basic, bare-bones Chevy work truck I bought in 2018 for $37k, which I then put about 30,000 kilometers on. I sold it in 2020 for $38k. I wish I could repeat that luck with my house but it's gone the other direction!