I agree. Vans vagueness about pricing and availability of the 14, was a
HUGE turn-off for me, that's why I chose the 8.
Hey, I'm still buying an RV, vans still wins
Then again, so do I.
Many of the popular (but expensive) kits from the passed (note I say passed... most of them are no longer around) were priced based on the amount of profit they needed to operate the company profitably, while only producing the X # of kits they wanted to produce per year.
A big part of what makes RV kits such a good value is Van's setting the sale price of the kits at a very tight profit margin, and then being successful based on volume.
[Kit plane trivia - do you know that Van's ships more complete airframe kits
every year, than the majority of the other kit manufacturers sold in the entire history of their company?]
Anyway, it would be nearly impossible for a company the size of Van's to publish a projected sale price for a kit section (let alone the complete kit), in advance of actually producing the first batch. Sure, it could be done, but because it would have to be done in a very conservative manner, customers would probably pay quite a bit more.
So, price speculation on the RV-14 is being handled pretty much the same way it was for the RV-12 and all of the other models before it.
Years ago, when the next new model was very similar to the previous (like when the RV-7 was released after the RV-9), it was much easier to make a close estimate on what the total kit cost would be, because there wasn't a very big physical difference between the kits. The RV-14 is a huge difference from any previously released kit, so pricing estimates will be kept rather vague until they are well documented.