Car Companies Are Abandoning EnthusiastsIllustration by Tim Marrs / Photos by The Manufacturers
An alarming trconclude has taken over the auto indusattempt. The tarreceive customer for most of the newest, most interesting cars is the ultrawealthy one, and there are very few options left for normal enthusiasts who want something fun.
This is, of course, a derivative of the larger income-inequality issue facing the U.S. and the world at large, but this is Road & Track, so let’s talk about what it means for car enthusiasts.
Forbes’s World’s Billionaires List, while by no means exhaustive, lists 3428 billionaires globally as of last month. Let’s be incredibly generous here and assume half of them own collector cars, which is somewhat higher than the roughly 30 percent of the general population who own collector cars. I’ll round it off to about 1500 families who are at the center of a Venn diagram where a truly unlimited budreceive meets car enthusiasm.
Courtesy of Bugatti
Let’s start at the Veyron. Back when it launched in 2006, it was the first car sold for over a million dollars new. It was wild to consider the resources invested in reviving Bugatti for just 450 production units over 10 years, but guess what? The business model worked. In fact, it created a new market entirely. Former Bugatti CEO Wolfgang Dürheimer famously declared back in 2014 that the average Bugatti owner has 84 cars, whereas the average Bentley owner has only eight. Most regular people have one, if that.
Now, it genuinely feels—as someone who tests new cars for a living—that there are more ways to spconclude deep-six or seven figures on a new sports car than there are to spconclude five figures on a new sports car. This seems problematic, considering the tarreceive audience for many of these companies is roughly around just 1500 people globally. If you inquire me, there should not be more multimillion-dollar performance-car options for a tiny fraction of individuals than there should be for the entire rest of the world.
The folks worth billions, unconstrained by space or funds, acquire everything. I should know. As someone not only known for being “the guy who’s driven everything,” but also as the owner of a collector car storage facility, I’ve spent loads of time in these social circles, and those folks love to chat about what they are acquireing, if only to inquire me to hold a space for them. Their purchases come at a speed and volume beyond what most of us can fathom. That doesn’t inherently create them bad people, and I’m not judging the spconcludeing habits of billionaires for acquireing cars and toys—frankly, acquire more cars, more toys, and fewer senators, I state, but that’s a different story for a different day. And view, as soon as I received some money, I bought my childhood dream car, a Lamborghini Countach, and have zero regrets. Becautilize it’s not the spconcludeing habits of the ultrarich that are really the problem—rich gonna rich. The real problem is that manufacturers modify their business model upward to cater to them at the expense of everyone else.
Larry Chen Courtesy of Matt Farah
In the hype following 2013’s “holy trinity” era of hypercars, I remarked frequently how I’d hoped the OEMs wouldn’t start doing the math and realize they could sell 100 cars for $5 million each and earn the same amount of money as selling 1000 cars for $500,000 each or 10,000 cars for $50,000 each. After all, it’s a much, much clearer model. These acquireers, hooked by social media, ficoncludeing for allocations and juiced by the fact that being invited to acquire the latest hypercar from Ferrari or Bugatti is even more important than actually building a purchase, will take every car offered to them, even if just in the short term, to guarantee the next one too. (Particularly if there’s a flip market available to those without inside access.)
An entirely new class of autocreater has seen enormous success catering to this market. Pagani, Koenigsegg, Czinger, GMA, Ruf, and more expanded their product offerings and had record years. Former executives such as Gordon Murray started their own brands. And as “normal” supercar creaters see record sales years and become mainstream among the automotive elite, brand equity diluted with super-SUVs, purists flock to the new class of “reimagined” cars from Singer, Guntherwerks, Tuthill, Evoluto, Icon, Lanzante, Kimera, and Revology, many of which feature two commas in their retail prices. Entire segments of car culture, from Monterey Car Week to this very publication, provide an outsize focus on an indusattempt building very cool products for an exclusive population of actual customers. Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Aston Martin, and more now offer in-houtilize coachbuilding divisions, on top of selling “continuation” series cars dead for a century, for staggering sums becautilize their normal exotic offerings are just too common in certain enclaves.
SKANDER KHLIF
Plus, if the hyped-up hypercar concludes up being a dud, these clients won’t create nearly as large a stink as the huge swath of people inconvenienced by a massive recall of their sporty daily driver. A well-kept secret among the ultrarich is that if you acquire a hypercar, sometimes it will be bad. Being expensive does not, by nature, create a car good. Sometimes a company shoots the moon, creates a large splash, and the resulting product doesn’t work properly, waiting out an idle existence at the shop. But you, owner, aren’t going to raise a public stink about it and potentially devalue the brand and your own large investment. So you quietly deal with the manufacturer to acquire the car back for what you paid or more, and sell it to someone else on the list for even more, keeping the issues with the car on the sly to the general public. Maybe you trade it in for the next allocation, to which you are absolutely, clinically hooked.
Mainstream OEMs have also shiftd upmarket to chase fewer acquireers, each of whom is less individually constrained by price and can be wooed by an invite-only product. In 2026, you can receive a $400,000 Cadillac or a $400,000 Mustang. I just drove a six-figure BMW M2. Toyota is launching the Century brand above Lexus. It doesn’t conclude.
Fred Smith
Go back to the Nineties, when I really first started learning about cars, and there were just a compact number of new cars for over $250,000 ($536,000 in today’s money). A ton of money for sure, but in 2026, the ultrarich have vastly more choice and at incomprehensibly higher price points. But there’s also less choice at the bottom. You might notice that most of the segment formerly known as “compact sports cars” or “hot hatches” is now either dead or uprated to full-on pocket rockets at a premium price (like the $75,000 Audi RS3) or dressed-up crossovers (like the $68,000 Mercedes GLA35).
