What exactly is luxury in terms of the automobile? How visible can it be, the benchmark for image and prestige? Which premium properties also contribute to the brand? What about social acceptance? Are traditional values such as size, comfort, equipment and performance still relevant? Lots of questions, lots of answers, lots of material for discussion. Does modern luxury set new accents when evaluating the opposing poles of ownership and use?
Yes and no. Owning personifies the trophy-thinking, the passion for collecting, the desire for self-expression, the joy of driving in its most exclusive form. Use means availability at the highest level. So cars “on demand” – to be able to get into the right car for the season and the occasion at any time. The convertible for a trip to the beach and the black limousine for the opera ball. For example, in the form of a concierge function, an app tailored to elite needs, an all-round automobile service to the remotest corners of the globe. Luxury is being able to fulfill wishes that are still vague.
Rolls-Royce perfected this elite service early on. We remember the Flying Doctors who repaired valuable items on site after a night flight. In line with this, the brand in Goodwood runs a special training course for executive drivers that hardly ignores a quirk of the often sensitive clientele. Not extraordinary enough? If requested, Bugatti customers can be accompanied by a mechanic who jets with the rulership from one Concours d’Elegance to the next.
The company also knows where each car sold is currently located, how often and how fast it has been driven and what may have broken down. That sounds like Big Brother, but it is just further proof that nothing can beat money in the world of ultimate luxury – except for more money. There are Bugatti owners for whom an absolutely identical Chiron awaits in every property (unit price 2.3 million euros). But it can be even more extreme. For example in the form of one-off productions such as the Voiture Noire (almost eleven million euros expensive), the completion of which the client Ferdinand Piëch was no longer allowed to experience. Or a sports car company like Scuderia Glickenhaus, whose namesake was fed up with its Ferrari collection and was looking for a new challenge.
Which Rolls-Royce would you like to have? Here is the current range of models – if you can’t decide, just take them all.
(Photo: Rolls-Royce)
Because luxury only manifests itself as such in the eye of the beholder, material value is often secondary. A profane Golf, painted in a very special RAL color in the factory and covered with special leather, is not only noticed in the golf pack like a sore thumb. But isn’t attracting attention counterproductive? Classic cars can be grotesquely oversubscribed and still collect more likes than Lady Gaga. A purple Porsche turbo, on the other hand, inevitably calls the taste police onto the scene.
Where exactly is the line between stylish and chubby? The question arises again and again not only with demi-world greats, but also with football stars. In addition to the sponsors’ compulsory company cars, the kickers like to drive in a particularly sporty manner. Arsenal striker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, for example, moves everything that attracts attention: Ferrari LaFerrari, Lamborghini Huracán Performante Spyder, Lambo Urus or Aventador Roadster – optionally in chrome gold or rainbow colors. You have to be a big fan to appreciate self-presentation on Instagram.
On the other hand, even a dark Rolls-Royce SUV with the neat name of Cullinan can look to some like a fluffy London Black Cab for decadent very-much-better-earners. A Bespoke Dawn convertible in uni-light blue with dark blue leather and a hood, on the other hand, is just beautiful. When parking, you can see many appreciative faces. Rolls-Royce reacted late and only switched from ostentatious to simple but exquisite with the new cloud as an updated synonym for pure luxury.
Luxury can be seen, smelled, felt and experienced, and that over the course of time. Because leather with patina, a bleached convertible roof made of fabric and real wood from the seventies smell completely different from the daily cocktail of dry sump lubrication, hot carbon and sticky wide tires. In the ideal case, luxury is neither gliding nor rushing, but something of both: the Phantom is either a darkened booth with a private parking space in the posh district of the city or an extroverted bank statement with enough zeros; a Bugatti can be transported in the glass elevator from the garage to the owner’s living room or even crack the 450 km / h mark on the salt lake of a billionaire friend.
True luxury cars are not necessarily specialists, they are all-rounders, who submit to the stop-and-go traffic without a flap exhaust protest, conquer the boulevards of vanity in a flick, enrich even extreme worlds of experience with another experience, and incidentally break records and the respective Convert the mood of the user into forward movements of a special kind.