I'm going to rattle off some names and see how many you recognize. Ready? Apollo, Aspark, Czinger, Dallara, De Tomaso, Delage, Gordon Murray Automotive, McMurtry, Praga, Picasso, Rezvani, Zenvo. How many did you get? One? Maybe two?
Those aren't prescription drugs (talk to your doctor before taking Delage)—every single one of those companies builds a supercar or hypercar in the year of our Lord 2024. You probably have no idea what half of those vehicles even look like or where they’re built. Still, investors are dumping millions into many of these companies in hopes of becoming the next Bugatti.
If only it were that simple.
Hypercars are a relatively new concept. The McLaren F1 is often cited as the first true hypercar, with the late 1990s and 2000s spawning small-time players like Saleen, SSC, and Vector. But it wasn't until 2005 that hypercars as a genre stuck—and soon exploded in popularity.
Bugatti introduced the Veyron in 2005. In Italy, Pagani ramped up production of its then-new Zonda in anticipation of US deliveries. And further north, an upstart Koenigsegg produced its first 30 examples of the 806-horsepower CCX, with plans for a more powerful CC8S already in the works.
Twenty years later, Bugatti, Pagani, and Koenigsegg are considered the forefathers of the modern hypercar industry. They represent the top one percent of one percent. But in recent years, they've faced a new swathe of competition—seemingly from out of nowhere.
It seems every billionaire with some business sense thinks they can be the next Ettore Bugatti. The problem is that so many of these hypercar upstarts follow the same worn-out formula:
- Step 1: Extremely Silly Name
- Step 2: Grand Theft Auto V-Inspired Design
- Step 3: Too Much Power For Public Roads
- Step 4: Multi-Million-Dollar Price Tag
- Step 5: Profit???
Take Delage, for example. The brand's first new vehicle, the D12, is a Frankenstein's monster mashup of hypercar tropes; A central seating position, a Formula 1-inspired design, a yoke steering wheel, and a 1,100-hp hybrid powertrain. That's not to say it isn't cool, but it nails every platitude.
CEO Laurent Tapie refers to himself as the "Refounder" of Delage. The former turn-of-the-century French race car manufacturer was "re-formed" in 2019 as an upstart hypercar brand. Two years ago I spoke to Tapie, fresh off the launch of his radical-looking D12, and he told me one of the major reasons he restarted Delage (with daddy's Adidas money) was in part due to the skyrocketing profits he saw in the industry.
How romantic.
"I read an article about the incredible figures of hypercars, in terms of sales—Pagani and Koenigsegg were already selling ten times what they used to sell 10 years ago, same with Bugatti," Laurent told me. "So I said, 'Okay, the market is there, and maybe I have a chance to make my own car.”
Who can blame him? Supercars and hypercars are a booming business. Last year was one of the most profitable years of all time for many players in the space. Ferrari raked in €5.79 billion in 2023. That's billion with a B. Lamborghini made €723 million off its best year, and brands like Aston Martin, Bugatti, Lotus, and Mercedes-AMG can't keep their latest hypercars in stock. Most of them sell out before the general public even gets to see them.
Billionaires see these numbers and think, "Why not me?" Yet, making a profit takes years if not decades. It's been widely reported that Bugatti lost about $6 million for every Veyron it sold. Only did the company start making money with the Chiron. That profit-up-front mentality limits creativity.
Unless you've really studied up on modern hypercars, so many of them are similar. The Hennessey Venom F5 looks a lot like the Koenigsegg Jesko, which looks a lot like the Lotus Evija, which looks like the SSC Tuatara, the Pininfarina Battista, the Mercedes-AMG Project One... the list goes on.
And the specs, as impressive as they are, are mostly familiar across the board. Some form of forced induction or hybridization yielding 1,000-plus hp. The Mercedes-AMG One has 1,063 hp. The Jesko has 1,280 hp. The Venom F5 has 1,817 hp. And all of them will hit 200 miles per hour. Curb weight or the experiential aspects of driving are rarely mentioned in the marketing materials.
