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Wheel Trouble [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-02-18

For decades, my go-to indicator of economic imbalance has been overpriced hypercars—things like the Bugatti Veyron, the Ferrari Enzo, the Pagani Huayra, etc. I theorized that when there is a healthy market for cars costing 20X the annual salary of the average citizen, the economy is imbalanced and teetering on the brink of collapse. I even wrote about this predicting the Great Recession in 2008: The Economy on Wheels

The imbalance has been increasing. The picture above was taken in 2017. We were renting an apartment next door to a Silicon Valley tech giant (the rent cost approximately 65% of my monthly take home pay). This was taken from the stairwell of our 3rd-floor walkup. It’s a brand new McClaren 570s, which at the time started at $181000. With options and destination fee they typically ran about $235000. We always knew when the tech giant next door paid out their annual bonuses, because over the next two weeks, transport trucks would show up delivering the new Porsches, McClarens, and the occasional random Lamborghini.

Nowadays those prices seem quaint. Today’s prices for hypercars generally start over $1 million. The Koenigsegg Gemera is designed to be comfortable 4-seater priced at $1.7 million. The Rimac Nevera introduces EV sustainability and performance to the hypercar market at $2.2 million. An Aston Martin Valkyrie Spider starts at an even $4 million. The Bugatti La Voiture Noire will set you back an eye-watering $18.7 million.

A quick Google search listed 24 cars in the us with an MSRP over a million dollars, and over 50 different models world wide. Car makers can’t make them fast enough to keep up with demand. For the folks in that market, those prices aren’t eye-watering; they’re chump change. That’s the point. While the rest of us work longer and longer hours to keep falling slightly farther behind, these guys throw more money away in a week than any dozen of us combined make in a year.

Economically, folks, we’re in deep doo-doo—and that doo-doo’s being run over by some very expensive tires!

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