The Cars Millionaires of the Future Will Drive
Every celebrity and millionaire has them – fancy cars that cost as much as your house. From the iconic Lamborghini to the record-breaking Koenigsegg, these flashy sports cars are a staple in the garage of the rich and famous. With the recent push to go green though, what will happen to the dream of these luxurious, gas guzzling stallions? The Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt are nice and reliable, but they don’t have the glitz and the glam that a multi-million dollar budget looks for. Tesla’s Model S and X are going to cost a lot more and have the luxuriousness a millionaire looks for, but let’s explore some of the interesting options.
Coming up first is the kind of car that you would find in a collector’s garage in a mountain range somewhere. Beginning production all the way back in 2006, touting the title of first fully electric sports car to enter the market, is the Venturi Fétish. The 300hp motor is alright and the 340km range is a little disappointing, but the Fétish exhibits the European styling that millionaires love, just like Febergé eggs and Victorian-style furniture. The very limited run of this car has the price tag up to $531,000 CAD, which is absolutely astonishing when you begin to factor in the added value of being a collector’s item.
Next is the much more recent Rimac Concept_One, and it’s high performance model, the Concept_S. Designed by Rimac, a Croatian manufacturer dedicated to making electric supercars, the Concept_One follows the same boutique trend as many other European brands like Koenigsegg and Hennessey. This means that each car is made by hand, rather than machine, and the production run is even more limited than the Venturi Fétish with only eight being made, costing $1.25 million CAD each. This being said, its capabilities are much more impressive than the Fétish. Though still only at a simple 350km for range, the Concept_One sparks up 1224hp, and holds a 0-100km time of 2.5 seconds. The car is so impressive that it even received praise from the three hosts of The Grand Tour, despite Richard Hammond crashing in one.
In a more “affordable” bracket is Tesla’s new Roadster, set to be released in 2020. Roadsters improve on our previous cars in every regard, with a 2.1 second 0-100km time and a 1000km range. The range depends on multiple factors though, like how aggressive of a driver you are and how many accessories you are using, so a safe, conservative number will sit around 800km. The price tag rivals the other cars on the list as it comes in at only $257,000, under half of the Fétish. If you don’t want to wait through the production schedule that has been plaguing the recent Model 3, you can look into the “Founders Series”, or the first production run of the Roadster. Skipping the line is going to bump the price up to $322,000 though, with only a possible unique badging and fully loaded interior to show for it. Founders Series or not, buying a Roadster will let you brag about owning the first model of car to ever be shot in to space.
Next we have the marriage of the modern and the future in the form of Lamborghini’s Terzo Millennio, or “Third Millenium”. While I’m kind of breaking the rules with this car, as it doesn’t have a release date or price as of yet, I felt the need to include this because it’s the embodiment of a rich person’s car. Of course it’s going to be unbelievably high performance; it’s a Lamborghini. What sets it apart though, is how much it lives up to the name, “third millennium”. On top of the record-breaking supercar engineering, this Michigan Institute of Technology (MIT) partnered masterpiece can heal itself from minor scrapes and cracks. The carbon fiber body is planned to maintain a “health monitoring system” that will detect any structure compromising issues and repair them using nanotechnology. The space-agedness continues on with the battery, and how Lamborghini plans to incorporate the energy storage into the actual body panels of the car. It’s pretty much the last step before we have flying cars.
Finally, we have a car that literally embodies the mindset of a multi-millionaire – maybe even a billionaire. Japanese supercar maker Aspark took sensibility and threw it in the trash alongside practicality and created the Owl(warning: PDF link). At only 150km on a charge, the Owl is pretty much the “show off your money and laugh” kind of car. Don’t get me wrong, it was modeled by pure passion to create something unique, but the marketing model for this car is pretty much to ridicule other cars. It’s literally modelled so it has a rear design with “taillights that appear to smile at drivers as it speeds past”. The performance of the car was oriented to capitalize on acceleration, as Aspark recognized that most of the world doesn’t allow for cars to go faster than 100km/h legally. This resulted in an official 0-100km/h time of 2 seconds, with an unofficial time of 1.9 as seen in a recent video. Much like the Terzo Millennio, Aspark’s Owl is like owning a solid gold jet; completely unnecessary, unbelievably expensive, and everyone in the world is going to admire you for it. It’s almost as if Aspark ditched carbon fiber to make the car out of bragging rights.
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