The BMW-Pininfarina Gran Lusso Coupe will be shown at Pebble Beach this year. Photo courtesy of BMW.
BY: JIM HENRY
PUBLISHED: AUGUST 13, 2013
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Credit Suisse is an Official Sponsor of the 2013 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, an event beginning this week in California that celebrates the rarest and most beautiful cars in the world. As the events get underway, The Financialist covers a prominent trend in luxury vehicles: customized cars.For someone who can afford a car painted to match a favorite lipstick, or a flower, or a necktie – and yes, those are requests that well-heeled car buyers have actually made – Monterey, Calif., is the place to be this week.
For five days in August, California’s Monterey Peninsula serves as a headquarters for owners and admirers of the world’s rarest and most exclusive collector cars. It all culminates in the Pebble Beach Concours D’Elegance this Sunday, when the top vintage collectors are judged on their cars’ historical accuracy, technical merit and style. “Pebble Beach is quite simply the finest concours of its kind. It attracts the best cars,” said automotive journalist Ken Gross, a judge at the competition for the last 25 years. “If your car wins at Pebble Beach, you can rest assured it’s the best it can be.”
The vintage-classics crowd expects a lot from their new cars, too, and brands see the expo as an opportunity to showcase their bespoke offerings. To this crowd, cars from ultra-exclusive brands like Rolls-Royce and Bentley, as well as top-of-the-line models from Mercedes-Benz and BMW, aren’t yet a finished product when they roll off the assembly line. That’s just the starting point – a blank canvas that can then be customized to buyers’ individual tastes. While the days of the fully bespoke automobile are for the most part over, thanks to strict safety regulations that make creating a soup-to-nuts, custom-made vehicle prohibitively expensive, leading high-end brands are increasingly interested in personalizing cars to fit their wealthiest customers’ whims.
Photo of a custom SLS AMG in “Boudalis Blue” with “Peeler Orange” stitching on the seats courtesy of Mercedes-Benz. The car was on display at the 2011 New York Auto Show. “While it was not customized for a specific customer, an auto show attendee loved the car so much that it was soon purchased after the show,” a company spokesperson noted.
At the extreme high end, a design, engineering and small-batch manufacturing firm such as Italy’s Pininfarina does create one-of-a-kind cars for individual clients. People are still talking about the Ferrari P4/5, a unique car that Pininfarina built by restyling a rare Ferrari Enzo model with a retro exterior that recalls that brand’s race cars from the 1960s. Pininfarina delivered it to an American collector, James Glickenhaus, in 2006—at Pebble Beach.
Pininfarina says it plans to build a “very limited series” of its latest concept car, the Sergio – named for the late chairman of the firm, Sergio Pininfarina – for retail sale. At this year’s concours, Pininfarina and Germany’s BMW plan to show another concept car called the BMW Pininfarina Gran Lusso Coupe, a V-12 model styled by Pininfarina and based on the flagship BMW 7-Series. The companies do not plan to offer the concept car for retail sale, though Pininfarina spokesman Francesco Fiordelisi said the company does take orders from “special customers” for one-off models.
But even Pininfarina’s special customers aren’t getting cars made from scratch. Back in the day – say, before World War II – a tycoon, movie star or a head of state could special-order a separate chassis from a luxury automaker and have a coachbuilder create a one-of-a-kind body to bolt on top of the chassis to create a one-of-a-kind, street-legal car. Today, cars are built on a “unibody” structure that’s a single, welded-together piece, instead of a body bolted on top of a ladder-like chassis. Add to that modern safety and emissions requirements, and the idea of building a completely unique car is essentially a thing of the past.
Modern cars are designed to absorb and deflect the energy of a crash, channeling it away from the occupants. When a manufacturer makes modifications that could affect a car’s safety performance in a crash, it has to perform extremely expensive crash testing on the new version. That involves destroying a prototype car –more likely multiple cars – under lab conditions. For most people – even extremely wealthy people – it’s simply not economical to underwrite such testing for a single car.The same idea applies to emissions. It’s enormously expensive to perform emissions testing on an engine that’s not already certified for sale in the United States. Therefore, even the crème de la crème choose certified engines off the shelf instead of creating a new engine from scratch. For its part, Pininfarina typically starts out with a production model from another manufacturer. The Sergio, for example, has the mechanical insides of a Ferrari 458 Spider.
