It’s an interesting question - Hypercars v Icona. I think Icona will do very well. But…the hypercars are the pinnacle of what Ferrari have always represented; modern and state-of-the-art performance. Icona is about style and nostalgia. Is that ultimately enough?
Today yes, because it is the notions of timelessness and emotions that make the history of the road car. Technology passes. SP3 and SP5 will probably be more desirable in the long run than an F80, that's my humble opinion.
The F80, particularly for its production numbers and timing so close to the heels of the SP3, feels like a car meant to placate the guys who have been vying for an allocation and playing the game but haven’t gotten offered any of the other halos or xx cars in years if at all. I know three guys who passed on it, deciding to get off the new Ferrari abuse treadmill. For me, I’d rather spend on vintage cars that are legitimately rare/limited over a $4m one of 800-1200 car any day of the week.
“Ferrari abuse treadmill” … bullseye. That game is over because Ferrari have taken away any gains. Also who really wants to do business with a car company that wants to charge extra for electric seats or 100 other options that are standard in cars 1/10 the price. It’s ridiculous. Anyone that wants to keep going, be my guest. Remember that at $4m plus taxes, the car needs to make $200,000 a year just to keep up with what that money will make in the bank. A car that is up 50% in the last 10 years might feel like a good investment, but the S&P has tripled since then. The actual cost and opportunity cost of owning a $4m car are huge. The reason to buy an F80 is because for some reason you love the car, I don’t think there is any plausible investment rationale.
As far as I know all of the customers from our dealer are taking the allocation. If there are cancellations, that’ll be good news for the people I know who can’t get one currently. And why should a car perform as well as a pure investment asset, where the only purpose to owning such an asset is to make money. Ferrari is a passion. The fact that you can maybe do ok financially to pursue a passion is simply a (very) helpful bonus. One of the negative narratives here is that Ferrari have lost their passion, is now another that you shouldn’t buy their products because they are not a great investment?! I thought it was Ferrari who are supposed to be losing their passion.
This is spot on, it’s any company’s prerogative to offer their products at any price they like. I don’t see any evidence of Ferrari losing their passion, I do see evidence of them trying to squeeze ever dollar out of their sales at the expense of their customers, and what that does os ignore the reality that leaving some money on the table for the clients helped keep the sales turning. It is unrealistic to think that Ferrari customers don’t care about losing money and adopting this sales approach I think will cause lots of clients to back off. One used to be be able to buy new car, keep it for six or 12 months not lose much and leave some money on the table for the dealer, and the next guy wouldn’t really suffer much depreciation either. That has been completely turned on it’s head and I think it’s going to have a dramatic effect at some point on sales with awful depreciation and clients walking away. We are already saying that with SF 90 and 296 and it is likely to propagate into other models. There are many ways to have passion, you can have passion without buying anything, you can have passion and the brand allows you to participate and not lose much money and then you can have passion and lose a ton of money on every car. The third bucket is quite small and that’s reality.
There are two views in my mind of where Ferrari are, both views have merit, only one will prevail. But which? Neither of these views can operate outside of the well-known economic parameters of demand and supply. In the end, that always determines price. But various factors influence demand and supply. Essentially two are important - what and how many does a company decide to build and how strongly do people want what they have built, both now and in the future (which, as we know, can vary). The two views are; first, that the pure distilled essence of a brand is strongest closer to its inception. This purity starts to drive desire to own but lack of understanding or confidence from buyers restricts demand. This early-years lack of purchasing, when combined with continued growth in brand exploits, achievements and credibility starts to make demand for the rare, earlier products outweigh supply very heavily. This spills down to the more recent products and if the brand cannot or does not produce enough to sate the demand, prices remain strong. If the wrong type of customer - those who enjoy the financial strength of the asset more than the asset itself - become too large a percentage of the customer base, a bubble forms. If this is not controlled it eventually pops. But if it is controlled and demand remains generally ahead of supply and enough investment is made into product and continued ‘brand exploits’, then growth becomes turbocharged (forgive the pun) and can keep going. But, it becomes harder as time goes on because the perceived ‘purity’ of the brand can be diluted and everyone forgets why exactly the brand was interesting in the first place - again, the bubble pops. The remedy for this is to