Here's a perplexing fact of life. Really big things are expensive. Really small things are expensive, too. A reasonable person would assume that things in the middle are less expensive. Right now, they'd be wrong, but once, a long time ago... they were right.
A friend of mine worked on the International Space Station. In case you're not familiar, it's a station in space that's international. Astronauts go to it and then wait for a train that will never come, because the funding for the solar railways were cancelled. Then they grudgingly go back home and resent the rest of us idiotic ground-botherers for the rest of their existence. I imagine it's very frustrating to be stuck in traffic on the freeway when you were previously in outer space, so I can empathize.
Anyway, the point of the matter is that she told me they had worked out this secret trick. Because the space station was going to be big, it would be too expensive to launch it in one complete chunk. Instead, they made every country do their own little chunks of the station and fired them into orbit individually. Clicked 'em together, like billion-dollar Legos. This, in the words of Waylon Jennings, "got me to thinking."
Many of us in North America want a larger car. Not only are larger cars more comfortable and signal the value of the human being operating them, but they are often perceived to be safer. This is probably because fewer cars can fit on the freeway when it's full of huge cars, which statistically does work out to reduce accident rates (ask an underwriter.) Unfortunately, because larger cars require more materials to make, they're often very expensive. And the automakers know what they've got, so they slather on layers of extra profit in order to keep their shareholders in yacht cocaine.
Following the example of our brave astronauts, I took two $400 Chevrolet Cavaliers and welded them together. Now, I had a massive car, for much less money than just buying one would have been (upwards of $1000!) And I even let some scientists sit in the back-back seat and do some experiments. Unfortunately, most of what they actually did was scream and cry whenever one of the welds broke or the floor fell off at highway speeds, but I still got the research credit tax break. Too big to fail, baby!