The luxury segment sales are crashing, you might even say plummeting. This will be a weird thing to say, but it’s the middle. Bugatti and Ferrari are doing just fine selling seven-figure automobiles. Kia’s sales numbers are on fire. But Bentley, and believe it or not, Porsche, and of course, Aston Martin, feeling that heat, you might say. Not good.
Bentley can do low volume, specialty models like the Supersports, but it’s not a brand that can sustain extremely low volume sales in a way that Ferrari or Bugatti can. The margins simply aren’t there, and that’s before we address the train wreck that is Aston Martin’s current reality, or even worse, Maserati’s bleak situation. That’s all before even addressing Porsche’s catastrophic sales numbers marking the iconic automaker’s worst year since 2009. Dealers aren’t helping the situation.
Bentley’s sales issues look like a blip compared to Porsche’s situation, but both are owned by Volkswagen Group. While Cayenne and Macan SUVs saved Porsche once, it’s not clear if that’s about to be repeated. The electric Cayenne and Macan are fantastic in their own ways, but America’s on the struggle bus with EV adoption at the moment. A gas-powered Macan and Cayenne replacement weren’t even in the original plans. And we’ve said this before, but it bears repeating, cars aren’t designed and developed overnight, and this stuff costs billions of dollars.
On the latest episode of The Drivecast we go behind the scenes on the luxury car market crumbling from the top, why it’s happening, and what comes next.
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Full Transcript
Joel: Byron, would you say either of us even fit the demographic for the topic we’re talking about, whether it be a Porsche, an Aston Martin, a Maserati, a Ferrari?
Byron: Yeah, that’s kind of a stretch. I’m going to say we’re definitely not the core of the demo, right? I mean, I own a Blackwing, but not the expensive Blackwing. So, my aspirational car is probably still like a 718 of some kind.
Joel: See, and truth be told, this isn’t like a well-known fact. I actually almost bought a 911 once, but it was an ’80s 911 and I wanted like an SC. And this is back when those things were going to be, I don’t know, probably would have cost me $20, $25 grand. This is, you know, which by the way, wasn’t that long—I had more hair, but it wasn’t that long ago. I mean, I’m definitely not the demo for a current 911, and I’m certainly not the demo for an Aston Martin or a Bentley. In fact, look, I love a Bentley, but I love a Bentley for the handcrafted wood, the fit and finish, the materials, the carpet, the way things actuate. Whenever I’m in a Bentley press car, especially a convertible, that’s like the worst situation, and I go to a stoplight, and you’re not in somewhere like LA, right? Like you’re in Portland, Oregon or whatever, and you’re at a stoplight, and some dude in an Explorer rolls up to you and starts gawking at the car and is like, “Wow, what’s the retail on one of those things?” Literally, I was asked that once. I just, my skin crawled. I don’t like that kind of attention. I liked that no one in the world knew what my E34 M5 was except for enthusiasts. And so the appeal of a Bentley was dissipated immediately. I see people drive Bentaygas around here, and I’m like, if I had Bentayga money, I wouldn’t own a Bentayga, because I don’t want people to know I have Bentayga money if I had it, and I don’t want that attention. It’s just not me.
Byron: No, 100%. And that’s the thing, it’s like, I mean, my car is orange, so I can’t say that I don’t have a thing for cars that are eye-catching. But at the same time I kind of want the car to like be its own kind of thing. I don’t want it to be about me, about what I can afford and what I can’t. I bought the car because I like the car. The cost is not a factor for me with these kinds of things, except when it comes to me actually buying the thing. After that, that’s not a consideration.
Joel: I also would argue, I would argue a Blackwing is similar to an E34 M5 in the way that like enthusiasts know what that is, but I mean, yes, you picked an orange car, so it’s a loud color. But I don’t think people know if you pull up to a stoplight that a Blackwing is anything different than a regular—I was about to say CT4 and ATS and start like moving the names around, but like—
Byron: I mean, but yeah, I mean that’s the thing. And, especially here, even in the Detroit bubble where people know what it is, it’s still a pretty small community. In fact, I was, I came back from a trip yesterday, landed at DTW, walked out to the parking garage and found parked next to me a blue CT4-V Blackwing, literally the first time that’s happened to me since I bought the car.
