There was never such a time for costly cars. Not just moderately costly, like the MG Rover XPower SV coupe between £65,000 and £85,000, but also really costly, like the £100,000 Bentley, or £158,000 Aston Martin. There is a black Enzo Ferrari for £450,000. Even the humble Spyker (pictured) is between £144,000 and £210,000 before VAT.
Spyker? Unless your Mastermind specialist subject is obscure Dutch cars between 1898 and 1925, you will not have heard of it. You might remember it as the cad’s car Kenneth More drove in Genevieve, the 1950s film comedy of the London to Brighton veteran car run. The heritage of Jacobus and Hendrik-Jan Spijker was resurrected for a Le Mans and Sebring racer this year, made into a road-legal coupe, still more of a racing car than a road car. It comes in various guises as a sort of Porsche lookalike with huge reserves of power.
It is anybody’s guess who will buy these up-maeket cars - cash-rich drug barons or wealthy footballers perhaps; the manufacturers are full of confidence that there are enough customers to go round. Noble, which makes four up-market sports cars a week and has its hundredth car on the stand at Birmingham, says it sells them to IT millionaires or enthusiasts who don’t want, or already have yachts, second homes, or small aircraft. Now more car makers than ever are clamouring to get into niche markets with big mark-ups, raising their game clear of the volume market where competition is cut-throat, capacity under-used, and discounts rife.
Even Porsche is getting into new markets with its off-road Cayenne (below). It has built a factory in Leipzig to make it, and when it comes on stream next year it will be either an entry-level £60,000 with a top speed of 150mph, or a twin-turbo capable of 165mph and costing £185,000. The chassis of mind-scrambling complexity is shared in many respects except some refined electro-hydraulics with VW Touareg. Nothing wrong with that. Jaguars of the 1930s shared their underpinnings with a much humbler Standard 14. The difference was that nobody seemed to know that then.
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JIM CLARK: Tribute to a Champion by Eric Dymock
MG Classics by Eric Dymock. Model by Model, Books 1, 2 and 3
Kevin Wale, the new managing director of Vauxhall, promised that following its centenary year it too was going to get back to radical products. He told a lunchtime press conference that, building on the success of the VX220, Vauxhall would be returning to the performance field with cars to put the excitement back into motoring. This was code for an assault on a high-profit area not dependent on volume to make money. Fast cars can cost very little more to make than slow cars, but they are less price sensitive.
Their development is encouraged by the flourishing hobby of track days, where enthusiasts club together to hire a racing circuit, not to race on, but just to drive at speeds illegal on the public road. The traffic will be fast and with luck be going in the same direction most of the time. There may not be much point in having a 150mph car unless you can use it to hone your skill on the track, and track days in their turn provide a rationale for spending big money on a fast car.
The MG was a case in point. MG Rover was falling behind in the volume market. It could never compete with Ford and Vauxhall, or Japanese and Far East manufacturers. It may even create useful partnerships, although that mooted with China Brilliance is under a cloud until the probity of its CEO, Mr Yang, is cleared up. It could cooperate with Tata in 1ndia or even acquire the old Daewoo, formerly FSO factory in Poland nobody seems to want, but the XPower SV with extravagant styling and enormous reserves of power is another means of making useful profit from a niche product. Even the entry-level car has 325bhp, and the top model 965bhp with the factory-approved nitrous oxide injection kit. It might be more convincing however had it completely dispensed with its old Ford Mustang antecedents.
The MG’s engine is a 5.0 litre Ford V8, a recipe repeated on the Invicta, like the Spyker a reviva1 of an old deeply respected name. lnvictas of the 1920s and 1930 tended to be large-engined, rather lazy cars with plenty of low-speed pulling power, dignified appearance, and high quality. They were also expensive and following the 1930s slump sales fell away. The founder Noel Macklin, father of 1950s racing driver the late Lance Macklin, tried to make smaller Invictas but they were not a success.
The Invicta follows the successful pattern of the 1930s cars, big, powerful, of striking appearance and high quality. They claim it only needs to make only 15 of the carbon-fibre bodied cars a year to break even. At just under £70,000 each it might just manage; there must be 15 footballers or IT millionaires who do not want Ferraris, Mercedes-Benzes, or Porsches.