
Bugatti’s Strategy of One-Off Supercars - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-31/bugatti-s-sky-is-the-limit-strategy-of-13-million-one-off-supercars
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aqme28
I think about this quote a lot.

>"The clientele between Bentley and Bugatti is remarkably different," Bentley
CEO and Bugatti president Wolfgang Duerheimer told Bloomberg. "The Bentley
customer on average owns 8 cars. The average Bugatti customer has about 84
cars, 3 jets and one yacht."

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f_allwein
Future generations may wonder about this too...

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Theodores
It is widely understood that the featured one off car is for Ferdinand Piech,
the former boss of VW group who also introduced his own luxury car brand at
Geneva this year.

The lifetime of these cars is pretty limited, the Veyron no longer is where it
is at, it is an old car but not a classic old car, it just says 'eugh' to some
people that have seen it before. A technical marvel when new, now quite passe.

The Bugatti brand value is an interesting exercise in make believe. It is a
revived brand, there is no common heritage. But they pretend there is and
nobody points out the flaw to this thinking. At least VW's Lamborghini brand
is a bit more credible, there is some thread between the old and the new. The
Lamborghini style is spot on for consistent lineage, with Bugatti they have to
have the horseshoe grill even though it makes no sense from an aero or other
engineering relevant reason.

In theory VW could bring out a 'Tucker' car and pretend that there was some
link between the three headlamped effort their designer comes up with and the
original:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_48](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_48)

They could sell the thing with faux American heritage and have it churned out
of their Slovakia plant with a few Bentleys. If there was novelty in it people
would buy it just because nobody else had one yet.

Meanwhile MacLaren are making cars that are ageing gracefully. There is no
fake heritage and there is no horseshoe grill or other legacy novelty that
goes with resuscitating a badge engineered image. They are also in the
business of doing extremely expensive one off projects but that seems okay as
the tech filters down to the cars affordable by lesser multimillionaires.

Returning to VW, the original brand proposition was 'the people's car',
something that could bring motoring to the masses. Plenty of other marques had
this starting point. But right now we need some reinvention of that with some
humble electric car. I think something could be put together with enough range
to get you to work and to the train station for longer treks, with a modest
sized battery, super-capacitor and humble seats for less cost than a cheap
hatchback. But we haven't had that, we keep getting these absurdly expensive
cars that are not for the masses.

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amanzi
The world that billionaires live in is just so difficult to fathom. They
literally _need_ nothing since they already have multiple mansions, jets,
yachts, etc paid for sitting there waiting to be used. Yet they still have
access to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, so spending a measly
$13m on a car is literally nothing to them. No need to even blink at the cost.
What a crazy world we live in...

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benj111
Story's like this just remind me of the early days of the app store, when
someone launched an app for the then maximum price of $999 or something, that
didn't do anything except put an icon on the home screen.

That for me is perhaps the purest example of people selling 'status'

~~~
ceejayoz
I'd forgotten about that.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich)

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Scoundreller
Am I to believe that one-off (or low production) cars are exempt from
emissions, mechanical inspections and crash testing requirements?

And if so, why am I breathing in their exhaust or involuntarily at increased
risk with their driving?

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gavia1
You seem strangely concerned about the health risks of a one-off/low
production car that you will probably never encounter on the road.

Personally I'm much more concerned about the 100s of diesel powered buses that
run 24/7 across cities such as London, and the huge amount of particulate
pollutants they emit into our lungs.

~~~
rakoo
The 100s of diesel buses probably emit less than the 2000s of individual cars
they replace, so you should be relatively happy that they are here and even
concerned there aren't more

~~~
gavia1
Not really.

People are already discouraged from driving private vehicles in London during
the week with the £10 congestion charge, which along with parking prices,
makes it too expensive to drive to work in Central London for the vast
majority of workers.

In other words, I don't believe removing buses would increase cars. So our
problem is really the buses, and they are very dirty
([https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-
london-38157860](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-38157860)).

~~~
rakoo
I do agree that diesel pollutes a lot, but if they were removed workers would
still need a way to go to work.

I think the problem is that there are still cars on the road, which means the
bus service (even dirty) should go to even more places and have more flexible
schedules

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kevin_thibedeau
Destined to be collecting dust in an Emirati parking garage.

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nikanj
Similar strategies seem to be working across the board from luxury mansions to
designer watches.

~~~
beenBoutIT
A one-off luxury OS could be extremely secure and difficult to hack.

~~~
est31
That's security by obscurity and in the computing world this strategy has
shown to fail. In other areas of life obscurity gives you advantages like in
military conflict, but not here.

Furthermore, an OS with only one or only few users would have to go through a
lot of extra testing compared to the free testing that "popular software"
companies are getting.

