For those who’ve wanted an affordable, optics-ready AR-10 for hunting or just for fun, Smith & Wesson may have just what you’re looking for. Today S&W announced their new .308/7.62 M&P10 Sport rifle. With an MSRP of $1049, you can probably expect to see a street price somewhere in the $900 range. Here’s their press release . . .
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (November 1, 2017) – Smith & Wesson Corp. today announced the addition of the new M&P10 SPORT rifle to the company’s award-winning M&P10 rifle lineup. As the newest addition to the modern sporting rifle family, the M&P10 SPORT rifle features a popular 16” barrel with a .30 caliber A2-style flash suppressor. Chambered in .308 WIN/7.62×51 NATO caliber, the M&P10 Sport is equipped with ambidextrous controls for both right and left handed shooters in an optics-ready configuration.
Jan Mladek, General Manager of Smith & Wesson and M&P brands, said, “In 2013, Smith & Wesson introduced the award-winning M&P10 rifle, which quickly became a popular choice with consumers. Today, we’re proud to expand the M&P10 line of modern sporting rifles with the release of the M&P10 SPORT rifle in .308 WIN. The M&P10 SPORT rifle offers consumers a top performing modern sporting rifle at a competitive price, and is well suited for target, hunting and competitive sport shooting.”
The M&P10 SPORT rifle is chambered in .308 WIN/7.62×51 NATO and equipped with a mid-length gas operating system, resulting in lower felt recoil. The M&P10 SPORT semiautomatic, modern sporting rifle features a medium-contour 16” barrel with 5R rifling for increased accuracy, a 6-position telescopic stock, and durable corrosion resistant Armornite® finishon the interior and exterior of the barrel. With an MSRP of $1,049, the M&P10 SPORT ships with a 20 round Magpul®PMAG® and is optics-ready with a picatinny top rail and gas block to easily mount a variety of optics.
For more information about the new M&P10 SPORT rifle, please click here.
For more information on Smith & Wesson products please go to www.smith-wesson.com.
About Smith & Wesson
Smith & Wesson Corp. is a provider of quality firearms for personal protection, target shooting and hunting in the global consumer and professional markets. Smith & Wesson is world famous for its handguns and long guns sold under the Smith & Wesson®, Performance Center®, M&P®, Thompson/Center Arms™, and Gemtech® brands. Through its Manufacturing Services Division, Smith & Wesson Corp. also provides forging, machining, and precision plastic injection molding services to a wide variety of consumer goods companies. For more information on Smith & Wesson, call (800) 331-0852 or log on to www.smith-wesson.com.
‘Why’, broadly speaking, do W308s cost twice what a 5.56 rifle costs? Just curious. I paid $460 for my M&P 15 Sport II, and I’d be happy to pay $700 for an M&P Sport 10.
Not paying $999, though.
Because the market hasn’t driven the pricing down for a .308 AR style rifle to that price level yet. From a pure cost of material/machining time standpoint the costs should be similar between the two. There isn’t significantly more metal or machining in an .308 AR style rifle. However, the economies of scale between the two are quite different.
Why is that? The fact that there isn’t a mil-spec standard for the .308 AR style platform so interoperability between brands is limited as they’re all a little different. This limits economies of scale. Someone making .308 AR parts for S&W can’t sell them to every company making .308 AR’s. They can only sell to a small subset of the market. This means part volumes are lower for any given part. If they’re only making thousands of parts instead of hundreds of thousands of parts those parts are going to cost more. Further, when there’s only a few niche players who want to make the parts there’s much less competition in the market. There just isn’t cutthroat competition at the part level (or the rifle level for that matter).
Great explanation, thanks!
Use this analysis for understanding any other product or market.
— Standards allow scaling.
— Scaling allows economies, and spreads development costs over more items.
Works the other way too.
— Non-standards prevent scaling.
— Costs more per “solution” spread over fewer solutions.
So, why wouldn’t you standardize everything & scale? Captive markets. If you have to get HK parts from HK, they can charge a bundle. Rem 700 action’s ubiquity makes a “standard” market. Kinda sucks for Rem, pushing down their margins. You see this with mag compatibility.
In a standardized market, you see two kinds of competition:
— A ubiquitous “good enough” standard product, competing on price. Supplier has razor-thin margins, small or no R & D costs & strong pressure to chip away at quality and characteristics. Top risks with this strategy are any kind of operations bobble (internal), somebody scaling or supplying out of your cost structure (competition), or quality erosion enough to get noticed (market).
— A “standard but better” product, competing on some feature. Supplier has higher gross margins (at sale), with higher R & D costs & strong pressure to come up with nonsense differences. Top risks with this strategy are financial management bobbles (internal), somebody duplicating your differentiator (competition), or alignment of your unique thing (market).
These are the same two kinds of competition as non-standardized markets. Terms of art are “commodity” and “feature-driven.” Navigating the distinction for products that meet a standard is a bit of an adventure. For example, “wonder 9’s” bounce around between being better commodities vs. same stuff but different. Getting confused about which strategy you are doing, or caught flat-footed when the market flips you from one to the other can be fatal. When things change isn’t entirely up to you.
Soooo, the federal government did something right: AR-15 common standards (MIL-STD or MIL-SPEC) resulted in high quality and low prices….
It’s still a bargain, though. Lot’s of pistols cost more than the AR-10 – I’ve never understood why a 1911 or other pistol can cost more than an AR-15.
