When country music superstar Reba McEntire got the itch for an exotic car recently, she plunked $246,000 down on a hot red Lamborghini Diablo VT, complete with scoops and wings and flaps and a V-12 engine.
“We just delivered the car to Nashville,” said Erv David, president of Prestige Imports in North Miami Beach, which sells 275 premium models and is one of the largest exotic-car dealers in the world. “She said she wanted it for her husband-and herself.”
David said most of his high-roller customers pay cash for their exotic cars, but wannabes need not worry. Prestige also has a Lamborghini lease program.
For $50,000 down and $2,799 a month, you can lease the all-wheel-drive Diablo VT, regarded as one of the world’s fastest production cars. It can hit a top speed of 204 miles per hour and go from zero to 60 in 3.9 seconds.
And the Diablo apparently has a better reputation than its predecessor, the Countach, which Automobile Magazine recently described as “a car more associated with drug dealers than driving performance.”
“The Diablo’s merits have erased everything unsavory about the Countach’s reputation,” crooned the ’95 Automobile Spring Buying & Leasing Guide.
Gee, you’d almost think they were talking about Madonna or Sharon Stone. And in a lot of ways, the cars are about as removed from the real world as a Hollywood starlet.
Exotic cars by definition are racy and high maintenance, with prices in the nanosphere. What you get is raw power, sex appeal and the satisfaction that comes from knowing 99.9 percent of the population will never even get a chance to sit in one.
These vehicles, which can cost up to a million dollars, are the domain of entertainers and sports figures, not autoworkers or mail carriers. Ex-cons are another story, though.
One of the first things boxer Mike Tyson did after getting out of prison was to buy a $313,000 Bentley Azure convertible-and he ordered three more, according to exotic-car dealers. Bentley, the sporting division of Rolls-Royce, is sending only 50 of the exotic vehicles to the U.S. this year.
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld has eight Porsches, including a vintage 1958 356 speedster-the type in which actor James Dean was killed. Chicago Bulls megastar Michael Jordan has a Ferrari Testarossa. Tonight Show host Jay Leno owns a Ferrari F40 and a couple of Dodge Vipers. Talk-show host David Letterman has a fleet of Porsches and a Ferrari Dino from the early 1970s. Drummer Frank Beard from ZZ Top is another Ferrari owner, as is rocker J. Geils, who restores the cars in his spare time.
Beyond the glitterati, the profile of the typical exotic car buyer is a male age 45 to 55 with an income of $250,000 to $350,000 a year.
“The guy has been through the trauma of paying for a home and sending his kids through college,” said John Weinberger, president of Continental Auto Sports in Hinsdale. “He wakes up one day and says, `I’m gonna buy a toy.’ “
Fifty-percent of Continental’s customers are doctors; the rest are what Weinberger describes as “entrepreneurs.” The dealership has two orders for the Bugatti EB110, a $350,000 exotic with a luxury tax of $30,000. Both buyers own factories and say they want to pamper themselves with the most car their automotive bucks can buy.
But exotic cars are not necessarily synonymous with luxury.
A Cadillac probably is more comfortable than most of them, as owners of exotic cars will attest. New Lamborghini owner McEntire got a car that can crank out nearly 500 horsepower, but some mothers probably have better amenities in their mini-vans. The Diablo has no anti-lock brakes, no traction control, no air bag and no cupholder. There’s no need for traction control on the all-wheel-drive vehicle and the air bag is unnecessary on a car with such limited production.
David E. Davis Jr., publication director of Automobile Magazine, has a red Ferrari 328 and a purple Porsche 968 Cabriolet parked in his garage in Ann Arbor, Mich., but as someone taller than 6 feet, he says he’s more at home in his Chevrolet Suburban.
“It (the Ferrari) is really Mrs. Davis’ car,” he confesses. “I’m too tall for it unless I take the top off.”
Kinda makes you feel good you passed up the Lamborghini lease deal for that Neon, though smart shoppers can buy exotic for a lot less than a quarter of a million dollars.
Just about the cheapest exotic vehicle on the market is a Lotus Esprit S4, which has oodles of sex appeal, a base price of about $72,000 and dual air bags.
The most expensive exotic car probably is the McLaren F1, which nears the million-dollar mark.
BMW Chairman Bernd Pischetsrieder, 47, enjoys the dubious distinction of wrecking one recently after driving the 627-h.p. vehicle off a remote road in Germany. The McLaren has a BMW V-12 engine and is said to be as close to a Formula One racer as is possible for a street car. Move over, Jacques Villeneuve!
For 1995, McLaren International said it intends to bring a safety-and-emissions certified F1 to the U.S.
