The ruptures in the fabric of America’s culture can be traced on the year-end sales logs of a German automaker.
Volkswagen sold very few Passats, Jettas, and Golfs in 2021 (a 10-year sales low), mostly because they made very few of them. There was a microchip shortage, you see, which was why ordinary people couldn’t buy a new car and so had to pay a massive premium for used cars.
Volkswagen’s subsidiary did very well in 2021, though: Bentley sold the most cars in its history, nearly 15,000, a 31% increase from last year. What happened?
“We are hardly affected by the chip shortage,” Bentley’s sales chief told the Wall Street Journal. “We are prioritized, so we managed to get all of the chips we needed,” he explained. That is, the rich people got the microchips, while the middle-class mothers got the used car lot.
Bentley was not an exception. More Americans bought Rolls Royces in 2021 than in any year in history.
Lamborghini hadn’t released its 2021 sales numbers as of press time, but CEO Stephan Winkelman said this was the company’s best year ever, with U.S. sales up 11% from 2020.
A bit further down the luxury ladder, BMW and Tesla also had record sales years with huge increases, suggesting it isn’t merely the super-rich who had fun buying cars last year, but all the rich.
Whence this buying spree of $300,000 toys?
Rich people have gotten richer thanks to the booming stock market. There’s also the boredom of a cosmopolitan class that has found its global travels curtailed by COVID-19 restrictions. The roads have been a bit emptier for two years than normal, too, enticing some sports-car drivers.
Some experts point to the new millionaires minted by the cryptocurrency boom — a disproportionately young and male crowd.
The average American Rolls Royce customer is 43 years old, the company says. That means a lot of millennials are buying up these bespoke super-luxury cars.
I suppose if you’ve decided never to have a family or buy a house, why not buy a Phantom in Diamond Black? You could probably get a good price selling your used BMW to your gardener.
