Absurd Carmaker Cash Grabs: From Toy Cars to $2M Watches

Automakers and art

This egg-shaped sculpture, very obviously, is not something that anyone just looking at a photo would associate with Bugatti. Perhaps some sort of bedroom recreation assistant, but not Bugatti. Despite that, it is an immensely expensive item intended to be displayed as art.

It is only if you get closer than any poor person has ever gotten to such works that you’ll begin to notice the Bugatti tie-in. Asprey says the surface of the egg shows Rembrandt Bugatti’s Dancing Elephant, which was originally used on the hood of the Type 41 Royale. Within the shell is “a scene of the Chateau Saint Jean – the iconic home of Bugatti in Molsheim – in front of which is a sterling silver stylized Bugatti Type 41 Royale Esders.” Bugatti, of course, does not list the price in its media materials. You know, if you have to ask...

More to the point, this qualifies not only because of the price, but because all Bugatti had to do was let some people into the factory. Asprey says it 3D-scanned the hood of the Type 41 to ensure the Dancing Elephant was as close to the real deal as possible.

Automakers and alcohol

Booze is a great, fast cash cow for anyone in the game. Williams Martini bought champagne for the F1 grid for ages, for example. You bet that sold a few bottles. Bugatti, again, has gotten in on this. It had some Carbon Champagne made up in a tie-in with its cars.

Tesla has been in the news for this recently as well. Originally, Musk sold a few bottles of whiskey (almost instantly) for hundreds of dollars thanks to a Tesla-logo-shaped decanter. Reportedly, it wasn’t even very good whiskey. Now, the brand is doing it again with GigaBier. Musk wants a hilarious $97 (or 89 euros) for the stuff.

It is, of course, a limited edition brew sold in three 330-ml bottles, all made up to mimic the shape of the Cybertruck. Each also features glow-in-the-dark “Giga” watermark. I suppose we can add this to the now-long list of Cybertruck paraphernalia that has managed to come out before the truck itself.

What happened to all those automaker NFTs?

Personally, this is the most egregious cash grab any automaker has done. Lamborghini sold a one-of-one NFT with the last-ever Aventador. I added a JPG of the NFT above, which is its own joke. Lamborghini pulled some big names into this one. Steve Aoki and artist Krista Kim collaborated on the creation of the NFT, and their designs informed the last Aventador’s spec. While the final car itself isn’t a cash grab, the NFT certainly is.

Acura got in on this as well, selling limited NFTs of the Integra. This was all at the height of NFT popularity, which has since (mercifully) declined. Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath spoke out against them at the time, saying that the brand wouldn’t be making anything of NFTs due to their somewhat dubious environmental drawbacks.

The Little Car Company

$12,000 for a tiny Aston Martin your kids can drive around. That’s what Aston Martin and The Little Car Company cooked up a while back. It’s a neat toy, but the absolutely ridiculous pricing of LCC’s toys is enough to make anyone wonder if maybe someone added a few zeros to the price tag. In LCC’s defense, they are very well-built and absurdly detailed.

But again, the automaker – in this case Aston and Ferrari – had to do very little to get these made. It also isn’t clear who this is for. Any responsible parent, regardless of their net worth, would think handing their kids a $12,000 anything is incredibly stupid, much less a toy car with a top speed of 50 mph, even though it's a Ferrari Testarossa. And why would an adult want to piddle around on something like that when for $12,000, they could buy an entire Mazda Miata that’ll feel just as much like a toy?

Absurdly expensive car-adjacent watches

This one deserves an article all its own (keep an eye out) and a quick caveat. Much like the Little Car Company toys, some of these watches are incredibly well-made. More to the point, they are functional, if not prohibitively expensive in most cases.

The watch that springs (ha) to mind is pictured above, the Ferrari Richard Mille UP-01. The watch runs a hilarious $2 million. That’s Koenigsegg money. While it is incredibly thin, and an incredible feat of watchmaking, all Ferrari did was throw a prancing horse on it. Yes, it is only about as thick as a quarter, but the watch is really a marketing exercise for a brand whose IP is more valuable than the cars it sells. Aside from perhaps some design input, high-end watches are extremely easy ways for brands to profit off their IP. F1 teams do this as well, and drivers are often sporting six-figure watches as part of their contracts.

While these were in no particular order, NFTs were probably some of the worst cash grabs. Most of them require very little effort from automakers and serve just as much as marketing opportunities as they do revenue streams. But hey, if it keeps Lamborghini making cars, I guess...