But your comment made me think about why there isn't much going on in luxury
computing. As in: where are the raytraced photorealistic nvidia DGX games.
Probably too small of a market but I don't know. Do rich people play a lot of
games? Or do they rather prefer real life because they have the resources?

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ebg13
> _$12.5 million ($18.9 million, counting taxes)_

50% sales tax? How does that happen?

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kyleblarson
money != class

~~~
Bakary
That's something we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better. In reality
class is an abstract concept that it also derived from status-seeking behavior
and creating a distance from others through abstract metrics, or defending our
egos from more powerful people.

~~~
kyleblarson
ok, money != taste, is that better?

~~~
Bakary
It's the same mechanism at work. The thought that someone would have so much
more disposable income creates tension, so we jump to another axis of judgment
according to which we come out on top. In the end we still are trying to
reassert our own ego in the face of a threat.

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adetrest
This is both absurd and obscene. I could think of a million better ways to
spend the money and benefit people or ecosystems if I had 10 or 20 million $
burning a hole in my pocket. Shame to the people spending this kind of money
on such trivial and useless things, and to Bugatti (and other brands) for
humoring them. It makes me really sad to know there are people who would
rather blow these amounts and waste the money.

~~~
mfatica
Fortunately, many of us live in free countries and are free to spend our money
as we choose. At the least, the money going to bugatti with benefit the people
who helped design and build the cars. Maybe those aren't the people you think
should be helped, but after all we are free.

~~~
bgorman
Unless you want to sell certain types of plants/chemicals, gambling services
or your own body...

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dmix
The web link isn't working for me with this article. Can't bypass the
subscription modal.

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detaro
blocking third party scripts seems to help.

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dmix
Yep that works. No images loading for some reason though. Probably using some
fancy JS-powered image service. Which is very anti-web accessibility.

Blocking cookies is the better option if you want images.

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iancmceachern
This is what's wrong with the world. I can understand a $100k car, but this
level if unnecessary decadence and the apathetic world view that one must have
to own and operate one is staggering to me. One of these cars is the
equivalent cost of education and medical Bills for several large families over
a generation or more. One question, why? How do things like this move us
forward as a civilization and society?

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HeyLaughingBoy
Perhaps if you backed off for a second and considered the amount of wealth
this person had to create, and the people and businesses they had to support
(besides Bugatti) in order to achieve this level of wealth, you'd find that
it's not as obscene as you think. That process was the one that "moves us
forward as a civilization and society."

IOW, as you get to this level of wealth, you improve the lives of the others
who provided you products and services. Does it really matter to you that much
what this person then chooses to do with their accumulated cash?

How is buying the car worse than, say, a single person winning a $13M lottery?
Would you complain about that?

~~~
ceejayoz
> Perhaps if you backed off for a second and considered the amount of wealth
> this person had to create...

It's possible that amount is zero, if they're just spending their parents'
money. Plenty of multi-generational wealth sitting around.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Anything's possible. However, in the world we live in, it's more likely than
not that someone with money earned it themselves.

~~~
ceejayoz
Tech's been shifting the balance, but there's still a very substantial portion
of the folks with this sort of throwaway money who're sitting on family
fortunes.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2014/10/03/there-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2014/10/03/there-
are-more-self-made-billionaires-in-the-forbes-400-than-ever-
before/#3db2fb283369)

> In 2004, we had 59% of the Forbes 400 having made their own fortune, as
> opposed to 41% who inherited it. But, again, at the extremes we still saw a
> full one-tenth of the list, or 40 of them, having fully inherited their
> fortunes and not working to grow it, and only 4.75% of them, or 19, as
> totally self-made, having battled adversity to reach the top.

> Thus, the most encouraging results come from this year’s Forbes 400. For the
> first time in our data set, we see the number of self-made billionaires who
> rose from nothing, and overcame various tough obstacles, outpacing those
> that just sat on their fortunes. A total of 34 billionaires, or 8.5%, scored
> as 10s, or more than three times as many as in 1984. The number of 100%
> inherited fortunes as a percentage of the total fell to 7%, with 28
> billionaires in the 1 category, compared to 99 back in 1984.

There's a _higher_ chance these days someone spending millions on a car is
some sort of "job creator", but it's by no means guaranteed. The supercar set
may lean more towards Saudi oil wealth sort of folks, as well.

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iancmceachern
This is exactly my point. The great job and wealth creator's (a la Warren
Buffet, Gates, etc.) just aren't interested in things like this. The latter in
your comments above are the folks buying things like this. There is no real
meaningful difference between this and say a Range Rover. We can't, and
shouldn't presume to tell other people how to spend their money, but we can
talk together as a society to discuss our common priorities and values. That's
my point, our priorities as a society seem to be shifting.