THREE ORANGE CARS? NO PROBLEM
The bragging rights that come with a “bespoke” automobile do not come cheap. Almost any degree of personalization commands big bucks, which is why the luxury automotive brands assemble en masse in and around Monterey to court old and new customers. And they’re open to pretty much any idea. “It’s really endless,” said BMW’s Experiential Sales and Marketing Manager Nicolas Brown, when asked what customers can do to personalize a car. Brown is in charge of cars that are personalized under the “BMW Individual” program.
Brown said customers spend anywhere from $2,000 to well over $40,000 customizing their BMWs with special interior and exterior colors, wood veneer and other paneling choices – one wealthy salmon farmer opted for salmon-skin veneers – plus leather and other exotic materials. Colors usually come from the BMW palette, but BMW will also create custom colors—for a price. Getting a custom color is not simply a matter of choosing “the blue one” instead of “the red one” at your local dealership. High-end customers can ask a luxury manufacturer to match literally anything, or may simply want their fleet of cars to match one another, even if a standard paint color has been discontinued. In its 100-plus years of manufacturing, Rolls-Royce says it has created more than 44,000 exterior paint colors. Adding to the cachet of custom-ordering, one-of-a-kind colors are reserved for the exclusive future use of the client who ordered them.
A Rolls-Royce craftsperson painstakingly creates a wood-veneer insignia for the dashboard of one of the brand’s “Home of Rolls-Royce” collection vehicles. Photo courtesy of Rolls-Royce.
During this year’s Pebble Beach festivities, one BMW collector is taking delivery of three personalized BMWs from the company’s high-performance “M” division – an M6 Coupe, a matching M6 Convertible and an M5 Sedan. All three have “Sakhir Orange” exterior paint, an optional, red-orange color reserved for certain high-end models and named for a landmark at the Bahrain International Circuit, a Formula One racetrack.
SPECIAL TREATMENTIn a recent interview at BMW’s U.S. headquarters in the United States, Brown said that the BMW Individual treatment is available for BMW 5-, 6-, 7-Series and X6 crossover models, plus the BMW M5 and M6, although most individualized cars in the U.S. market are 6-Series, 7-Series or M models. And consider this: the 2014 M6 Convertible is $116,425 suggested retail, including $925 in destination and handling fees, before any modifications or extras.
BMW intends to announce a new feature for its BMW Individual program during this year’s Pebble Beach events: one-on-one access to a designer from BMW’s DesignWorksUSA subsidiary in Newbury Park, Calif., who can work with clients to select colors and materials.
Rival Mercedes-Benz calls its customization program “designo.” When the program was launched in the late 1990s, it was little more than an assortment of a few upgraded options packages. The company re-launched it for the 2008 model year, featuring a much wider range of choices for paint, trim and leather, said Paul La Penta, assistant product manager for the design program and the high-performance division AMG for Mercedes-Benz USA. “It’s probably the closest you can get to truly custom modifications,” La Penta told The Financialist. A 2014 SLS AMG GT sports car painted with an exclusive “Monterey Blue” color will be shown at Pebble Beach.
That’s not the only thing Mercedes-Benz has in store. The company plans to show its new 2014 S63 AMG at a series of exclusive events taking place at the Quail Lodge & Golf Club, Carmel, Calif., as part of the Pebble Beach expo. The car is the high-performance version of the all-new, S-class flagship sedan and a strong candidate for customized design orders. The decision to roll out the model at Pebble Beach shows how important the concours’ high net worth audience is for car companies, since it isn’t actually expected to make its auto show debut until September’s Frankfurt Auto Show in Germany.
BESPOKEN FOR
Rolls-Royce, owned by BMW since 1998, has enjoyed substantial growth in its “bespoke” division. Custom-ordered cars accounted for 95 percent of North American deliveries of the company’s Phantom models in the first quarter of 2013, up from 60 percent in 2009 and only 30 percent in 2005.
The compass motif embroidered into the leather of the Home of Rolls-Royce Collection vehicles require more than 112,000 stitches. Photo courtesy of Rolls-Royce.
Rolls-Royce plans to show its “Home of Rolls-Royce” commemorative models of the car company’s Phantom sedan at Pebble Beach. With a suggested retail price of $463,065, the model marks the 10th anniversary of the brand’s most up-to-date factory. Only 50 “Home of Rolls-Royce” cars will be built for sale worldwide, according to spokesman Oleg Satanovsky. Of those, only a “handful” will come to the U.S. market, he said.
There is no better place to get a jump on selling a “handful” of $460,000-plus cars than Pebble Beach this August. Carmakers know that the enthusiasts there are increasingly focused on the rare, the exclusive and the built-for-me aspects of the ultra-luxury car market, and they’re plenty willing to pay for them.
Tejas Thakker