Isn’t the PA10 from Pametto about $600? I know it doesn’t have the highest quality, but it sounds like a pretty good value to me.
My first thoughts as well!
You can snap together a really decent AR-10 from Palmetto for just a few bucks more than a 15.
It’s now $700 but the QA is spoty
didnt they release this already
This variant has been available for sale and on the S&W website for at least a month. I can’t say whether they announced it before or not though.
So they took off 2 inches from the barrel, are using a different flash hider, added 4.8oz to the weight (in the barrel?), and dropped the MSRP by $570 from the older model.
Old 18″ M&P10:
https://www.smith-wesson.com/firearms/mp-10-optic-ready
New 16″ M&P10:
https://www.smith-wesson.com/firearms/mp-10-sport-optics-ready
Did they cheapen up the components or are they getting aggressive on price? You don’t save $570 by taking 2″ off the barrel and using a shorter A2 style flash hider.
thanks for calling attention to that. I paid 1300 for my sw mp10 18″ several weeks ago. Now I’m thinking, what the fuck?
$1300? You’ve been able to get it for ~$1100 shipped (+FFL fee) for months from DEguns.net. Hyatt Gun Store even had it on clearance for $1k + $30 shipping (+FFL fee) early last month.
Still, this new 16″ one is cheaper. Myself, I’d rather have an 18″ vs. a 16″ everything else being more or less equal. It’s also unknown if the 16″ will have the same reputation for accuracy as the 18″.
Let me guess: Completely different standard compared to and no parts compatibility with every other 308 AR on the market?
WHAT commonaity would that be? There is none. Other than where reusing AR15 parts.
It’s just like every other .308 AR style rifle. It has limited compatibility with other .308 AR style rifles. Presuming the 16″ version is the same as the 18″ version, it has some limited compatibility with AR-15 parts and some limited compatibility with other .308 AR style rifles. It uses a AR-15 fire control group, but the bolt catch/release lever on the right side of the gun has to be removed before you can install the hammer. The buffer tube is mil-spec AR-15 compatible from a stock replacement perspective. Standard mid-length AR-15 handguards mean for a mil-spec non free-float rifle will fit, like the Magpul MOE SL. I’m not sure what is required to free float it. The grip is AR-15 compatible, but the lower receiver has a slightly different shape than an AR-15 above the grip where the top of your hand rests. So if your replacement AR-15 grip has a “beavertail” you will get a gap between the receiver and the “beavertail” on the grip unless you get one meant for lowers with this shape like the Magpul MIAD 1.1 Type 2.
It also has a few unique quirks. For example, the charging handle is non “standard” from other .308 AR rifles (DPMS pattern?). Some people have had no issues replacing the charging handle with a “standard” .308 AR one, others have had to modify them and remove some metal to get proper fit and operation. Like two different posters on a forum who both bought the same charging handle will report different experiences fitting it. One will say it fits fine, another will have to remove metal. Also, the gas tube is reportedly a non-standard length.
Yeesh. The multiple formats and cross-compatibility issues are what makes me leery about 308-based ARs. I know I’d want to mod it, but the (expensive) trial and error process is a turn-off. I think it’s going to get worse as companies come up with newer, lighter, and, of course, proprietary versions.
It’s not thaaaaaaat bad… Buy one that’s how you want it. If you quite don’t want to roll stock, make a few customizations and be happy. You can swap the stock, handguard, and grip out on this pretty inexpensively. Swapping the latch on the existing charging handle for an extended one takes care of the changing handle’s irregular size while making it easy to use with a scope. Then you’re good to go after adding a scope and/or sights. If you’re a trigger snob get a Black Friday deal on a Geissele G2S and swap it in.
Now, if you want to free float the barrel with an exotic handguard, change the barrel, etc. then you probably should be building from scratch. If you build one from scratch you’ll have to do your homework and research your parts very carefully.
So … AR-10s are the AKs of the AR world?
I guess… I’m not familiar with trying to play part swap on the AK platform or building one up from pile of mix and match parts. I’ve only heard that there’s not one solid set of specs they’re all built to and some are copies of copies of copies so tolerances between them can be a little iffy.
I think generally the AR-10 differences tend to be a little more substantial than that. It’s not a multi-generational copy problem, but just that different companies had different ideas about how to design different parts.
Armalite has literally been doing this for at least two years with the AR-10 Defensive Sporting RIfle, the DEF10 (yes, that’s actually what they named it–a forward slash “/” would go along way in that name to separate “defensive” and “sporting”).
https://www.armalite.com/product/def10-defensive-sporting-rifle/
Priced around $950 in most areas.
I will buy an M&P AR chambered in 6.8 spc.
Sounds like a great idea for a bear gun
Mine looks a lot like that one, except I built it from a Polymer80 lower and LPK ($200) and a PSA .308 rifle kit. $400.
Although I hate the handguard, the stock and the front sight post/gas block.
I’m spending another $100 for a MagPul MOE stock, a low profile gas block and gas tube, and A 15″ picatinney quad rail from eBay.
So with the $100 1-4X28mm. scope, I’ve got $800 in it.
And customized the way I like it.
Still waiting on the new parts, so this is it as of this posting. I cut the sight post off as it interfered with the scope.
The MOE stock is from my 5.56 AR. Temporary swap.
http://i1248.photobucket.com/albums/hh500/AF_Veteran/AR10_zpsyg2i0mnf.jpg
Here’s an up-close look at the gun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ77OL6vRoQ&t
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