There are more hypercars, supercars, limited editions, special editions and one-offs being launched than ever before. Where once their arrival would have been so mind-bendingly exciting that we’d have stuck them on posters to hang on the bedroom wall, now they are being launched so often that you could wallpaper the whole house within a month. Why so?
In simple terms, there are more rich people than ever before – and the very rich are richer than ever.
For Autocar Business webinars and podcasts, visit Autocar Business Insight
Quoting a Credit Suisse report while talking about his firm’s first EV and expansion plans in Crewe, ever-insightful Bentley CEO Adrian Hallmark highlighted that the number of people globally with $1m of free-floating cash to spend had risen from six million in 2003 to 17 million in 2022.
While not every one of those 17 million is going to rush out to buy a special car, a proportion will: they are not thinking about how they’ll get the kids to school, but rather whether to hang something by a famous artist on the wall, spend another week on a super yacht or buy a new set of wheels.
As a guide, Hallmark pointed out that in 2003 there were 3500 car sales in the £110k-£150k price bracket, but last year there were 68,000 in the adjusted £150k-£200k region.
Not to say that the opportunity ends there. That’s just the bracket Bentley operates in today. The same escalation can most likely be applied all the way into the millions.
Of course, the car industry has always specialised in extracting value by pushing the limits, be it in terms of capability, luxury or just rarity. On the last of those, Ferrari famously built its brand on making one less car than it could sell, and the McLaren F1 is stratospherically valuable partly because fewer were sold than hoped for.
Little wonder every high-end manufacturer has ploughed resources into expanding personalisation programmes in recent years.
It’s all very well turning up at the golf club hoping you’re the only one with a Bentley Bentayga, but by ticking an option, you can ensure exclusivity and bragging rights.
Extrapolate that mindset and you soon get to the Bentley Bacalar, the £1.5m two-seater that found all 12 customers it’ll ever have before it was even revealed to the world.
Join the debate
Add your comment
I suppose in this level of Car where your wish is made real in a Car, having it built the way you want it is for 99% of us not nearly ever going to happen for us, we can admire them, it's nice to see one cruise by or maybe touch at a Trackday or Carshow, aspiration?, it shouldn't be looked at something you lose, depending on your age why can't you in the future not have it?, if you work hard, do well, get your finances sorted for your retirement, I've had my aspirations filled, I had my mid life crisis Car, I've driven some of the fastest Cars on the Planet which is a cheaper better way to driven your dream Car. If there are plenty of buyers out there with the wealth, and there are, for instance, in the emirate's there are 52,000 million Millionaires, so even if one percent of them bought Cars, that's a lot of expensive Cars sold there alone.
At one level, this article has some interesting stats to back up what many car enthusiasts have observed or suspect. However, at another level, this article doubles down on a recent feature article in Autocar about specifying an SF90. As I commented about that article, Autocar (and its rivals) spend too much time covering cars that most of its readers will never able to own or even aspire to own. To add insult to injury, even older performance and luxury cars from, say, the last 20 years are now expensive to buy and run.
One other point about the current crop of "special" limited run cars from exotic brand is that many of them are drawing more crtiticism than praise. A recent example is the Lanborghini Countach LPI 800-4, which is a reskinned Aventador with an exorbitant price tag. Yes, Lamborghini is having a good run at the moment, but the LPI 800-4 is probably a bridge too far for many Lambo fans - it's seen by many as a cynical exercise just to make money.