For the “1 percent” who can afford it, there are a surprising number of stratospherically expensive vehicles that make most of Mercedes-Benz andPorsche’s cars seem relatively affordable.
It’s the definition of a First World problem, but for some people it’s irritating to buy a powder-blue Rolls-Royce Phantom, only to find someone at a neighboring horse farm bought a powder-blue Rolls-Royce Phantom, too.
Maybe a Hennessey Venom GT, for a suggested retail price of $1.2 million, would represent a step ahead of the Joneses. Hennessey says its 1,244-hp Venom GT set a Guinness World Book-sanctioned record time of 13.63 seconds from zero to 300 kilometers per hour, or 186 mph, in January 2013.
However, anyone who wants to buy one better move fast, pun intended. The company plans to build a total of only 29 units, and 11 have already been sold, including just five in the United States.
No. 1 on our list of the 10 Most Expensive Cars for 2014 is the Lamborghini Veneno Roadster, which retails for $4.5 million — if you can get one. Lamborghini says it plans to build only nine of them in 2014.
Next year could be a good one for the exotic automobile industry. Wall Street bonuses could be 5% to 10% higher than last year when they are handed out in early 2014, according to Johnson Associates, and that’s a prime source of buyers for high-end automobiles. Exotic-car dealers keep close track of the stock markets, since that’s where many of their customers get their disposable income, whether those customers are shareholders or captains of industry.
The automotive upper-upper crust also includes traditional brands whose names ring a bell like Bugatti and Ferrari. British brands Rolls-Royce andBentley are also traditional choices, although they are not in the business of hair-raising performance at all costs.
Relatively mainstream brands like Porsche and Mercedes-Benz also have their highest-end models. Mercedes-Benz has dropped its Maybach brand, but it is pushing into higher and higher price ranges with the Mercedes-Benz brand and its high-performance AMG division.
But most people have never heard of some of the rarest brands, like Texas-based high-performance tuner Hennessey, or Koenigsegg of Sweden. If you see yourself coming and going in one of those, maybe it’s time to move, or else start looking at yachts, or airplanes.