keep reminding everyone why people have always loved the brand, keep immersing new customers into what is great about the brand and keep remembering that the brand is not the product, the brand is an idea. In the case of Ferrari, this idea is “We love racing. To fund our passion we must sell cars that are built from what we have learned in racing to sell to people who are passionate about the same things.” The further Ferrari goes from that essence, the harder it is to maintain its existence. But, nobody does the job of immersing current and future customers in their brand as well as Ferrari. They are masters of it. It also casts the negative comments about Ferrari’s marketing department in a different light. Bad marketing, we all lose because Ferrari becomes irrelevant. Here is the second, equally valid view. Really, it’s an adaptation of the first. Namely that everything in the first view is correct except it is impossible to overcome the fact that when a brand becomes large, it loses the one main thing that helped get it there - purity, rarity, exclusivity, the ability to set yourself apart by being somehow identified with the brand. In other words, the remedies that stop a brand from passing a peak just don’t or can’t work. The Ferrari GTO, all 37 units of them, can never really be repeated. Each one raced, there are very few of them and they were built fairly close to the inception of the brand and were a very rare and pure expression of the brand. High value. In fact, ultra-high value. But as time goes on, it becomes impossible to avoid the problems that continued growth and expansion brings and eventually the brand reaches an inevitable peak after which it cannot recover. This process can last many years, maybe a few decades. If you want the best of it, you have to have the insight or belief in a brand when it is not easy to purchase. In other words, low volume ensures costs are high and lack of awareness and poor knowledge of the future introduce risk to the purchase. But for the few brave early adopters, the payoff is handsome. A GTO was something like £600 in 1962 and around £50m now. So if you want a car purchase to be both an investment and a passion, find a small brand that will become big. Modern McLaren could be that, so could GMA. But they’re both brave purchases for today for many reasons and will they be like the GTO, or even the F1? Pagani is another example, Koenigsegg too. But the fact there are so many is a difficulty in itself. The problem with this second view is that there are many companies that start like Ferrari and don’t ever make it. It’s like picking a dotcom company at the turn of the millennium - you knew one or two would make it big but which ones from the many available were they? If you believe the second view is correct, the natural conclusion is that you only get ‘value’ by buying what the herd are not knowledgeable or brave enough to. And that you simply cannot get value by buying what has already become large because it cannot avoid the drop. These people may have recently ‘left’ Ferrari and buy Paganis or GMA cars. If we’re all honest, it’s very hard to say which of these views will prevail. Will Ferrari reach an inevitable drop? Will its competitors be a dotcom? Or maybe we’ll see something we’ve never seen before such as using petrol engines gets banned everywhere and they all become pointless.
What was the approximate percentage price difference between the LaF and the LaF Aperta when they were introduced?
36 not 37 GTO's (250 GTO's). Just saying. As for the price of a new 250 GTO it wasn't "something like £ 600". A 250 SWB Berlinetta in 1961 cost (list price) £ 6'666.17.2 (six thousand and sixty six Pounds Sterling), per price list of Maranello Concessionaires. A 250 GTO cost quite a bit more when brand new. As for today's price for a proper 250 GTO 3-liter Berlinetta you are also a bit overenthusiastic with £ 50 M. Those days are gone, the market has changed lately. Marcel Massini Image Unavailable, Please Login
Coupe: 1.30 million euro / US$ 1.42 million Aperta: 1.86 million euro / US$ 2 million These are the numbers released. But there may have been variations shortly after the introduction. Marcel must know more precisely.
Your post reminded me of this excerpt from Amanda Mull at the Atlantic. "Over the decades of growth that have turned the executives of these luxury conglomerates into some of the richest men in the world, their wealthy customers have settled into a routine that flatters a sense of exceptionalism: What the customers want is almost always available to them, and that availability still feels special and enticing because those products are theoretically not available to some unseen other, even as sales of those exact same products tick ever upward worldwide. Buying luxury goods isn’t intoxicating to so many people because they all love fine craftsmanship, or even necessarily because they all want everyone to know exactly how much money they have. At least in part, it’s because arriving at a velvet rope and being let inside is a thrill, and modern luxury businesses have found ways to preserve that feeling while raising the velvet rope for as many paying customers as humanly possible." https://www.theatlantic.com › technology › archive › 2024 › 04 › hermes-birkin-handbag-luxury-lawsuit › 677940 Seems like the F80 might be revealing the limits of what Ferrari's velvet rope is actually worth.