A $10bn car? The trend for hyper-personalised cars gains momentum

Ferrari’s chief executive Benedetto Vigna says he hopes one day to sell a $10bn car. He is joking, but it is an idea based on a genuine industry phenomenon: super-rich customers prepared to pay sky-high prices to create their own unique supercar. 

“This is a dream . . . but this would be the extreme of luxury,” Vigna told the Financial Times. 

Until recently, options for personalising cars such as a new Rolls-Royce, Bentley or Aston Martin were limited to choices such as paint colour and the type of upholstery and wheels. 

In the past five years, things have changed: wealthy buyers are willing to spend ever larger amounts to make their new cars highly personalised, sometimes even opting to redesign the entire vehicle themselves. 

“If you look at Bentley 20 years ago, you chose your colour, the leather and the wheels and everyone was happy,” said Adrian Hallmark, the former chief executive of Bentley who is joining Aston Martin as chief executive this year. “Now, you cannot get away with it.”

“Demand [for customisation] is through the roof, and maybe it’s because people are able to express their own aesthetic and preferences”.

This hyper-personalisation boom is a major factor in rising profitability for those brands, such as Ferrari and VW-owned Bentley, that can cater to the demands of the big spenders.

Last year, Ferrari was so profitable it increased its forecasts every quarter and posted a record €1.26bn of net profit for the year, of which about €460mn came from higher prices driven by customisation.

Bentley meanwhile has had an almost 10-fold rise in profits since 2019 to €589mn last year, driven by what the company called “jaw-dropping” levels of spending on customisation.

At Rolls-Royce, BMW’s luxury brand, a separate division has been set up to deal with personalised features. These regularly take the cost of the car — which has starting prices from £270,000 to more than £500,000 — past £1mn.

One of the most popular Rolls-Royce features is a night sky scene of tiny dimmable fibre optic lights installed in the roof of the car, allowing chauffeur-driven stargazing. But some customers want their night time view more personalised. 

One requested embroidery depicting the moon’s surface complete with craters. According to Rolls-Royce, this involved at least 250,000 individual stitches, surrounded by 1,183 fibre-optic “stars”. Another couple in Shanghai commissioned a constellation based on their baby daughter and had an image of her footprints inlaid on the car’s white dashboard. 

Bespoke commissions have reached “record levels . . . both by volume and value,” said Rolls-Royce boss Chris Brownridge. Customisation is often labour-intensive but still earns carmakers substantially higher margins.

Some customers have special requests for the outside of the car, to go with the personalised interior.

There are legendary industry stories about paint colours, from the McLaren team dispatched to a Swiss chalet to capture the exact shade of sunrise on the snow, to the engineer who returned to the Bentley factory at Crewe on the train with his nails painted the customer’s desired shade of pink. 

One of the most recent trends is carbon fibre panels and accessories. As a material, it is strong, light weight and very expensive. Used unpainted, its surface catches the light at different angles to create a shimmering effect. 

“Our clients care because it is lightweight, but it’s also beautiful,” said Vigna. 

A carbon finish, both inside and out, was seen as another way of putting your personal stamp on the vehicle, he said, adding that Ferrari had been taken by surprise last year by the popularity of this particular option.

The company had to make changes to its supply chain to cope with demand, he said, adding this would have been unthinkable five years ago. 

One Bentley buyer last year spent €400,000 replacing large sections of the bodywork with carbon fibre, spending so much that he doubled its price. 

Another asked for wood from his own forest to be used in the interior of his new Bentley, a project that eventually took the price tag above €2mn. 

At Ferrari, some customers even sit down with designers with a “base” vehicle — such as the £375,000 SF90 — and develop entirely new body shapes. One client, from a US tech company, studied aerodynamics and opted to draw his own vehicle, which Ferrari made. 

The company said it makes “a few” sports cars like this a year, where customers produce their own design based on an existing model. The price tag runs into “multiple millions”. 

One question is why people have become fixated on expensive customisation. 

Carmakers have become better at catering to such demands, investing in supply chains and dedicated teams. But there is something else at work: a number of executives say the trend is more pronounced since the pandemic. 

“Covid left a clear message — you call it a YOLO effect,” said Vigna. “In Italy we say carpe diem. You make money, you can make good investments in equity, bonds, real estate, but your lifespan is limited, so you also have fun.”

A picture caption in this article has been updated to say that one of the images is the interior of a Rolls-Royce Phantom, rather than a Bentley