For example, Rolls Royce Phantoms start at $340,000 and can go as close as $500,000. Rolls Royce sold 1000 cars in 2007. The cheapest Rolls Royce car cost $340,000 but they still managed to sell 1000 of them. The SLR and Maybach are the only cars Benz makes even remotely in Rolls’ price range. Yet even with combined sales, they’re not even a dismal 300 units. Bugatti sells $1.3 million Veyron Super car has sold 220 units. That’s almost as many sales as the Maybach and SLR combined. The sad part of that is that the Veyron costs 3 times as much as any of those cars. You could buy the most expensive Maybach and the most expensive McLaren SLR and still have money left over to buy a Murcielago LP640 for the price of a Veyron, but Buggati managed to sell almost as many units as Mercedes’ most prestigious vehicles with a car costing 3 times plus.
Let’s not even throw Ferrari, Lamborghini or Bentley into the hat. Ferrari starts at $280,000 with the F430, Lamborghini starts at $260,000 with the Gallardo, and Bentley starts at $190,000 with the Continental GT. All of those automakers have $1 million cars with the exception of Bentley, which makes a half million dollar car. Ferrari sold more than 6,000 cars in 2007. Lamborghini sold 2,400 cars in 2007, and Bentley sold more than 10,000 cars in 2007. The 290 cars that Mercedes Benz sold in its super-luxury category aren’t even statistically significant compared to its competitors. For Mercedes to be statistically significant, it would have to sell at least 5% of what its competitors in a similar category do. Because Mercedes Benz can’t do that, the cars they make that are comparable aren’t even worth discussing because the buying population doesn’t pay attention to them and they aren’t statistically significant.
