World’s richest motorheads fuel acceleration in supercar sales
Demand for exotic vehicles made by McLaren, Lamborghini, Rolls-Royce, Bentley and Ferrari has increased 51 per cent over the past five years
The steering wheel may be slowly going out of style, but no one seems to have told the Ferrari set.
Sales in this rarefied strata of the motor industry are accelerating far more quickly than those of pedestrian cars and crossovers catering to the Costco crowd.
Now, it is poised to shift into an even higher sales gear. Over the past five years, the five brands that sell their cars for US$200,000 or more – Bentley Motors, Ferrari, Lamborghini, McLaren Automotive, and Rolls-Royce Motor Cars – have collectively managed a 51 per cent increase in the annual number of machines sold. Last year, 30,000 of these exotic beasts roared out of dealerships.
[Customers] are getting more comfortable with splashing out … we’ve done seven-figure cars this year
So much for scarcity. During the same period, the global auto market as a whole failed to keep pace, growing by just 23 per cent, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
“I like to keep one from each brand,” Anthony Tonokaboni, a disposable-glove magnate and self-professed car nut, said.
At the moment, the Los Angeles executive has a 2012 Ferrari 458, a McLaren 650S Le Mans, and, on order, a Porsche GT3. Tonokaboni borrows his business partner’s Bentley on occasion and, in the next year or two, intends to buy a McLaren 720, which starts at about US$290,000.
Indeed, much of the recent growth at the socioeconomic peak of the car world has come from McLaren, which has gone from a boutique skunk works hammering together a few hundred cars in 2011 to a polished manufacturer on par with the most bourgeois Italian brands. In 2016, it sold 3,286 cars, almost as many as Lamborghini.