Leaving Their Market Behind

In his latest video, Harry Metcalfe takes aim at supercars — or to be more specific, their manufacturers — and their ballooning love affair with technology.

Now Harry lives in a different world from pretty much 99.99% of the rest of the world, because the market for the insanely-priced supercars is absolutely minuscule;  and his point is that the market is shrinking still more.

I don’t care about any of that, and I’d bet good money that pretty much none of my Readers could give a rat’s ass about it either, for all sorts of reasons:

• we couldn’t afford the frigging cars even with a decent-sized lottery win;
• even if we could, we have too much common sense to spend that amount of money on an asset that depreciates, on average, about 50% per annum, regardless of how many miles you drive the thing;
• and lastly, we all shrink from the Nanny Technology that takes away from the pure enjoyment of driving (not to mention the intrusive data harvesting and so on, which I’ve ranted about before ad nauseam).

I’m not even going to talk about how fugly all these new super/hypercars look, because that’s also a frequent target for my rants on these pages.

Lest you couldn’t be bothered to spend half an hour in Harry’s company, let me illustrate his point about car depreciation by looking at a car we all know about:  the Bentley Continental GT convertible (GTC, for the cognoscenti ).  Here is the 2024 model, with its 4.0L V8:

I have to say, by the way, that it looks absolutely gorgeous:  very definitely a worthy successor to the 1930s “Blower” “Speed Six” Bentley which won Le Mans several times.  It’s price, however, does not look absolutely gorgeous:  $340,000 with only a few adornments.

Which is bad enough.  Now let’s look at its second-hand value.  Here’s a 2015 GTC:

Looks more like a limo than the 2024 model, but essentially it’s the same car (same engine, same luxury interior, etc. etc.) but with… 15,000 miles on the odometer (about 1,500 miles per annum of ownership).  Its price:  $90,000 (!!!).

All sorts of things come to mind, most of them unprintable anywhere except perhaps on this website.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  there is no justification — none — that can justify the prices of these upscale cars (and of the supercars we will not speak because Ferrari and the other thieves only make a few of them each year, thus ensuring their consistent “value proposition” — read:  snob appeal for the terminally-insecure rich).

Of course, the thieves (and their sycophantic customers) will cry out that it’s all the new  whizz-bang technology (“All hail Technology!!!”) that makes their cost of manufacture rocket into the stratosphere.

Unfortunately, as Metcalfe points out in his video, more and more people are looking at all that technology, what’s involved and how much money (not to mention weight) that it adds to the car, and are saying, “Eeeeehhhh I don’t think so, Luigi.”

Which, by the way, might account for this atrocity:

Looks like the More Money Than Sense crowd are taking the $340 grand they would have dropped on a new jazzed-up Bentley, and instead splurging it on a rebuilt version of Ferrari’s entry-level model of the 1970s.

At least the Dino is bereft of anything that could remotely resemble a micochip.

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There is a companion piece to this post:  it’ll appear next week.