Experts generally agree that the McLaren is one of five cars that top the pantheon of exotic vehicles. The others are the Diablo, the EB110, the Ferrari F40 and the Jaguar XJ220.
Those five were picked as the best exotic cars by readers in the June issue of the Robb Report, the magazine “for the affluent lifestyle.” The cover story on the “best of the best” named the Diablo as best exotic car.
“The sleek and sexy Diablo triggered an overwhelming response from readers,” writes Editor Robert Feeman.
Curiously, the F40 and the XJ220 have not been in production for several years, but continue to sell briskly in the “previously owned” market. All five cars have distinctive personalities and styling. The McLaren is two feet shorter than the Jaguar XJ220 and 1,775 pounds lighter than the Diablo. The Bugatti is the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the auto world, meaning this is one beefed-up buggy. The EB110 has 12 cylinders and 60 valves, plus four turbochargers and six forward gears.
The wide range of exotic offerings makes defining an exotic car difficult.
Author/columnist and former race-car driver Denise McCluggage said the term exotic is “a name some magazine created.”
“They were called sports cars originally,” said McCluggage from her home in Santa Fe. “Nobody called them exotics. Exotics had to do with animals back then. Speculators changed the definition when the prices started going up. And it’s unfortunate, because people once collected these cars because they were loved, not because they were valuable.”
McCluggage, who has an unfinished novel called “All Ferraris are Red,” describes herself as a person who “never owned an exotic car when it was exotic.”
In 1961, she paid $9,000 for a Ferrari (in dark blue, despite the title of her unfinished work). She sold the car the following year for $6,000 and a used Austin Mini. But McCluggage kept track of the Ferrari 250 GT Berlinetta, which later sold for $2.2 million-and was repainted red by its new owner.
Prestige Imports’ David has a strict definition of exotic cars. And it starts with what he believes isn’t an exotic car.
“Corvettes are not exotic,” he said. “The (Acura) NSX is not exotic. Porsches are absolutely not exotic. Even some Ferraris, like the 348, are not exotic. I like to think that a car is exotic because it’s hand-built and has limited production and also because it captures your imagination in a way that no mass-produced car can.”
The Diablo definitely fits David’s definition. Because the car is hand-built, for example, Automobili Lamborghini-now owned by an Indonesian entrepreneur-expects to bring only about 100 of the vehicles to the U.S. each year.
Then there’s exclusivity. Bugatti, for example, built only about 80 EB110s in 1993, 65 of which were sold, according to Automobile Magazine.
David drives a purple 1994 anniversary edition of the Diablo, only 25 of which were made available in the U.S. Contrast that with the Ford Taurus, a car for the masses, which sold nearly 400,000 copies in 1994.
And an exotic car such as the Diablo is more lovingly put together than, say, a Dodge Avenger. Where an Avenger or similar production car gets four or five coats of paint, the Diablo has 15 coats of lacquer. Components are race-quality, not what you’d find on an expressway. Exotic cars have special tires, special engines and high-tech gadgetry such as adaptive suspensions that automatically adjust to road conditions.
But they also have such things as four-inch ground clearance, which means trouble when you race over a six-inch speedbump in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven.
“They are definitely fair-weather cars,” David notes. “But you can still drive them in the rain or in the city. I’ve sold plenty to people in Chicago.”
There also are some exotic car bargains to be had in the Chicago area, partly because the market has fallen off by about 50 percent in the last four years. Over-speculation and the hefty federal luxury tax put a damper on the dream-car market, dealers say.
“Exotic cars have fallen on hard times,” said Continental Auto Sports’ Weinberger, who makes a yearly pilgrimmage to Washington to lobby against the tax. “The luxury tax deflated the value of everything.”
Weinberger said savvy shoppers, such as a local schoolteacher who bought a used Ferrari from him for $25,000, are taking advantage of a depressed market.
Greg Berner, general manager of Lake Forest Sportscars in Lake Forest, notes that “it’s possible to get a used Ferrari-something like a ’79 308-for $30,000.”
“They’re nice and less money than a Lexus,” he said. “Just make sure you get the owner history and service records with a used Ferrari. It’s important to have.” the background information.”
One down side to owning an exotic-car is that it will pretty much put an end to tinkering with the car, unless you are an expert mechanic such as Ferrari owner J. Geils.
“First of all, you can’t find a filter to fit a Ferrari at Kmart,” Berner said. “Even though they look like they’d fit.”
Finally, Berner and other dealers say exotic cars may be the final automotive preserve of the male species.
“This is still pretty much a part of the business where you see the guys buying,” Berner said. “Very few women come in, although you will see them driving the cars around town.”
Apparently no one has told Reba that.
