Automobile Lister
For some, a high sticker price is part of the appeal of a car – not a drawback. Value is often as much perceived a it is real, and there is a privileged generation of people for whom price is no object, and would in fact prefer to pay more, to feel they are getting something that is top quality. Hong Kong luxury automobile dealers have found a host of challengers for the creme de la creme dollar in unique and customised cars – here we look at some of the most extravagant, including the features that your mid-sized runabout is missing out on.
With prices starting at around $300,000, it is easy to wonder who it is that actually creates a market for these cars to be built. In fact, the models that we explore below have quite healthy sales through Hong Kong luxury car dealers. Bentley’s sales and marketing director, Stuart McCullough, says that ” Competition is getting tougher … If you look at the kind of wealth these people have, the car is not that big a deal. It’s not that big a dent on their net worth”.
A great example of this is a customer McCullough had who had changed their mind about the color of the car they wanted. The man contacted the dealer to see if it was too late to change the order, and was told that unfortunately it was. He immediately asked to have another duplicate vehicle ordered in his chosen color … doubling the cost, but getting him the precise product he desired.
Top notch customers can even have complex factory modification s done at their request. For example, the luxury car dealer in Hong Kong that sold Sir Michael Kadoorie (Chairman of Hong Kong and Shanghai hotels) his Rolls Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe moved the two batteries underneath the floor of the trunk, so that there was more room for luggage. The Hong Kong luxury automobile dealer even had the CEO of Rolls Royce deliver the keys personally to Sir Michael … but that is understandable when you consider that he bought 14 of the up-to-$400,000 vehicles a couple of months before.
When a person buys a Ferrari from a Hong Kong luxury car dealer, around $20,000 to $50,000 worth of personalization options are typically ordered with the car. However, it is not only these options, bells and whistles that are important to ultra-high earners, and Hong Kong luxury car dealers understand this. They are now trying to focus on the fundamentals of great customer service for their super-rich clients, including putting real people on the ends of phone lines, allowing front line employees to make decisions rather than having customers wait for a response, and problem resolution policies that favour the customer.
Some of the cars that warrant this kind of service include the Bugatti Veyron, the only production car with over 1000 horsepower. It has a W16 engine – two V8s alongside each other, and costs around $1.4 million. The Mercedes Maybach 62S was one of the first to break the $300,000 barrier, and will now cost you over $400,000. This Mercedes auto has a turbocharged V12, and your Hong Kong luxury car dealer can arrange upgraded upholstery for you, including color contrasting piping, carbon fiber trim, paints that are exclusively mixed, and a choice of woods for the dash and console.
The Mercedes Benz SLR MCLaren is another Mercedes auto that make the list of the most expensive cars in Hong Kong. It has a hair-raising 650 horsepower, and purchasing this Mercedes Benz car also gets you an SLR-club membership, at a high-tech test track in the south of France, so you can really see what all those horses can do.
Thursday, and we arrive at the Westgate Mall in time for lunch. (It takes a while to register – what with the heat beating outside in an iris blue sky – that the mall is in festive mode: trees twinkle at every corner, scarlet nylon swags along the entire length of every balcony, fairy lights dangle from truly dizzy heights). A bit of a united nations sort of place, as usual the Artcaffé is packed with all sorts – scoffing away, chatting & joking, flirting & admonishing, wheeling and dealing, mobiles ringing, laptops vying for space amongst cutlery and glasses on tables. The interior is cool and dim, sparkling with ‘brasserie-chic’, but we choose a table on the terrace overlooking the street, beneath vast umbrellas, where the music is subdued. I gaze out into the buzzing sunlight and think about my daughters, the younger of whom is twenty-two today. We try to phone but as usual she does not pick up.