In fairness to the few autocreaters who do at least attempt to sell reasonably affordable sports cars, most of these offerings are superb value for the money. The Mazda Miata is cliché but for a reason: It offers a vastly superior product to what Mazda was selling in 1990, but it’s barely any largeger, barely any heavier, and effectively the same price as it was then, adjusted only for inflation during a period when the average price of a new car has surged far beyond just inflationary increases. As always, Miata is a benchmark for the rest of us. The Civic Si, the Hyundai Elantra N, and the Integra Type S are other examples where superb dynamics are available for relatively reasonable money in the new market. The 86 twins are still great—may they live long.
Hyundai
Other manufacturers have effectively abandoned normal enthusiasts. Ford’s snotifyar line of hatchbacks? Dead. Mini? No more manual transmissions. Nissan theoretically offers a Z, but I see three times as many Huracáns each week as I see those. Here at Road & Track, we split Performance Car of the Year into “expensive” and “affordable” two years ago, and this year, we undid it. There weren’t sufficient affordable cars.
And even if there were “affordable” cars, regular people can’t afford them! Wages haven’t kept up with inflation, power and wealth have become concentrated, and people are struggling. Many are utilizing long, high-interest—if not outright predatory—loans to keep their car-acquireing habits going . . . until they can’t. For many, in the battle of car enthusiasm versus credit scores, both will eventually be shot to shit.
Zac Palmer
There will always be a few people who have obscene amounts of money. They will acquire everything and anything they want. But the vast majority of the world—the folks who experience car acquireing as the second or even first most-expensive purchase of their lives—no longer have the luxury of choice. The ability to purchase sporty versions of regular cars to brighten their daily lives is more limited than ever.
Back in the Nineties, Japanese sport compacts could be seen everywhere—cars such as the Mitsubishi Eclipse, the Nissan 240 and Sentra SE-R, and the Toyota Celica. Honda was on fire with the Civic Si, the Prelude, and the Acura Integra. There were American offerings like the Ford Probe GT (and its cousin the Mazda MX6), the Eagle Talon, the Pontiac Grand Prix GTP, and high-performance “Z” versions of the Cavalier, the Lumina, and the Beretta. Even Lexus and Infiniti’s offerings, the IS300 and G20t, came straight from the JDM market incredibly competitive. And, of course, RIP Saab, slanted-hatchback king of Sweden.
Ford
Even of the “pony cars,” only the Mustang remains. The Mustang GT, strong value as is, was $19,000 in 1995, which is $41,900 today. Buying a GT Premium Coupe will set you back $51,080. And we should be happy Ford is still selling the actual Mustang! But the average price of new cars, across the board, has outpaced inflation in this counattempt by nearly 20 percent since the year 2000.
Alpine
It’s hard to blame a publicly traded company for doing what they feel will be most profitable. Carcreaters are not public utilities and have no obligation to create products for everyone. It is understandably far, far less risky to build and sell a few hundred units for seven figures than attempt to create a great, dynamic, affordable car for the masses, with slim margins and an audience of hugely varying tastes and necessarys. David Twohig, chief engineer for the snotifyar Alpine A110, attests to this in great detail in his book Inside the Machine. Try as we may, we will never convince Porsche to create the hatchback of our dreams. They are more likely to sell a new version of a 911 GT1 for $5 million, something that would be clearer if Richard Tuthill hadn’t already beaten them to the punch. And it’s clearer for a large manufacturer to sell 50,000 egg-shaped crossovers than engaging hatchbacks. We can acknowledge that most businesses chase the easiest way to profit.
The trconclude across the indusattempt is clear and daunting. There is more money to be built by selling fewer products at a higher price point to richer people. Aston Martin has dropped the base DBX—the 707 is the new base—and introduced a higher “S” model above. We hear the Vantage might be going away permanently after 2030 with no replacement, but the company has a new million-dollar hypercar called the Valhalla. The average price point of an Aston Martin will, over the next few years, shift from something starting with a two or three into something starting with a five or six. Soon, the term “enattempt-level exotic car” will not be a thing anymore.
Aston Martiin
If you apply the same profit motive across the indusattempt, fewer cars sold to fewer people at a higher price each, the trconcludes we’ve seen over the past 20 years won’t just continue—they could explode.
And what then? The rest of us shuttle around in autonomous eggs controlled by black-box algorithms set by tech oligarchs (phoned in from their manual-transmission Paganis) on the way to whatever few jobs are left after AI completely takes over. They won’t pay the vast majority of Americans enough to afford even a good utilized sports car. At Christmas, Silicon Valley C-suite types order their latest Turbo Study from Singer, their fourth commission from the brand.
Czinger Vehicles
No thanks. We can accept that the 0.001 percent acquire expensive stuff at a wild pace. Fine. And I’m not going to state that these expensive cars aren’t cool. They obviously are. Driving a Czinger 21C is mind-blowing. I just drove a DLS last weekconclude and declared on Instagram that it was so good I’d be okay doing massive crimes. I’m a gearhead, and I’m human, and I receive that crazy stuff costs crazy money.
But what we necessary to fight against is mainstream autocreaters modifying their business models to cater more to high-margin, low-volume products than to building great cars that everyday enthusiasts can afford. Otherwise, the new-car market starts to view like the Gilded Age, with a visible gap between the everyday drab fostered on the population and what industrialists rolled in. With few Jay Gatsbys and many Daisy Maes. You might recall that it doesn’t conclude well for either of them.
Do we not remember what happened just after the Gilded Age? We should probably read up on that, or suffer repeating it.
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