Joel: So we’ve established we’re not the demo. But we are here to report on a story, and you were the one who wrote this story. And it actually came, and this is a really, really important thing I want to highlight here as we get into the topic today, we report on tips, right? We make a call to action on almost the bottom of every story, and we try to tailor it to the story we were actually writing about. But the reality is here, folks, we report on tips. You can always send us an email at tips@thedrive.com. Obviously, Byron and my emails are on the website as well. But we report on tips, and that’s actually how we got this topic. We got a tip on this. Byron, how do we get down this rabbit hole of reporting in the first place?
Byron: Right, so the tip was obviously the big tip, and it was a pretty good one because, as I mentioned in our article about this, if you want to get our attention, say something shocking that we don’t already know. And this was one of those things where, you know, they came to us like, why haven’t we seen any stories about the state of the luxury market? Which of course makes us ask ourselves, what is the state of the luxury market? What is the story here? So that sent me digging and asked around to a couple friends who I’d already heard some rumblings about the situation at Porsche, which has been developing for a couple years, I think. But the tipster who reached out to us had some insights from a couple of other manufacturers, which helped to kind of bring the whole thing together a little bit. In speaking with him and especially with our Porsche tipsters, which we’ve kind of like overused a little bit over the past year, it feels like, we’re hearing a lot about, like you said, that middle part of the luxury market being in trouble.
Joel: We’re all well aware of Aston Martin’s situation or Porsche’s situation. It’s well reported on The Drive and multiple automotive sites. But when you start a sentence of like, “crash of the ultra-luxury market,” it’s a big statement that raises someone’s eyebrows, right? And so that’ll stop someone cold, including us. But the tipster had some interesting information to say about this that led us down the rabbit hole, particularly about payments and vehicles. What did they tell us, Byron?
Byron: Yeah, so I mean, the big stories were, I mean obviously, the volumes are down, so we’re seeing some manufacturers whose dealerships aren’t even selling cars in a given month, which is bad news. And the customers are coming in saying like, we already have this car that we just bought, we’re not seeing reasons to spend thousands of dollars more a month on a car that’s barely any different from what we just spent too much money on a few years ago. Because basically what these guys are saying is that, you know, their people might be rich, they might be filthy rich to the point of money basically not being an object, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid. So they don’t want to come and spend money on nothing. They want to have something to show for it, and apparently there’s a bit of a dearth of that in the segment right now.
Joel: I think that the point is is that Bentley is part of, and Bentley and Porsche, by the way, are part of the Volkswagen Group, right? And that entire group is in trouble. And so, Supersports that you just drove on Laguna Seca notwithstanding, which is a special car, but also a very low volume car, right? It’s not like the Bentayga itself or the Continental, like a lot of the main lineup of Bentley is dramatically different in the last couple years, right? They came out with their new cars, and so people lease some, and then you’ll have different wheels, and we’ll have different paint colors or customization options or whatever. But, the idea that you’re adding, if you have a payment that’s multiple thousands of dollars a month, the idea of adding another two grand to it, rich people aren’t stupid, that’s why they’re rich. If you win the lottery and you don’t do things right, you’re going to lose all the money in the end, right? Like you’re going to spend it all. And so, rich people don’t throw away money as much as it might look like it on Instagram, otherwise they wouldn’t be rich.
Now, just a couple numbers here that’s interesting. Bentley was one of the ones that they sold 150 cars in one of the summer months, and that’s not good, right? Ferrari was flat last year. Lamborghini actually didn’t have a bad year last year. Profit margin was compressed a little, but deliveries were up about a percent, so they were doing okay. But Aston Martin, ooh, Aston Martin’s getting decimated, and Porsche is in serious trouble. Porsche is a standout here. Porsche, that crash, they just had the worst year last year, like holistically, because we only have half the year’s numbers this year. It was the worst year in 16 years. It’s the worst year since 2009, the financial crisis. Now, a lot of this is being blamed on China. They were down 26% alone in China. That’s tough, right? That’s tough. Bentley was down 4.8% overall last year. Again, we don’t have all this year’s numbers, so we’re working off here, but this year isn’t shaping up any better. Aston Martin was down 10%, the revenue was down 21%. They sold 5,448 cars last year at Aston Martin. Like, that’s tough, and that’s not great. Bugatti doesn’t really report numbers, but Bugatti prints money on everything they do.
Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz is also tough. They’re having like their worst period in years. They were down 9% last year. We’ve seen all the cost cutting they’re having to do, the model trimming they’re doing. They were down 19% in China. Audi, also part of that Volkswagen Group with Porsche and Bentley, they were down 2.9% last year. Now these are companies that, you know, Mercedes sold 1.8 million cars, Audi sold 1.62 million cars. Now we’re talking about much bigger numbers and volumes than we are with Bentley. But I’m just trying to paint a picture here of there’s multiple tiers to the luxury market, and using air quotes with luxury here, and a lot of people across the spectrum are feeling it, or they’re not going up.
And also, Ferrari, which again, they really print money on everything they do, they suppress things, right? They will not sell above X number of cars. They could sell more cars than they do, but then it runs into different issues. If you make it so you can’t meet demand on purpose, there’s inherently demand, right? It means it’s almost fake, like you’re making it.
Byron: Artificial scarcity.
Joel: Scarcity, right. I do want to talk about—also, we need to talk about depreciation. You buy a Bentley, you buy an Aston Martin, you’re paying retail or you’re leasing, the depreciation on these cars is devastating, like breathtaking.
Byron: Especially if like, I mean, you’re talking about vehicles that are often leased. And when you have these owners coming to the end of a lease period and then being offered essentially to sign on to do it again, but they’re asking like, well, why is it going to cost me $1,800, $2,400 more a month to basically get into the same car I just got out of? And that’s when it becomes a tough sell, and that’s when they’re going to look elsewhere. Or they’re just going to drive whatever else they already had, because we’re talking about people who probably have access to other cars and probably other very nice cars.
And you know, we looked at like Porsche in particular, and it actually kind of illustrates it in kind of a weird way, because some of the stories we’ve been hearing from them now for a couple of years from their dealers, I don’t want to say they’ve been bullying customers, but they’ve been pushing customers to pick up vehicles that may not be selling. So in this case, it sounds like it’s been like Taycans and things like that, where the dealers really need to move them to get their numbers, and they can’t without using the allure of an allocation for something like a 911 GT3 RS, which is in very high demand, as a way to get them to essentially buy both. So they say, “Hey, you buy this Taycan, I’ll give you the allocation for the 911 GT3.” So it works out for the dealer because they get two sales, but the customers are getting to the point where they’re like, “Look, I’m buying cars I don’t want just to buy the cars I do want.” And that’s creating a mess in the secondary market where the unwanted cars then get dumped, and then you run into that depreciation problem where their own tactics are actually driving down the value of the cars that they’re then trying to sell CPO off lease, and they can’t.
Joel: Really the only automaker we’ve seen, and by the way, there’s no real firm, like it’s not like hard proof of this, but, the only automaker that is kind of like an unspoken thing that that definitely throughout time on and off has definitely happened is Ferrari. And I think that Ferrari really goes against a lot of rules here, right? Like Ferrari can do things other automakers simply can’t pull off. And I think that when you’re an automaker that’s selling a $290,000 911 GT3 RS or whatever, but you’re also selling an $80,000 Macan, it’s not the same as saying, “Well, if you want this seven-figure Ferrari, you’re going to need to buy three very high six-figure Ferraris.” Like this is a different level of rich person, right? These are different levels of rich. The guy that buys a 911 GT3 RS, yes, he might have a LaFerrari or the latest of these cars, but he’s probably not daily driving a Macan. Like that’s the reality here, and he doesn’t want to buy a Macan. And Ferrari can tell this guy, yeah, you got to buy three or two or whatever of these cars if you want to buy this.
Porsche is really trying to get into that, right, with their specialization customization department, 100%, because the margins there are real good. But 911s, dude, I remember when 911s were like $80 grand new. Now they’re like $100 plus thousand. Like it’s very expensive to get into a base 911, and that’s—which by the way, a base 911 is like a great car, let’s just be clear, like there’s nothing to sniff at a base 911. But they’re getting real expensive, and Corvettes are a real value, right? Like that LT6 is a cool engine. I know someone’s going to turn their nose up and be like, “You just compared a 911 to a Corvette.” But like, this is the—like guys, ‘ring numbers don’t lie. These cars are full of performance. Are you about performance or are you about a badge?
Byron: Yeah.
