Discovery’s car enthusiast Jerry James Stone walked you through how to build a street-legal Batmobile, but a group of econ students at Lehigh University have calculated how much the real thing costs: about $214,700, after adjusting for inflation.
The students behind the blog Centives had previously calculated the price of a real Death Star (which by the way runs about $852,000,000,000,000,000, or about 13,000 times the world GDP). When it came to crunching the numbers on Bruce Wayne’s snazzy auto, the students looked at Batmobile History, which has a record of every single version of the Batmobile ever made. They arrived at an average figure of $214,700, taking into account the most expensive, which is a modified Mercedes Benz CLK-GTR that would’ve cost about $1.8 million in 2010, and the cheapest, a 1950s Studebaker Wayne used from 1950-55 with an estimated value of $13,604 in today’s dollars.
Chrysler and Lamborghini vehicles make up about a third of the Dark Knight’s rides. About half of his foreign cars are from Italy.
But the caped crusader’s taste in cars tells a quintessential American story. Centives explains:
