Dreams on wheels

There was a time when just buying a luxury car would be considered a style statement. If you bought a Rolls-Royce, you had arrived in life. But today, driving these wheels of luxury goes beyond the brand name. It’s not about the style anymore, it’s about personalising this piece of luxury to suit one’s personal choices, preferences and comfort. Realising the need for this exclusivity, many customisation firms have popped up, willing to tailor a car to a customer’s exact specifications. The scope for profit-making in this segment is tremendous and carmakers are now offering custom jobs in-house.

Opulent Choices
On a basic level, BMW has its ‘Individual’ programme, Mercedes-Benz has ‘designo’, Aston Martin’s got the ‘Q’ division and Lamborghini offers the ‘Ad Personam’ option for its cars. All of these let the customer choose from a palette of exclusive paint shades, different trim finishes, unique alloy designs, colour of the leather and materials.
If you move further up the ladder, luxury gets a whole new meaning. Stephen Hung, chairman of the Louis XIII Holdings Ltd, plans to open a luxury strip in Macau, including a hotel that will be home to the most expensive suite in the world. To serve his elite clientele, he recently placed an order for the largest fleet of Rolls-Royce Phantoms, creating a historic record. He ordered a total of 30 extended-wheelbase cars—two of those being the most expensive Phantoms ever commissioned. These two cars come with bespoke touches like dashboard clocks designed by Graff (luxury watches)  and a dose of gold plating. Rolls-Royce pocketed a cool US$ 20 million (`121.6 crore) for the deal.

Bespoke to You
All these bespoke divisions will try to incorporate just about every single thing you’d want in your car, as long as you’re being rational. Rolls-Royce once had a customer who wanted the wood from a tree on his estate to be used in his car’s interior. There are also demands for exquisite picnic sets, replete with fine cutlery, family crests embroidered into the seats and animal skin to be used as upholstery. To make your car even more exclusive, Rolls-Royce will also reserve certain hues to make sure they’re never seen on another R-R again.

Ferrari also offers a tailor-made programme to its customers, which like the others lets them hand-pick the paint scheme, interior trim, liveries and so on. However, Ferrari takes things up a notch with its Special Projects division. For some buyers, just a unique colour or material aren’t exclusive enough. They want their cars to look entirely different from what’s on offer to the rest of the world. To cater to this particular section, Ferrari has the one-off department.

Luxe that’s Out-of-the-Box
As of now, there isn’t a new V12-engine open-top Ferrari that you can simply buy off the shelf. One customer didn’t like that, so he ordered Ferrari to chop the roof off its F12berlinetta supercar. The result was the F12 TRS, a one-of-a-kind roadster that’s thought to have cost the owner around US$ 4.2 million (`25.5 crore), making it at least thrice as expensive as the base car. But even this level of customisation isn’t quite good enough for some.
To understand this, you need to take a look at the McLaren X-1. The McLaren Special Operations (MSO) division accepted a request from a McLaren loyalist for a car that was based on the MP4-12C sports car, but had a completely bespoke bodyshell. Inspiration was to be taken from different walks of life: from classics like the Facel Vega and Mercedes-Benz 540K, various examples of architecture from the Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao, a Jaeger-LeCoultre art deco clock, an Airstream trailer, a Thomas Mann Montblanc pen, a grand piano and an eggplant. Yes, a vegetable. There was also a black-and-white photo of British actress Audrey Hepburn.

Within 18 months, the design had been signed off, and in just two and a half years’ time, the car was developed, tested and ready to be handed over to its owner. An MP4-12C cost US$ 285,000 (`1.75 crore)  and since this was a rather extensive overhaul, sources state that it cost about US$ 7 million (`42.5 crore). It seems that ‘expensive’ just doesn’t cut it any more. To be truly luxurious, a car has to be the only one-of-its-kind in the world.