Last week was Monterey Car Week, and I’m still recovering from all the remarkable cars I saw and touched and smelled and (keep this between us) tasted. Of course, Car Week tends to skew towards the higher end of the market, as most of the attendees are people whose net worths dwarf mine like an ostrich does a hummingbird. There’s rich people crawling all over the place, so most of the new cars introduced at events during Car Week tend to be high-end ones; this is not the place where, say, Mitsubishi is going to unveil a new Mirage, for example.
But even with that in mind, as I flowed through the various lavish events of Car Week, drooling caviar juice on my one “nice” shirt, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I was seeing too many damn hypercars. There are just so many options for the hypercar buyer looking to drop hundreds of thousands or even more dollars on one of these sleek, incredibly engineered, wildly fast beasts that will likely never be used to even a tenth of their capabilities, and will likely spend the vast majority of their lives keeping expensive, climate-controlled garage floors safely pinned to Earth.
Oh, and I’m calling these hypercars but some may be supercars or whatever; the line’s kind of blurry, I think, but generally I’m talking about cars that are very limited production and cost at least, oh, around $250,000 or so at the bottom end, but most likely much more.
I’ve never really understood the appeal of these incredibly expensive and rare cars, and while I’m sure my biases are coloring a lot of my thoughts, it still doesn’t change the fact that there feels like a glut of incredibly expensive cars out there, and a dearth of cars people can actually buy and use, and that doesn’t feel right.
If you’re incredibly, wildly rich you have a lot of options to find a car that really lets everyone know you’re incredibly, wildly rich. Cars like these, all of which were shown at an event named The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering:
- Gordon Murray T.33 Spider
- Pininfarina Battista Gotham
- Tuthill GT
- Maserati GT2 Stradale
- Lamborghini Temerio
- Karma Kaveya
- Hennessey Venom F5
- Kalmar 9X9
…and there’s even more out there. These cars range in price from about $250,000 to well into the millions, and they’re all targeting the same basic group of buyers, and they’re all cars that most of us will never see in person in normal life, really.
I’m just not sure I see the point here? I guess if these companies can keep selling these rarified machines to this small, fortunate segment of the population, great, but for everyone else, who gives a shit?
And for companies like Karma and Maserati, what does this really do for them? Maybe these can be considered “halo cars,” cars that are exciting enough to get people interested in a given brand. But, for that to work, people have to actually encounter these cars.
Currently, I think the most successful halo car may be the Tesla Cybertruck, which drives huge amounts of attention (good and bad) to the brand, and this partially works because the Cybertruck isn’t super/hypercar priced. It’s not cheap, but it’s affordable enough that you actually see them on the road.
Hyundai was very clever about this idea a while back with the Veloster, which you could argue was their halo car, even if it was also near the bottom of their lineup, price-wise. Making a cheap and highly visible halo car is a good idea.
That’s what Karma, who introduced their Karma Kaveya electric supercar during car week, needs to learn. Though official pricing has yet to be released, it’s going to cost somewhere between $250,000 and maybe up to $400,000, which begs the question: Just who the hell is going to buy this thing?
The brand has no real cachet, it looks cool but not so much cooler than anything else out there, it will likely drive like pretty much all fast EVs do – what’s the point? What if, instead, Karma had made a fun, fast, EV coupé or GT car or Supra-like sports car and it cost, oh, around $85,000 to start? That would be much more exciting because you might actually see those around, being driven and used and enjoyed.
I also think Maserati needs something more like what the Biturbo did for them in the 1980s: when Alejandro DeTomaso bought Maserati in 1976, they’d sold 201 cars the year before – the Biturbo itself sold 40,000. There’s a big advantage to making a car that can be bought by just regular old one-house-and-one-vacation-house rich people, and not just available to why-yes-I-do-have-a-small-island rich people.
It’s not like I have real data to back this up, but that’s fine, because fundamentally, this is just a rant: I’m sick of supercars, hypercars, all of that. It felt like new ones were popping up all over the place, and I just can’t get excited about a class of car that hardly gets driven and I hardly ever encounter.
And even when I do encounter them, like when we crashed the Exotics On Broadway event with our crappy Aztek, while I appreciate their looks and sounds and drama a great deal, it just reminds me how little these cars tend to get used.
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There were dozens of McLarens and like 20+ Paganis/Koenigseggs at this supercar parade, and it feels like outings like this are some of the only times these cars get out and driven. Now, of course there are exceptions (though the number of people who daily drive a supercar without also having a YouTube channel seems small), but I think what I’d rather see being introduced at events at Car Week are more cars that people will actually buy and use.
