Lamborghini, like many other automakers, has recently seen the effects of the most simple equation in car manufacturing: that making SUVs skyrockets sales, because people buzz toward them like bugs to lightbulbs. But, Lamborghini’s now having to remind itself, it doesn’t want sales to skyrocket too much.
With its new 650-horsepower, twin-turbocharged V8 Urus SUV maxing out sales so far in 2019, Automotive News Europe reports that Lamborghini CEO Stefano Domenicali said the carmaker expects to sell more than 8,000 vehicles this year. That’s creeping ever closer to the brink of Lamborghini’s comfort zone, since ultra-luxury automakers are all about exclusivity.
Here’s an excerpt from the Automotive News story, which published around the time Lamborghini’s record half-year sales were announced last week:
“We must not go on growing forever. We now have to consolidate these results and preserve exclusivity,” Domenicali said at an event on Tuesday for the inauguration of the new paint shop inside its Sant’Agata Bolognese plant in Italy.
The 2019 sales level is “the right dimension of our company with our current product portfolio,” Domenicali said.
Domenicali, Automotive News wrote, said an increase to 10,000 vehicles sold per year would be possible “only with the addition of a fourth model,” but that it would have to be discussed with shareholders first. While 10,000 doesn’t seem like a lot of vehicles sold, it is for a company like Lamborghini—McLaren, for example, sold just 3,340 vehicles in 2017 and 4,806 in 2018.
All of this talk came after Lamborghini announced last week that it had sold 4,553 vehicles through the first six months of the year, covering Jan. 1 through June 30. It sold a little more than half of that number, 2,327, through the first six months of 2018, before it began deliveries for the Urus SUV that’s made up nearly 60 percent of its model sales so far this year. The company’s even selling less of its other two supercars, the Huracan and Aventador, than it did in 2018, but said it still hit a “new half-year sales record” this year.
It seems almost counterintuitive to introduce a vehicle targeting a booming segment of the market and turn right around to say that sales can’t boom too much, but exclusivity is the brand at companies like Lamborghini. If sales climb too much and its badge becomes a regular sight on the streets, be it on the Urus or a more traditional supercar, it loses some of its mystique among passerby.
And that, of course, would be almost as bad as everyone finding out its cars are really Volkswagens or something. How horrifying.