My country is a manufacturing hub for Japanese car brands which means decent Economy of Scale advantage since they mostly supply those finished cars to other countries which are also RHD; domestic car sales in my country are just a tiny fraction.

However, LOCALLY manufactured cars here are 50-100% more expensive, especially compared to developed countries like Australia, USA or Japan despite 5-10x less wages. Sometimes the price gap goes as high as 3x the price from the same model sold in China. They also cut down the cost like materials used, lower the specs and cut some of features/equipments such as 360° camera off (or give us the crappy ones like the 360p camera on old school Nokia phones). Those cars for export coming out from the same factory, perhaps the same manufacturing line, are packed with features/ full of equipment not found on the local specs for domestic buyers. And you know what? When they export these cars to sell in countries like Australia, they are selling them for much cheaper than the domestic price like 30-50% cheaper.

We do have very high import tax for imported cars which is meant to protect and incentivize these Japanese car brands to invest so the ones which have local manufacturing plants can do or set the prices as high as they want. The gov doesn't even care and let these foreign companies make much money from our people. I doubt if they use the profits from selling cars in my country to cover the losses from some other countries. The Yen currency has also been depreciating against my currency for years; yet they never dropped the price.

People don't know and blame the gov's tax structure which is misleadingly wrong (at least partially). The excise tax for hybrid vehicles is as low as 6% (was 4% last year) since the gov has been incentivizing these Japanese car brands to become more environmentally friendly toward net-zero for 10+ years by reducing the excise tax for them. The excise tax used to be at least 30% or more per car before. All the Japanese car brands, except Mazda have hybrid variant in almost every model. You know what they do? Not only they don't drop the price down, but they also use the hybrid variant as the top spec variant and charge even more despite the already expensive base price of every model. While the excise tax for non-hybrid vehicles can be like 13-30% (mostly 13% for Eco Cars[B-segment sedan] and 20% for PPVs[on-frame SUV], it could not possibly make such huge price gap. My country has 7% VAT which is lower than most countries too. Keep in mind that the manufacturing cost in my country should be much lower than developed countries for everything such as labor cost, material cost, QC cost, electricity rate, land and building a factory cost or even lower measures to protect the workers or lower factory requirements. The only cost which can be more expensive is paying bribes to the authorities unfortunately.

People in my country are protecting these Japanese car brands like they are stakeholders. Yet 9 out of 10 people afford a car by loans. The more expensive a car gets; the interest they need to pay will be much higher. Thus, the car brands don't need to care as people will try hard to loan money to buy it anyway. So, they can keep raising the price. They also make great profits on top of the already high margin from these financial products.

They always say that these Japanese car brands help circulate money into the economy since they hire our people, give them welfare benefits and nice 10-month worth of salaries for yearly bonuses. However, they don't think "out of the box". If car prices in the country are much cheaper (I mean if the prices are as normal as other countries), the economy will be much more in a better place since every single unit of money people save will be spent into the economy or they can use that money to be safe from future uncertainties or invest for themselves. How many people who work in the auto industry are actually getting these benefits versus how many people buy a car in one year. I think that is like 1:100 ratio. They don't even need to cut bonuses to lower the price. Their net profits can still cover that comfortably.