Even though sales are down by as much at 30%, don’t look for any of the super-luxury carmakers to begin offering incentives.
Rather than diminish the perceived value of their vehicles by offering incentives, manufacturers like Bentley, Maserati, and Lamborghini are instead going to wait out the economic downturn. Efforts to improve sales in the U.S. are focused on introducing new products, rather than discounting current ones.
Well, there’s really no reason for these makers to offer any incentives. With the exception of Aston-Martin, all of them are bolstered by major manufacturers and have the resources to simply sit and wait for a turnaround. Porsche is hugely profitable, Bentley, Bugatti, and Lamborghini have VW’s coffers to fall back on, Ferrari & Maserati have Fiat SpA, Lotus has it’s Malaysian owners (Proton) and it’s engineering business, Maybach has Daimler, and Rolls-Royce has BMW.
For Aston-Martin, the downturn couldn’t have come at a worse time. They’re trying to get their new regime established and launch a very expensive sedan (the Lagonda) at a time when they are largely backed by two Kuwaiti investment companies (Investment Dar and Adeem Investments), and I’m not sure how well those companies are doing. There won’t be any new products for Aston until 2011, so it will have to get by on the vehicles it has now, and the ultra-expensive 1-77 that it showed recently. If things get bad for Aston, will they be able to be bailed out by another David Brown or Victor Gauntlett, who saved them in the 50’s and 80’s, respectively? On November 24th, A-M announced it would keep the factory closed not only over the Christmas holidays but until late January.
It’s usually the less-established independent companies that get hurt the worst when spending on exotic cars craters – this time around that probably means companies like Fisker, Koenigsegg, Spyker, Tesla, Saleen, and Pagani. Tesla has a good audience but it’ll be interesting to see what these others do to keep going for the next year or two – especially Fisker, which is deep in the expensive process of creating a new hybrid sedan with Valmet of Finland and California’s Quantum Technologies, and Spyker, which was near death already. It should be noted that the specialty high-end makers most likely to be effected by a major reduction in supercar spending are ones that don’t play in the U.S.A.
My 2010 prediction is that entire practice of lender/discount fees used by many sub-prime lenders will be scrutinized heavily from a regulatory standpoint and in litigation. The fees charged to “dealers” for those loans are not included in the Truth-in-Lending box and results in a true cost of the loan much higher than what the disclosed interest shows.
Lenders need these fees to lend to deep sub-prime customers and normally do not have the ability to charge higher interest rates due to state usery laws. So in one regards it is somewhat deceptive to the consumer but yet at the same time, if the lender could not charge those fees the loan would not be approved and the customer who needs basic transportation would not be able to purcahse the car.