Bugatti & Lamborghini at Monterey Car Week: How luxury brands target ultra-rich

Yahoo Finance Senior Autos Reporter Pras Subramanian previews Monterey Car Week 2026, highlighting projected auction totals approaching $500 million, major public debuts from luxury brands like Bugatti and Lamborghini, and how automakers are targeting ultra-high-net-worth consumers. Video Transcript 00:00 Pras You know, the classic car market is had been booming in recent years, right? From I guess early mid mid teens to the 20s in and during pandemic and then there was a little bit of a cool down because values were skyrocketing so much. So Hagerty found that last year they tabulated all the the big auctions that happened around Monterey Car Week and it was about around $432 million. Uh, a bit of a downbeat year, uh considering sort of the recent sort of uh auction values. But this year, they project nearly 500 million that could be crossed across all the three different major auctions here. Uh, and I mean the most since 2022, right? So I spoke to McKeel Hagerty, uh gave a statement here. He's talking about how live auction sales this year are up 28% in the last 12 months. This used to be a much more staid event, lot of older pre-war cars. And then the automakers themselves, especially the luxury brands sort of coming out and noticing this is a good place to sort of reveal new cars, right? 00:59 Pras That's sort of what they see and say as as a way to kind of get a lot of attention. You got a lot of buzz, a lot of high network people here and it makes a lot of sense to do that. We have a lot of CEOs walking around, a lot of car reviews, a lot of car reveals, sorry. Uh, especially at the Quail event on Friday. A couple ones I'm looking forward to. Lamborghini's going to have a new Revuelto on, it's probably be the SV which is a super Veloce version, so a more higher performance, hardcore version. Bugatti of course, uh, synonymous, synonymous with with Monterey, has a has a car called the Destriate. That's a basically a Bolide track car that they've stripped away the aero bits to make it more slip slippery. Uh, and and of course there's Ferrari and McLaren and those guys will all be there, uh, putting out their their latest version. But there's the Bugatti there. I think it's just looks really, really interesting. They showed it online, but this is the first public debut, uh, will happen this week. 02:00 Speaker B There's going to be a lot of auto CEOs at this show, right? Kind of walking around, Pras. Um, for you, what in your opinion, as someone who's who's hit this show a lot, what do you think right now the biggest questions are for the luxury auto makers? 02:21 Pras McKeel Hagerty talked about how stocks are at all-time highs and he expects, you know, good high bidding for these cars, right? So that lends us to sort of talk about what are these guys as CEOs talking about when it comes to the ultra high net worth consumer, right? I think we'll hear a lot more about the K-shaped economy because I think there's so much, you know, the question is how much juice is left there with the luxury consumer, that ultra high network people. We were hearing about how that that subset, that cohort of people has been growing crazily. Uh are automakers gonna keep trying to reach them? Are they gonna come out with more and more exclusive cars? I think we're sort of seeing that there with with the Ferraris and McLarens and and Bugattis of the world, uh putting off one-off, higher end pieces, higher end cars that they they can kind of trickle down, make a halo effect and then they're going to be sort of using those high net worth people as a way to bridge more uh consumers into their into their brands. I think there's gonna be a lot of talk about, can you keep milking that high net worth consumer? View Comments