Seen Furious 7 yet? You should.
Among the film?s hard bodies and the muscled engines, there?s a sexy little number that stands head and haunches above the rest: It?s called the Lykan HyperSport. The car is a $3.4 million beast with a top speed of 240 miles per hour and the face of a raptor. The huge audiences who saw the movie this past weekend won?t soon forget it?even if they?ll likely never see the vehicle in real life.
The Lykan is the first supercar made by a company (W Motors) based in the Middle East (formed in Beirut, with headquarters in Dubai). It?s also among the most expensive production cars ever to go on sale. But it?s not the only land rocket to come out lately that costs more than a million dollars. Far from it.
Over the past decade we?ve seen almost every automaker (that calls itself a true ?luxury? brand, at least) produce a contraption with a seven-digit price tag. Sometimes they get there only by making a one-off with diamond-rimmed headlights and titanium bones, but they get there.
The Lykan HyperSport premiered at the International Dubai Motor Show in 2013. Top speed is 239 mph, with a 0 to 60 sprint time of 2.8 seconds. The car is rumored to have diamond and titanium accents in its headlights. Price: $3.4 million.
The brands make these cars because people buy them. The past few years have seen an explosion of royals and tycoons around the globe who buy entire fleets of Aston Martins and Lamborghinis to support their proclivities. Bloomberg has discovered more than three dozen new billionaires in the world since January alone, and more than 300 since 2012. They buy the cars in Los Angeles, in Doha, in Moscow and S?o Paulo and Shanghai. Some, like hotel tycoon Steve Wynn, buy them to bolster their business interests just as much as their personal life.
For them, it?s not that big a deal.
The Aston Martin One-77 was unveiled in Paris in 2008 as the British automaker?s most expensive offering to date. It has a V12, 750-horsepower engine, and only 77 were made. Price: $1.7 million.
?The fact of the matter is there are a lot of rich people around the world, and I mean super rich?hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars of net worth,? says Jack Nerad, executive market analyst for Kelley Blue Book. ?When you?re talking about these types of people, a million-dollar car isn?t really much of a stretch at all.?
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