It's the ultimate symbol of wealth, or douchebaggery depending on your personal tastes.
Ferraris have been world
renowned as the top luxury sports car brand in the world for almost
eight decades, and the
tell-tale sharp angles of its most modern high end models are impossible
to miss.
Ranging from a few hundred thousand
dollars, to a whopping seventy million dollars, a Ferrari
is the ultimate status
symbol- but why in the world are Ferraris so expensive?
Ferrari has its origins
with Enzo Ferrari, who created a racing car manufacturing plant
Originally Ferrari had
no interest in building road automobiles- or cars for use outside
of a race track- and
focused exclusively on building the finest racing cars that a wealthy
gentleman racer could
afford.
With the outbreak of the
second world war, Ferrari left the world of race cars briefly,
and created a
manufacturing company that specialized in building machine tools and aircraft
parts.
Unable to resist the old
urge to build fast cars though, Ferrari had a prototype built,
the Tipo 815.
Unfortunately due to the
world at large being at war, the Tipo's premier race was largely
ignored.
Eventually Ferrari's
factory would be bombed by the allies, and after the war it was rebuilt
to focus on regular
automobiles.
Enzo Ferrari grudgingly
agreed to build commercial cars, but only to fund his beloved racing
team, Scuderia Ferrari.
This racing team would
go on to be the most successful in history, winning numerous Grand
Prix events and fueling
the legend of the Ferrari name.
Soon, Ferrari started
building luxury sports automobiles, and thanks to the success of
its racing team, was able
to charge a hefty premium- a practice that lasts to this day.
So the first answer as
to why Ferraris are so expensive should be immediately obvious.
When you're buying a
Ferrari, a large part of the cost goes towards you in effect licensing
Ferrari is a global
status symbol, and when you buy a Ferrari it doesn't matter what street
in the world you drive
it on- everyone who sees it will instantly know that you have
a ton of cash and
probably very little personality.
But hey, you don't need
personality when you've got the cash to drive a Ferrari around.
You may not be a
legendary race car driver with nerves of steel, but once you're behind
the wheel of a Ferrari
none of that will matter.
You'll immediately join
the ranks of the most elite race car drivers and mysterious international
spies, and probably end
up wrecking your brand new Ferrari like a disturbingly large number
of drivers do.
That's the other thing
about Ferraris, they are known as supercars for a reason, and pack
more horsepower into a
vehicle than any civilian in the world actually needs.
The 2016 Ferrari
LaFerrari- which we feel is a highly redundant name- clocks in at a
whopping 950 horsepower,
and can accelerate from zero to sixty in 4.8 seconds, which is
perfect for destroying
your vehicle on a guardrail like a driver in England recently did.
Compare that with a much
more economical Toyota Camry which ranges from 203 to 206 horsepower
and you can see why
Ferrari itself often warns against inexperienced drivers purchasing their
vehicles.
The second reason why
Ferraris are so expensive, is that they are very unique cars.
When you have a global
brand name like Ferrari that fetches hundreds of thousands of dollars
per car, you don't need
to mass produce your vehicle.
In fact if Ferrari
started mass producing its supercars, its total brand value would
plummet, because it's
just not cool to have the same toy a million other people have.
Ferrari owners are not just
buying artificial personalities with their car, but they're
buying into elite
exclusivity, and being exclusive is really the only way to one-up your
neighbors
in the lofty world of
the one percent.
Normal cars will see
production numbers that run in the millions, and that's what helps
make the miracle of
horseless transportation a reality for the unwashed masses, allowing
them to run their
errands like buying beets and... farming dirt?
We're not really sure
what peasants do with their time to be honest.
Ferraris though see
production numbers that are a fraction of that, and this skyrockets
Toyota Camrys for
instance saw sales of around 34,000 vehicles in one month alone in 2018-
compare that with the
1,315 total Ferrari F40s that were ever built.
The Ferrari 348tb saw a
four year production run of 2,895 units, and the Ferrari 360 Spider
had a five year
production run of 7,501 units.
Considering that each
Toyota Camry costs around $20,000, depending on year and upgrades, while
a Ferrari starts at
$260,001 for a Ferrari Spider and can get as high as $600,001 for
a Ferrari F40, and you
can see that Ferrari definitely is making a healthy profit off
each car.
They may not mass-market
the way that regular automobile manufacturers do, but then again
they don't need to and
enjoy their status as a niche, high-status brand.
Another difference
between a Ferrari and a normal car which drives up the cost is how
they are made.
Normal cars made for
normal people are made in large factories and on long assembly lines,
where machines put
together the cars piece by piece, one after the other- a soulless
and monotonous
24-hours-a-day-seven-days-a-week operation that perfectly mirrors the empty
meaningless existence of
the car's future owners.
Ferraris on the other
hand are hand-crafted, each part of the vehicle built by master craftsmen
using only the finest
machine tools.
Each Ferrari is a labor
of love, a celebration of the incredible talent of each individual
master craftsmen that
took part in its construction, and those master craftsmen get paid very well.
Certainly a lot better
than the robot that built your dumb car.
Lastly, the reason that
Ferraris are so expensive is because, well, they can be.
Despite the staggering
price tag and the ever-increasing number of dead Ferrari drivers scraped off
the sides of the
freeway, demand for Ferraris is skyrocketing.
The ranks of the global
one percent are growing, and not because suddenly we're living in a
world with an equitable
economic system for all people, but because individuals are rising
around the world who are
quickly hoovering up wealth into fewer and fewer hands.
This means that more
people around the globe desperately need to prove how superior they
are to you, and to their
fellow elite one percenters- and what better way to do that
than to show off the new
mistress, or because divorces are so expensive, a brand new Ferrari!
That's right, Ferrari
can pretty much just set its own price and rich people will beg
Ferrari for the
opportunity to buy one of their supercars.
When money is no object,
then the only thing that matters is status, and it's hard to beat
the status of owning a
Ferrari.