So many of these startups also engage in shady business practices, too. Remember DeLorean? CEO John DeLorean was indicted in 1985 on tax evasion and fraud charges. Vector was the victim of a hostile takeover in 1993. And Hennessey—well, that's a whole different set of issues.
More recently, the born-again De Tomaso brand was at the center of a huge lawsuit. The new owners attempted to break into the supercar space in 2019 with the stunning P72 concept, but one of its former founders filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming fraudulent activities. De Tomaso hasn't delivered a single car since.
"The complaint alleges that this was part of a fraudulent scheme by [majority shareholder] Norman Choi and others to manipulate the company’s value, engage in a series of non-arm’s length transactions, and cash out," attorney John T. Zach of Boies Schiller Flexner LLP told Hagerty in 2023.
Then there's the issue of "vaporware." Anyone with a few hundred thousand dollars to blow will commission a 3D rendering or full-sized clay model that doesn't run or drive. It's usually accompanied by promises of thousands of horsepower and record-breaking speeds, useful tools to trick investors into shelling out cash for a vehicle that may never exist. More often than not, it leads nowhere.
But for every DeLorean and De Tomaso, there's a Czinger.
Kevin Czinger is a Yale graduate and a former Goldman Sachs executive turned entrepreneur. He’s also the CEO of the company that bears his name. He founded Czinger with his son Lukas in 2005. The first 21C prototype rolled off the production line in 2021 and the company delivered its first customer car this year.
At first glance, the 21C is yet another 1,350-hp, $2.8-million eye roll. But there's more to this company than meets the eye. Czinger holds about 700 manufacturing patents, and between Kevin and his son Lukas—Co-Founder and COO—the duo holds 300 patents together. With that, Czinger hopes to revolutionize the auto manufacturing industry as we know it—something we haven't heard much of from the other upstarts.
"We need to leapfrog the countries we've outsourced our manufacturing to and reindustrialize America," he told me during an interview at The Quail in Monterey. "That 100% is what my mission was in starting the company 10 years ago. No one has even taken step one to—from scratch—look at a system and say, 'What happens when we use primarily high-performance computing and machine learning to develop a system that's totally digital for engineering the built world and human-built world?' That's what this is. This is the first step in what will be a massive fundamental revolution."
Kevin also notes that so many of the parts his company produces are used by other hypercars, some of which are merely feet away from the Czinger booth at The Quail.
"It’s kind of like Amazon Web Services. We say to Aston Martin, Bugatti, McLaren, Mercedes-AMG—if you go over to Bugatti, you'll see parts that we've generated, printed, assembled, and shipped to them…. We will be your full machine learning, AI-based engineering, manufacturing arm, distributed way across the planet and we'll own and operate those."
But ultimately, all roads still lead to Bugatti.
Mate Rimac took over as CEO of the newly formed Bugatti-Rimac Group in 2021. Under his watch, we've seen the Rimac Nevera reach production and the new Bugatti Tourbillon fill the Chiron's massive shoes with its ridiculous V-16 engine. And more recently, a hardcore Nevera R debuted at The Quail in Monterey.
But Mate Rimac was Kevin Czinger before Czinger—Laurent Tapie before Delage. The Rimac company was founded in 2009. It built its first electric hypercar, the Concept_One, in 2011. Thirteen years later—even now as CEO of one of the preeminent hypercar brands—Mate Rimac’s entrepreneurial spirit is still alive and well, a core tenet of his identity as an executive.
"[Rimac] customers are mostly entrepreneurs,” he tells me, as we sit and chat at The Quail near his newly debuted Nevera R. "They love this entrepreneurial story of me starting in a garage building this company."
But with so many unrecognizable brands now saturing the space with copy-and-paste jobs, that innovation is dwindling. Supercars and hypercars are starting to feel less special. The dozen names I mentioned earlier only represent a small sample of a laundry list of brands you’ve probably never heard of. And there are certainly more to come.
Thankfully, success stories like Czinger and Rimac keep me hopeful. Being an innovator is what drives this segment forward, and CEOs like Kevin Czinger and Mate Rimac fit that definition.
"We don't do normal," Mate says. "We always want to push the boundaries."