Joel: So we will go there. We glossed over for a second, Maserati, just to really paint a picture. They sold 7,900 vehicles last year, and by the way, that’s not a big number. That was down 30% from the year before of 2024. And we don’t have full numbers or anything from Maserati yet, but I will tell you, like there are whispers that there was—there’s 86 US dealers right now, give or take, on Maserati. There are whispers that 60 of those 86 sold zero cars in the first 25 days of August, so when we’re recording this last month, right? And 13 of those dealers sold exactly one, and only four sold more than two. Now whether any of these numbers are like—and none of this is confirmed yet, so if these numbers are even close to accurate or even close to realistic, that is, I mean, that’s catastrophic. How could you be a dealer and not sell cars? That’s how you make money. I mean, sure, you make parts and service, but like it’s not like you got Maseratis rolling in here every day. They’re not a high-volume car to begin with.
Byron: Right. But this isn’t something that’s restricted to the luxury segment necessarily. Shoppers across the board are basically doing this, whether it’s, you know, at a Honda dealer or at a Maserati dealer. They’re coming in with the same complaints, and they’re leaving either spending less or not spending money at all. So while volumes are doing okay at the mainstream automakers for the most part, the more they lean toward premium, the harder those segments are getting hit, and the less likely they are to be up. So a company like Honda or Hyundai, you know, which is separating their sales from their luxury brands, the volume stuff looks fine. But the high-end stuff is where the shift is happening. And of course, you know, that’s talking about like mainstream buyers, which is not the luxury market, but it’s, you know, an echo of the exact same trend.
And it kind of brings us to this broader point of, you know, what is a luxury car these days? Because if you can go to say an Audi dealer and you can buy a mid-range like, you know, a $60,000, $65,000 car that does every fancy thing that their $165,000 hypothetical car does, what is the allure remaining in that $165,000 car these days? And especially with the stagnation we’re seeing in innovation. And a lot of that is due to COVID, it’s due to the electrification push being abandoned because automakers put billions and billions and billions of dollars into electrifying and then basically just had that yanked out from underneath them. So all that money’s gone. It’s money that could have gone into improving the products that we’re looking at right now, the stuff that’s actually on the road, it could have gone into replacing the products that are currently on the road. And it was going to, except they were going to be electric. So now, you know, we’re in this kind of state of industry-wide whiplash where everyone’s trying to come back and say, “Okay, what can we do with what we have to try and get people to keep coming in the door?” And the answer for everybody isn’t working. So it’s messy.
Joel: Okay, so that I really want to lean into what is a luxury car here for a second on this topic before we move on to pricing and everything else. Because within the last—and I want to be careful here, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, so let’s just say within the last couple years, I was at a dinner with an automaker and I was with a bunch of their executives. And they asked me the question. They said, “What’s a luxury car, Joel? Name some luxury brands.” And I said, “Well, here in America, you’ve got everything from,” and I started naming Audi and BMW and Mercedes. And then I said, “But then also you’ve got people that are going to consider Porsche, I know that’s a sporty car, but it’s going to be in that luxury price bracket. But then you go all the way up to Bentley and Rolls-Royce.”
And they just looked at me and they said, “So luxury includes Audi and Mercedes?” And I was like, “Well, of course it does. Like in America, for sure, right?”
And they said, “But it’s also Bentley and Rolls-Royce?” I’m like, “I mean, that’s like ultra-luxury, right?”
And they were like, “But Mercedes sells like C-Class, and Audi sells the A3 and the Q3, and are those luxury cars?” And I’m like, “Well, they’re tiny luxury cars.”
So then they said, “Have you been in one? Do they feel like luxury?” I’m like, “I mean, depending on the timeline in history, some of those just felt like, you know, a shrunken down two sizes smaller, because we did the one sausage different length thing with Audi and Mercedes for a very long time.” I said, “You know, it almost felt like they just took an S-Class and shrunk it.” They’re like, “Really?” I’m like, “Okay, well maybe the plastics weren’t wrapped in as nice.”
And they’re like, “People use C-Classes as taxis in Europe.” And I’m like, “Well, we don’t live in Europe.” They’re like, “So I don’t understand why that’s a luxury car.” I’m like, “So what? Only a Rolls-Royce and Bentley are luxury cars?” They’re like, “Yes.” And I’m like, “What’s an S-Class?” They’re like, “A premium car.” I’m like, “Okay, hold on. An S-Class is not a premium car. That is a flagship luxury car. Like, I know about the W126, guys. That is not a premium vehicle.”
