Apparently, buying a new sports car off the shelf is no longer cool enough to brag about at ritzy dinner parties. These days, the ultra-wealthy are building their supercars from scratch.
Driving the news: U.K. luxury automaker Rolls-Royce is planning to build 100 custom, one-of-a-kind EVs for a group of invite-only clients, with price tags expected to range from £4.5 million to £25 million.
Why it’s happening: Rolls-Royce, Ferrari, and Bentley have all benefited from a surge in luxury vehicle customization — Ferrari’s CEO even joked that with the current pace of custom jobs, they’ll soon be able to sell a $10 billion car.
Between 2019 and 2023, Bentley saw a nearly 10-fold increase in profits driven by what it called “jaw-dropping” levels of spending on custom models.
In 2023, Rolls-Royce unveiled a US$31 million custom convertible that it made for a mystery client, which, at the time, was the most expensive new car ever built.
Those customizations range from stitchings of baby feet on a dashboard to star constellations on the roof. One McLaren client even sent a design team to the Swiss Alps to capture the exact shade of the sunrise reflected on snow for their paint job.
Why it matters: With more billionaires being minted than ever before, this trend of custom cars reflects the reality of the K-shaped economy, with a growing share of consumer spending done by the wealthy on luxury goods. There may be fewer people in the market for the mid-range, luxury-ish vehicles, but there’s suddenly a lot more willing to pay millions for a custom Rolls-Royce modelled after a dog (we wish we made that up).—LA
