Today’s luxury car buyers want experiences, not performance

Lewis Hamilton is onto something. A couple of weeks ago, the F1 ace revealed his desire to build a Ferrari supercar called the F44, after his race number, and fit it with a manual gearbox.

Ferrari hasn’t installed a clutch pedal and its iconic, open-gate manual shifter to any road car since 2012, when it switched fully to the paddle-operated, semi-automatic gearboxes that are much quicker but lack driver involvement.

Back then, the switch from slow manual shifting to speedier automatic gear changes fitted perfectly with the performance-centric ethos of Italy’s favourite supercar maker. But now, with electric motors democratising performance – and the small Volvo EX30 sprinting to 60 mph quicker than the supercars that hung on your bedroom wall – Ferrari and its competitors should change tact.

They should listen to Lewis, but also learn from what’s currently hot, and what isn’t, among super and hypercar collectors.

There are whisperings of the new McLaren W1 and Ferrari F80 not going down quite as favourably among the super rich as you’d expect, while Bugatti Rimac boss Mate Rimac admits his Nevera – a £2m, 2,000 horsepower electric hypercar, pictured below – isn’t selling as well as hoped, and may not see a successor.

Speaking at the Financial Times’ Future of The Car summit in 2024, Rimac said just 50 of the 150-unit production run had been sold.

“We notice that as electrification is becoming mainstream, people at the top end of the sector want to differentiate themselves,” he said.

Likening electric supercars to consumer tech, he added: “An Apple Watch can do everything better [than the best mechanical watch]. It can do 1,000 more things, it’s a lot more precise, it can measure your heart rate. But nobody would pay $200,000 for an Apple Watch.” Anyone who remembers the gold, $10,000 Apple Watch Edition will be nodding sagely at that observation.

To differentiate oneself from his or her peers is a primary concern of almost every deep-pocketed luxury consumer. How can I stand out from the crowd?

The answer in the automotive sector is to go bespoke, but not necessarily to go more quickly.

Singer, the Los Angeles firm that charges a million bucks to reimagine classic Porsche 911s, pictured below, has a multi-year waiting list. It’s a similar story if you want a bespoke car from Jaguar E-Type specialist Eagle, Alfa Romeo specialist Alfaholics, or a born-again MGB GT from Frontline

In every case, the production numbers of these restored and modified ‘restomods’ are tiny, yet demand from the super-wealthy is off the scale. Zero-to-sixty times are irrelevant.

None of these buyers are seeking neck-snapping acceleration. Instead they want a car that blends classical good looks with modern reliability and usability. A car that looks gorgeous and is involving to drive, yet won’t expire in a cloud of steam at the roadside.

Back to Ferrari. While I’m certain it won’t go fully down the restomod route, reintroducing hits from the back catalogue with better brakes and Apple CarPlay, it already has its Icona series. This has so far spawned the Monza SP1 and SP2, complete with retro-futurism styling, and the SP3 Daytona, a car that borrows its design from the past and its engine from the current, albeit without any hybrid assistance.

This is surely where Lewis Hamilton’s dream for an F44 fits into place. Limited production run, manual gearbox, styling inspired by the F40 and a price tag well north of £2m or even £3m. I have little doubt it would sell very well indeed, just as Gordon Murray’s GMA T.50 did when it sold out in 2020 – a £2.8m car available exclusively with a manual gearbox and whose maker doesn’t deem it necessary to state performance figures, since the driving experience speaks for itself.

GMA’s follow-up act, the less powerful T.33 pictured below, was initially available with a choice of manual or automatic gearboxes, but the latter was soon dropped due to a lack of interest. Again, buyers of such cars want experiences, not performance.

Back to Northern Italy, and Pagani has a manual gearbox option for its latest car, the Utopia. So too does the Aston Martin Valour (£1m, sold out in two weeks) and the Koenigsegg CC850, which features a brain-scrambling nine-speed transmission that can act as both a semi-automatic and a proper stick-shift manual, with six simulated gears to shift through with a clutch pedal.

Why? Because it gives the driver something to do. It makes them feel connected to their multi-million-pound purchase in a way a point-and-squirt EV never could.

On the theme of simulated gear changes, there’s the brilliantly bonkers Hyundai Ioniq 5 N, an electric car with an augmented semi-automatic ‘box. Ford and Toyota are also both working on simulated manuals for EVs.

Back in the restomod world you have UK-based Electrogenic, a company that electrifies classic cars but says some customers enjoy retaining the manual gearbox, simply because it makes the experience more engaging; more fun.

Experience-as-a-luxury is booming elsewhere in the car industry too. Brands like Rolls-Royce and Bentley are leaning ever further into customisation. The former’s ultra-exclusive Boat Tail, shown below, offers buyers the experience of embarking on a multi-year journey to commission a unique car, while the latter’s Batur showed how the foundation of a series-production car, the Continental GT, can be turned into a bespoke vehicle selling for many times the price.

Similarly, Ferrari has its Tailor Made department for handling bespoke orders, and occasionally lets its most loyal customers design a unique car of their own. McLaren has MSO, its special operations department that is busy rebuilding, upgrading and personalising examples of the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren.

Aston Martin has the brilliantly-named Q, which I recently experienced when configuring a Valhalla, and Maserati has its new Fuoriserie department for handling bespoke orders. Even Porsche, a relative mainstreamer in this company, has its famous PTS, or Paint To Sample, service for blending the perfect hue.

So yes, Lewis is most definitely on to something. Ferrari should make his F44 dream into reality. It should have a manual gearbox, a highly-customisable interior with beautiful, tactile switchgear instead of touch-sensitive haptics, and no hybrid system. It’ll evoke the F40 without being a pastiche and it’ll sell out before we commoners even catch a glimpse of it.