But it got me thinking about this whole Q3, A3, A4, 3 Series, are they luxury cars, right? So what is a luxury car? And I posed that question, I almost would challenge any listeners to say what’s a luxury car. Feel free, drop us a line by the way, could be interesting. I just had a Kia Telluride, it had power sliding door handles that go in and out, let’s not get on that topic like whatever, whatever, but so does the S-Class. The S-Class door handles operate like the Telluride’s door handles. And the Telluride I had had a poor man’s massaging seat, they call like Ergo Motion so that your body doesn’t stiffen up while you’re driving to the lake, fine, sure, whatever, but let me just be real, it acts just like the same setup as a massaging seat in a Navigator, an Escalade, like it’s using the same concept of technology, so call it what you want for marketing, but it’s a massaging seat. And it had heated and cooled seats in the front row, in the second row, and it had heated seats in the third row.
What is luxury? What’s a luxury feature now? These have adaptive LED headlights that turn when I turn. What is a luxury car? You can get a Subaru with adaptive LED headlights that move with you. What is a luxury feature now? Is it the leather? Is it the lighting? Is it technology? By the way, I’m not giving you the answer, like it’s an interesting question because now I understand looking at everything why these guys were telling me, well, is Audi really a luxury car? And I still would argue that like the new Q9 is a luxury car, and I would absolutely argue that an S-Class is a luxury car. In America, I do think the general consumer thinks that Audi, Mercedes badges, even Lexus, even a Lexus NX is considered a luxury car. But automaker executives aren’t necessarily viewing it that way, and it’s kind of interesting to me.
Byron: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting, too, like we’re seeing a lot of the kind of, so to speak, mainstream luxury automakers, your Audi, BMW, Mercedes types, trying to get more into the upper tier space without infringing too much on like sister brands and things like that. But like, it’s the individual offerings that everyone’s trying to do. Everyone’s trying to be bespoke, everyone’s trying to act coachbuilt, because it’s a way to give their buyers something that is, you know, unique. And the thing is, like, I feel like that’s a generational thing. Like, you know, I’m an older millennial, you’re a little older than I am—
Joel: I’m offended.
Byron: I’m just saying. I didn’t put numbers on it, right? But the idea of like individualization, personalization, always having something that’s been catered to you is a very like millennial, I feel like, kind of like we were the generation that kind of kicked that off. Like it’s not good enough for us to just get what everybody else has. We can’t use top sheets because we’re weird, you know? Like we always had to do something just so slightly different to make ourselves feel special. And I feel like a lot of automakers are trying to like capitalize on that now with the individualization programs, because we’re starting to get money and that’s how they’re trying to pivot and appeal to us. That’s why you’re seeing stuff like that at Cadillac with the Blackwings, at other automakers, like and we’ve seen like the individual thing, I mean even down to like Volkswagen. Volkswagen’s done it for some of their special, like Golf R. But it’s something that lets them charge us more for the same product, essentially.
Joel: Yes. It’s interesting you mention the Cadillac thing, because GM’s really finally leaning into Cadillac for the first time in my lifetime. It feels like they’re starting to figure it out and do right by that brand. And the reason I say it’s interesting is the dichotomy, because a couple years ago, don’t quote me on the numbers, Audi, we heard rumors and we saw reports that Audi was going to bring back the Horch brand, I’m sure I just said that wrong with my accent of America, but we were going to bring back the Horch brand, and it was going to be like their Maybach division, right? So we’d probably have like a Horch A8, which by the way, they did do a Horch A8 for China only for like two years, just so you know, and it was like, you know, star-studded like luxury liner. And then we saw Q9 spy shots, and the one with the vertical slats, the pinstripe grille, we thought was the Horch edition. Turns out that was the mainstream edition, as they’re redoing their grille, and then the eggcrate grille is the SQ9.
But I digress. When I interviewed their CEO, Döllner, at the backgrounder for the Q9, I asked him about the Horch division, and they flat out said, “No, we’re not doing it.” They said, “We’re not doing a Horch division, we’re not going down that route, we’re not going against Maybach and the sub-brands like Alpina.” And we didn’t get into a why at the time, it was a group setting and all those things. But look, they don’t have a lot of money right now. They’re in huge trouble.
Byron: And everything is old. All of their products are old. Like they already have a few things that aren’t even new.
Joel: Because everything was supposed to be new and EV, and now it all got scrapped.
Byron: Exactly. Yep.
Joel: Right. So the point, so it’s interesting to watch Cadillac lean in, and Cadillac being a power position right now, because they’re printing money on trucks and SUVs at GM.
Byron: Escalade, baby.
