Automotive: Exotic car market crashes caused by war on oil
Soaring prices for exotic cars have come screeching to a halt, putting sellers at a loss but creating a great opportunity for buyers.
As inflation decimates everyone’s wallet due to the Biden Administration’s war on oil, sellers of high-powered, collectible dream vehicles such as Mercedes Benz G-Wagens, Ferraris, Aston Martins, Maseratis and other rich-man cars are taking a serious financial hit.
‘A lot of these cars were way overvalued, and people were paying way too much,’ said Todd Rowsell, sales manager for iLusso, a dealer in new and used high-priced exotic cars, in Costa Mesa, California.
‘Everybody got used to buying a car like a G-Wagen, flipping it and making money out of it,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘Now that’s all over, and some are taking a bath.’
The auto website Jalopnik recently quoted a luxury car dealer who goes by the Twitter nickname CarDealershipGuy as saying that a 2021 G-Wagen with some 3,300 miles sold for $187,000 – 30 per cent less than the ‘nearly $300,000 figures G-Wagens were going for earlier this year.’
He described the exotic car market as ‘getting decimated.’
And he acknowledged that his Ferrari dealership, which sells other high-end cars like BMW, took some ‘massive losses on certain cars as the market continues to go down.’
‘Some of these exotic cars are not worth as much as they were a year ago,’ sales manager Holden Moore, a 15-year car sales veteran, told DailyMail.com.
“People were selling them for over MSRP at one point, but everything has changed – interest rates are higher, gas prices went up, V8 exotic cars aren’t as popular as they were before – so the market for exotic cars has changed.
“Dealers would like to unload them so they are not stuck with them. We’re trying to sell our cars quicker, so we price them aggressively.
“I wouldn’t say the market for exotic cars has crashed, but right now the market has decreased. In the past two years the market went crazy – it was very high. But now it’s slowed down.
“The experts predicted it, and now it’s a reality. The past two years have been unrealistic in terms of sales and sky-high prices, but now it’s jumping back to quote unquote normal. The market’s adjusting back to what it should have been in past years.”