Surprise, I'm going to have to disagree with that ;).
The cost of the caliper at our production quantities is a combination of material cost, manufacturing cost, and amortization of engineering, tooling, and marketing.
I buy about 40,000 lbs of aluminum a year, so my price is pretty good. I imagine anyone else making a production run of calipers will pay about the same. Ironically, the most expensive aluminum alloys are the worse choices for a caliper body. So, excluding exotic materials like MMCs, everyone's material cost is about the same.
Assuming a CNC-machined caliper body and turned pistons, manufacturing cost is closely tied to design. An inexperienced designer, or one that isn't intimately familiar with CNC machining, will often design a part that is very expensive to machine, while someone else might design one that is much less expensive to machine and performs as well (or better).
The final cost is probably the biggest variable. A large company with a huge marketing budget has a big cost adder without any benefit to performance or quality. Similarly, an established company will need to amortize the cost of their staff engineers and overhead pretty quickly. That can easily double or triple the cost of the caliper.
In contrast, a small independent company like Radon (or ICP) has much more flexibility (and no real marketing budget!).
At $360, our caliper is amongst the least expensive, but I think it's the best. It's definitely better than more primitive designs costing twice as much from big companies. Maybe I should triple the price. ;)
You don't always get what you pay for, especially in racing. I can give you tons of examples.
Nathan