It’s possible to have something that’s too good, and I think that’s the Achilles heel of hypercars. They’re too expensive and rare and valuable to actually be used and enjoyed, so that makes them, effectively, useless.
So, fuck the hypercars, shove it up your exhaust manifold, supercars, and next year I hope to just see some exciting cars I can’t ever afford as opposed to a bunch of exciting supercars almost nobody can ever afford.
As a fellow “has-to-work-for-his-money” person, I wholeheartedly agree. It seems like every week there’s some crazy hypercar announced with some ridiculous stats and eye-watering price tag, and it all feels kinda overdone and pointless at this point. Know what’s much more challenging? Building an affordable car with fun driving dynamics that an actual middle-class person can afford without taking on an insane 96-month loan. It’s an ever-decreasing pool these days.
“I’m sick of supercars, hypercars, all of that. It felt like new ones were popping up all over the place, and I just can’t get excited about a class of car that hardly gets driven and I hardly ever encounter.”
Oh sweet Jebus, how I do agree! I can’t even feign all that much interest in cars costing much over $150K TBH. Sure, they’re impressive, and sometimes pretty, and even though I might actually see some now and again tooling around LA, they move me not at all.
Now show me a well-preserved/restored Volvo 140 series selling for a bit under $10K, or an adequately-powered new car that provides smiles for under $30K and then my interest is piqued. 😉
Just further proof of the wealth disparity going on right now.
They’re like art pieces. Rare, expensive, good to look at (subjective), but fundamentally useless.
This accurately reflects the state of society right now, doesn’t it? Opulent overconsumption, we haz it.
I think we all knew this years ago. Or maybe we are an echo chamber – I know that when I go to meetups there are all kinds of neckbeard car spotters who foam at the mouth for all of the hypercars, literally running into each other trying to get photos.
Also, Kalmar?? Kalmar built Tjorven, the DAF-based Swedish mail trucklet from the very early seventies. Seems like a weird heritage for a hypercar.
I SO much wanted this article to end on “Can you spot which hypercar names on the list I just made up, because fuck it?” 😀
FWIW some of these do get used as intended. I was recently on track with several mclarens, Lamborghinis and Ferraris along with the usual contingent of Porsche GTs of various types.
Agreed…I’m sick of hearing about them, am not impressed by the stats, and would rather have a bunch of cars that are more interesting. If I had a whole field of rusty classics, I would be in heaven
I have a 400hp car and I rarely give it full throttle. Understand I live not far from 75 MPH interstate, I don’t even need full throttle to get to the speed limit before merging into traffic on the short ramp entrance. I can’t imagine how useless more HP would be. Sure, if I could afford a hypercar, I probably could afford to take it on a race track, but if you’re gonna do that, wouldn’t you want something more purpose built for racing?
And what I just typed is a lot of words to express theese things are not for me, even if I could afford them. I really shouldn’t criticize the taste in cars for those that like and buy these cars. Still, I wonder if the engineering talent used in making hypercars couldn’t be better utilized?
I would argue that super/hyper/whatever-car design is relatively bland. See one wedge, you’ve kinda seen them all.
They’re just the stupidly expensive version of your garden variety crossover. At least the crossovers are driven, though. Speaking of which…
I would love if there was a minimum annual mileage requirement in order to own of these cars. If the owner doesn’t abide by the rules, the powertrain gets repo’d.
Best. Take. Ever. [insert clapping hands emoji here that shows up as a bunch of question marks instead.]
I agree, there are too damn many hypercars, and I want to know which one Jason tasted.
We’ve conflated luxury with performance because in the context of street cars, luxury actually has far more use (making you comfortable) than performance (which you can’t really use on the street). And since the point of conspicuous consumption is to buy things that have no use, the people who see these things as status symbols gravitate towards performance.
Personally I think it’s a sign that the extremely rich of today are just boring and out of ideas, so they live in kind of a pastiche of the tastes of previous generations.
We have made the West creatively sterile because we spend our collective efforts to cater a caste of uncrowned dollar princes that don’t desire to be challenged, don’t want to share, don’t want to be uncomfortable.
So the products designed by such a culture are only interesting to people who never had to work for their bread. Shock.
+100 to this rant. I feel the same way. IDGAF perfectly sums it up, but I may be even a bit more negative in that I also dislike the kind of people that the current crop of hypercars attract. You know who I don’t like? The kind of people that like to announce to the world that they are in fact really, really, rich.
Maybe it’s just my rose tinted glasses, but it feels very different to the era I grew up in where we all really cared about supercars, and everyone had a poster of a Countach or an F40. Even though those cars generally stood for the same thing, they were more unique, more special, and I still love them to this day.