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Brrmmmmmmm
Forbes, Dec 16, 1996 v158 n14 p276(4)
Author: Banks, Howard
Did you lust for a sports car when you were young, but it is only now that you can afford one? Do we have a deal for you!
THE LAST FEW MONTHS have witnessed an explosion in sports car sales worldwide, but especially in the U.S., as the baby boom generation emerges from the heaviest of its big commitments--mortgages and college for the children.
That opens, for the more affluent among them, a window of opportunity to have fun between now and the old folks' home. Karl-Heinz Kalbsell, who is in charge of worldwide marketing for BMW, has a name for this group of consumers. "Reentrants" he calls them. These are people who coveted sports cars as kids but couldn't afford them, though they can now. "We are aiming at the car buyers who want to have fun while they are driving," says Kalbsell.
Which means that the new sports cars have to remind them of the sports cars they lusted for when they were callow youths. Regard the six top-of-the-line European sports cars pictured on these pages. All hark back in some way to the classic sports cars of the 1950s.
The new Jaguar XK8 design deliberately evokes the Le Mans-winning D-type racers and their offspring, the Jag E-type--a design that was so far ahead of others in the 1960s that an example is now part of the collection at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Jaguar Marketing Director Philip Cazaly says the XK8 is currently selling at a rate of around 12,000 cars a year worldwide, the best ever for a Jag sports car.
The Aston Martin DB-7 Volante is instantly recognizable as the grandson of the delectable DB-3s that used to be raced in the 1960s. Like all Astons of the past, the DB-7 is assembled entirely by hand, with the paint rubbed down as many times as it takes to get it perfect. Saved from liquidation by Ford Motor Co. in 1987, Aston Martin will produce 700 cars this year.
The Porsche Boxter is a modernized replica of the Porsche 550 Speedster of the 1950s that Jimmy Dean drove. The new version has a fancy water-cooled, 6-cylinder, horizontally opposed Boxer engine to replace the old Volkswagen-derived air-cooled engine.
And the BMW Z3 has louvered side vents, a straight lift from the classic BMW 507 that was in production in the 1960s.
See the pair of humps on the hood of the Mercedes SLK? They serve no functional purpose, but come straight from the design of the Mercedes 300SLR racers that once upon a time won Le Mans and the Mille Miglia.
But even though the look is almost the same, there are myriad concessions in the new sports cars, concessions to the enhanced girth and stiffer limbs that have afflicted the potential buyers as they have aged. The new cars are much roomier and more luxurious than the cars they hark back to, and drive much more easily. The new Ferrari 550 Maranello has the engine in the front, just like Ferrari's 1960s classic 250 GTO. Aside from nostalgia, putting the engine in front makes the Maranello more manageable than a mid-engined, race-track-inspired design like that of the Testarossa it replaces.
All these cars have automatic gearboxes available, if not fitted as standard. Computerized traction control (as well as an antiskid braking system) is fitted to all of the examples of the new generation of sports cars we have picked bar one, the Aston DB-7. Aston Martin's surveys suggest that potential customers want "to drive" this car in the old-fashioned sense.
Each of these cars--even Porsche's Boxster--will take luggage for two for at least a weekend. And bring your golf clubs. Jaguar says the XK8 can take two sets.
Automatic hoods or hard tops are now the order of the day. Mercedes' SLK has a hard top that at the push of a button automatically retracts under the trunk lid, which opens backward to let it in. The whole operation takes just 25 seconds. But when it's down, forget the golf bags, since the SLK's retracted top clogs the trunk.
That these new cars exist is a tribute to computer-aided design. Most European sports cars went off the U.S. market after Washington introduced tough rollover rules These new cars all pass those tests handsomely. One SLK brochure even shows the car upside down, supported on the frame around the windshield (it is cunningly reinforced with a 3/4-inch-diameter steel tube) and on the roll bars, which are disguised as head restraints.
Gone are the days when rich people joked of needing three Jags--one to drive, one being fetched from where it broke down yesterday, one in the shop. And car buffs know that Lotus used to stand for Lots of Trouble, Usually Serious. But enthusiasts of yesteryear were masochists who pretended to enjoy spending time under the hood fixing something. Today's sports car buyers just want to put a key in the ignition and drive off. In designing these new sports cars, the makers have allowed for that. These sports cars should be as reliable as any car on the road.
All these cars will do well over 100mph (the Ferrari will exceed 200mph) and pull from zero to 60mph in about half the time it took you to read this sentence. Yet there are no public roads in the U.S. or Europe, even on Germany's autobahn, where people can legally drive these cars flat out.
But people don't buy these cars for maximum performance, says Stephen Bayley, a noted London-based design consultant to the auto industry. "Few people buying one of these cars will ever drive down the Pacific Highway with the wind blowing through their hair, or cross the Alps as the sun is setting," says Bayley. "The point is that for people who spend their lives congealed in traffic, nothing evokes freedom more than a two-seater."