Nairobi being the place to get things done and pick things up, one’s list of jobs may have grown over many days, even weeks, to become extensive and diverse. It’s wise, therefore, before launching into the traffic, to make a plan. We duly consult today’s list of jobs, finding that as well as the bank, Safari.com, Nakumatt and the pharmacy, we need to pay a visit to Kapu Wazir, mechanics and purveyors of automobile parts. I’m quite pleased. There is something about driving across town, deep into the maze of unmade roads (often with kerbstones abutting packed red earth – no pavements) many with Asian names, the muddle of warehouses with rundown fronts (through which one may catch a glimpse of state-of-the art-machinery), interspersed with swanky showrooms displaying the latest in Land Rover, Mitsubishi, Toyota, Suzuki: trucks with massive wheels and dust-caked windscreens, parked perilously alongside high-end saloon cars. We pass an elderly gentleman in embroidered fez and immaculate white robe, leaving his brand new Mercedes (perhaps paying a visit, unannounced, to his business premises) and trailed by a little princess of a girl not more than three years old, exquisitely got up in bejewelled fuschia silk, her birdlike arms stacked to the elbow with gold bangles. “Top drawer!” says David, admiringly.
There is also something in the meeting of smells – heat and grease and chemicals, and in the hive of industriousness, with everyone cheerfully engaged (for Africans often seem to possess a keen aptitude for taking cars to bits and putting them together again), the never-missing-a-trick overseeing of the Indian proprietors in the background, polite and efficient customer service in the true & sensible sense of that term. Here, even the smallest requirement (in our case, just a few hundred shillings worth of spare lamps for the vehicle) can be met, and that peculiar blend of chaos and languor (some call it malaise) is conspicuous by its absence.
After that, its westward bound to look at the Muthaiga mini-market, quite close to the famous Muthaiga Club of Happy Valley renown, blah blah – though judging by the flash vehicles number-plated in red, the place is now patronised by NGOs and UN wives – indeed we spot a few of them in designer frocks and shades, indulging their offspring in the pizzeria, where a dozen waiters die of boredom as they wait about for lunchtime trade.
We are staying in a flat kindly lent by a friend who has gone up-country on safari. It is situated on the first floor of a small original block in the centre of the city close to the arboretum, which was set up in colonial times and planted with rare specimen trees from all over the Pacific. (We walk through it, but sadly it has somewhat gone down in the world). I can’t work out why this flat feels so familiar until it dawns on me that the leafy views through crittal windows, parquet floors and art deco style door furniture remind me of the 1930s maisonette where I lived in north London as a child: and at night, when lights from surrounding modern apartment blocks shine through the trees, bamboo & palms and cars come & go through security gates, it reminds me of where I lived, not far from the Bois de Boulogne, in Paris in the 1970s.
The next afternoon, we raid the bookshelves and discover a treasure trove of ‘old Africa’ books – early pioneers and settlers, colonialism, wildlife, hunting and safari – including a parchment coloured copy of something called, ‘Colony and Protectorate of Kenya: The Origins and Growth of Mau Mau: An Historical Survey’. This is a Mr Corfield’s report, on behalf of the government of the day, on the origins and growth of Mau Mau. My avid friend devours it over the course of the late afternoon and evening, following me around and imparting large portions of it to me as I lay the table, prepare the food, cook the supper, set it down on the table, eat, clear away, and so on. It is riveting, if harrowing, listening. I resolve to read some modern African history.
On Saturday, I’m woken by the caretakers’ cockerel crowing at dawn, can’t get back to sleep and decide to make coffee. The milk is in the frig outside on the terrazzo landing, which means unlocking of bolts & padlocks. Outside on the staircase, the scents of red earth, (which seems to stain the very building, almost like Marrakech) and vegetation, compounded by a drumming sudden rain, rise up to meet me: and the clinks from a kitchen, an infant’s cry, a tinny radio, the distant hum of traffic reach me. Kate does not come in today, so we can make our own breakfast and enjoy it on the balcony, amid the red-billed fire finches and the red-cheeked cordon bleu birds tweeting and clowning for seed. It’s so soothing & reassuring here, and there is so much nagging away to be read; we decide to stay for one more day.
At lunchtime, we need to eat so drive out to Westlands again, where we find the shopping mall in a very different ‘Saturday mode’. All the parents of teenage children in Nairobi must have dumped them there for the afternoon – every level is seething with adolescents engaged in showing out and showing off their labels. The rooftop parking lot is glittering with expensive cars, and every café and restaurant packed: it’s the start of the Christmas holiday and the mood is contagious, everyone seems relaxed, including me. I find a great bookshop, hitherto overlooked, called Savani’s – and over-indulge, but only one is non-fiction.
