But what if I want a faster horse?

> Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches

For street usage, I think those cars are popular because they’re beautiful more than because they’re fast (or because enthusiasts like them).

My utterly soulless Lexus will drive more than fast enough to get me in serious trouble. No one will look at it and feel stirred by its beauty, whereas the typical Ferrari or Porsche coupe will look at least appealing to most and beautiful to many, even those who can’t tell the three marques apart or even unaided recall the name Lamborghini.

I would say they're popular because they are expensive. It's bragging rights, conspicuous consumption…

If they were cheap, I might have one. As is, I never will.

That doesn’t explain why japanese manufacturers who used to make sports cars in the 90s don’t anymore.

It’s a mixture of enthusiasm and conspicuous consumption. Most enthusiasts love 90s japanese cars, but the average person sees an old mazda and recoils.

But put an old ferrari in front of anyone and they have a completely different reaction.

But people desire them as a conspicuous symbol because some people decades ago were really into fast cars and picked those brands as the best of the best. It was the true enthusiasts that promoted them and then other people copied them because they wanted to be in the same "gang" and over time that evolved into a status symbol, far removed from the original one. But it did start with a small group of true fans.

> No one will look at it and feel stirred by its beauty

Except for the Toyota nerds who will want to come talk to you about the LFA. Ask me how I know!

But a large portion of their beauty is reflective. The Countach was seen as a very ugly car by many when it was released. But it was lust-worthy for its performance. That lust-worthiness over time transformed the car's image, and now it's seen as iconic.

Would someone really describe the LFA as "utterly soulless"?

If it was just expense, then Koenigsegg would be a household name. Most enthusiasts will know them, but the average person won't. There's something more that leads culture in such a way to uphold a particular brand.

Miata, BRZ, Nissan Z, and GT-R? Toyota's GR86 is BRZ derived but still counts, though their Supra is a BMW. Honda's closest thing is the Civic Type R, but they're bringing back the Prelude soon. Mitsubishi are the odd one out, all they have is an SUV recycling the Eclipse's name.

There's no million dollar Japanese supercars competing against Lamborghinis and McLarens, but I wouldn't say they stopped making sports cars.

It's funny, really.

My girlfriend thinks my cheap modern shitbox is more expensive than my old 90's 4x4 truck.

I agree, and I feel the beauty oftentimes comes from the intrinsic love evident in the machine. Looking at a Ferrari it's evident Enzo had a passion for autos. This can also cross boundaries (eating at fine dining restaurants, fine art gallery layouts, etc.) and is probably discernible in MOST things people put out.

Are you saying nobody will recognize old NSX as something special? R34?

Tbf I don’t think the parent meant all Lexuses (Lexes? Lexi?) are soulless, just theirs. But the brand has its fans.

> There's no million dollar Japanese supercars competing against Lamborghinis and McLarens

Well there was the NSX

I get where you're coming from, but describing the fastest production FWD car as the "closest thing" is really funny

And professional racing.

Really great, succinct way to make this point. Here's an NGRAM of mentions of these brands in the English Fiction corpus, 1860-2025 -- Ferrari dominates until ~1970, when Porsche gains dominance. Obviously, Koenigsegg is barely on the graph at all.

P.S. I think it's telling that Porsche wasn't mentioned almost at all in English until the mid 1950s, given their role in the war!

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Ferrari%2CLamb...

Don't they make like 5 of those, and for absurdly high prices?

Ferraris, Porsches and similar are somewhat attainable, which, I think, helps with their being symbols, since most people have already actually seen them and know they're real. A Koenigsegg is as good as a story. Hell, I live in Paris and I've never actually seen one. Porches and Ferraris? They're seemingly everywhere.

Yeah I mean dedicated sports car models, rather than sportified versions of existing models

Indeed, Andrew Tate's tagline when someone criticised him was "I drive a Bugatti and you don't".

Ferrari and Lamborghini predate Koenigsegg by a generation so my guess is it's about the history.

I guess the term would be "conspicuous consumption".

As to why Koenigsegg doesn't get the rep, I'll take the outside opinion that it's because their name is too inaccessible whereas "Bugatti" slips easily into rap lyrics.