Joel: Escalade. Dude, a $160,000 Escalade is just a really nice Tahoe. Let’s be clear. It’s a nice, nice Tahoe, but it is a Tahoe.
Byron: And it probably sells a lot of $60,000 Tahoes just by existing.
Joel: I had a $96,000 Suburban last year, by the way. $96,000 Suburban.
Byron: That’s absurd.
Joel: Yikes.
Anyway, point is, I’m not even—I mean, like, I don’t know if the ROI for them to create a Horch division and try and go against Maybach even exists with the current cash situation they have. And then again, like I said, you got the—we talked about this mainstream. Dude, the Hyundai Palisade Calligraphy I had that was $61,000 two and a half weeks ago, three weeks ago, before I had the Telluride, that is a nice car. That is a nice Hyundai. And there’s a whole different story here that we’re not going to get into today that we talked about in the Slack that I want to talk about with generations and all that stuff, but I will tell you, like that is not a Hyundai we grew up with. That is a nice car. And you get into one of those, and you start to think like, and this is nothing against—I mean, the new Q7 is very lovely. I sat in one, I haven’t driven one, they haven’t launched yet, it’s a lovely car. But you start to—you start to think, is someone going to question, “Should I spend an extra $20 grand and get a Q7 over this hybrid, which doesn’t have a hybrid, by the way, over a hybrid Calligraphy Palisade?” You might wonder. I’m not saying that they’re going to be cross-shopped, let’s be clear, that’d be a little weird. But I bet you a Genesis GV80 hybrid that’s coming will be. Would it cost less than a Q7? I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s interesting times, which brings us to the last topic: pricing, completely out of control.
Byron: Oh yeah.
Joel: The average new car today, just in general, it’s $50 grand. $50,000. That is bonkers. And the average truck today is about $15, $16 grand more than that, so we’re in the mid-60s range, by the way. These are average transaction prices. I have been in an F-150 that’s almost 100—almost $100,000. I remember the first time I had an F-150 that was $69,000, and I thought to myself, “This is almost a $70,000 truck, that’s nuts.” Back then, that was unthinkable, unthinkable. And then at the debut of the AT4, I believe it was, we’re no longer on that current CEO for GMC, but at the time, that CEO debuted the truck, and I said, “What’s this thing going to cost?” And he said, “I don’t know.” And I said, “What’s the price ceiling for a pickup truck?” And I’ll never forget the answer, stopped me cold. I was speechless. His answer without missing a beat was, “I don’t know, I haven’t found it yet. I’ll let you know when I find it.”
I was like, “Oh, my goodness.”
Byron: Yep. Yep. There you go.
Joel: And I don’t think they’ve found it yet. You can—you can create a six-figure Super Duty, guys. You can bury a lot of money in a pickup truck.
Byron: Yes, you can.
Joel: Which, by the way, they don’t have Cadillac and Lincoln badges. You can buy a Ford-badged pickup truck for six figures. Which brings—begs the question, is that a luxury car? I would argue, no, an F-150 is a luxury car.
Byron: And that’s the thing. It’s like, they’re almost—I don’t want to say like, averse to referring to them as luxury trucks, but they really like when you ask, like, “Oh, is this the Rolls-Royce of half-ton?” They, you know, they shrug and they’re like, “No, no, we don’t want to compare ourselves.”
Joel: No, no, no, but the hand-cut, hand-sewn leather, and the real wood and real metal that we hammered out with our little, little hammers.
Byron: The money’s still being spent, no matter what you call it.
Joel: I would actually argue that in certain time periods that we lived through, there are people that could afford very expensive cars that would rather shove their money into an F-150 or a Ram 1500 that’s super nice inside, by the way. And you’d never—and they look just like the guy that’s got a seven-year loan on this thing, you just don’t know he doesn’t have a seven-year loan, and they buried all their money in it. It’s the same argument with the handful of last-gen Land Cruisers that someone bought. “Oh honey, the neighbors bought a new Highlander.” It was a $79, $80,000 Highlander, by the way, but you never knew you buried all this money in a Toyota. You can bury a lot of money in a Ford or a Chevy or a GMC or a Ram now, and no one knows whether you have a payment on it or not. It’s a great way to make money disappear.
Byron: And a way to stay incognito, if that’s what you want to do.
Joel: Everyone knows you spent—when you roll up in a Lambo, or a Maserati, or a Bentley, everybody knows you spent money.
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