A lot of Veblen goods are kinda "unpleasant but striking". I mean just look at recent BMW design.

An NSX stands out, but anyone who doesn’t know what it is would just think it’s a ferrari.

GTRs absolutely do not stand out. They look like your your average sedan.

Stylish mid-engine cars like the NSX look exotic because they remind people of Ferraris and Lamborghinis.

The average person who doesn't know much about cars will think a second generation MR2 is more exotic than it is. Toyota probably wouldn't make their top three brand guesses. The R34 GT-R will thrill every car enthusiast (and probably everyone who had a Playstation around the turn of the millennium), but most people won't give it a second look.

It’s no Supra, but the FRS is a sporty little car that was marketed in a fairly affordable range. It’s also basically a BRZ. It’s a little sad that’s no longer an option.

The WRX has a turbocharged Boxer engine, manual gearbox or optional CVT, and all-wheel drive. It’s a sedan, but it does a 13.9 second quarter mile stock off the showroom floor. That’s not bad.

I'm not sure what it's supposed to be telling about, but it's probably not about their involvement in the war, which was hardly out of line for any german engineering company at the time. Ferdinand Porsche was arrested for war crimes, but never tried (which IS telling in its own way). Rather, the NGRAM just traces the rise of the company as it's known today:

Up until about 1948, Porsche was a pure development contractor mostly for the government. They only started manufacturing cars under their own brand in the early 50s (a few 356 built basically in a shed notwithstanding) after Ferry Porsche had taken over, and with the introduction of the 911 began a meteoric rise as a volume manufacturer for international markets.

Honest question: are you not a "car guy/girl"? Lexus people absolutely love Lexuses. I recently sold mine (needed something larger after having another kid) and I miss it every day.

Not for the enthusiasts. My neighbor has a $120k Porsche and a $20k Porsche and appears to adore them both

I am ~98th percentile car guy. I own two classic Mustangs, one stock, one restomodded by me, and have had a variety of interesting daily drivers over the decades, including dailying an 80s Alfa Spider year-round including 4 winters in Boston.

It’s comfortable, safe, and dead-nuts reliable, but no one gives a shit about or even notices my hybrid RX450h.

Well, some people. My friend with a Lexus just has a base model RX 350 because she couldn’t find a RAV4 in stock and her buying criteria were basically “crossover built by Toyota”.

> Would someone really describe the LFA as "utterly soulless"?

When it came out the LFA was widely lampooned by the car media for being too "soft", not fast enough, and generally lacking spirit and individuality. It's not pretty much recognized in hindsight that it's one of the single greatest cars ever made, and everybody who regularly buys/drives supercars regrets not buying one when they were still being produced.

Weirdly, many people realized this when it was new, that the LFA was actually excellent, but like anything else cars go through different hype cycles where media organizations and insiders focus on different parameters for what they think makes something good, and the LFA came out during a hype cycle that was focused on raw speed, as it was released around the time that "hypercars" were gaining steam as a concept.

Personally, having driven an LFA one time, I quite literally have regular dreams about the memory, and I wish that I owned one. It's on my bucket list.

> It’s no Supra, but the FRS is a sporty little car that was marketed in a fairly affordable range. It’s also basically a BRZ. It’s a little sad that’s no longer an option.

The FRS/BRZ/GR86 are identical cars mechanically, Toyota owns Scion, so the FRS was replaced by the GT86 and later GR86 within the Toyota line-up when Toyota killed off the Scion brand in the US, and the FRS never existed outside the North American market, because Scion was a North American exclusive brand.

The BRZ/GR86 has a Subaru Boxer engine, with Toyota D4S Port+Direct Injection, using a Toyota ECU/ECM, Toyota/Aisin transmission, Toyota TCU/TCM, and Toyota infotainment (in some generations), but with a mostly Subaru designed chassis and nearly entirely Subaru suspension and post-transmission driveline, but the wheels and tires off a Prius (in the first generation), and a handful of things that were only created to be jointly used by the BRZ/GR86. Except no matter which part you pick on the car, it'll be marked "Subaru", including ironically the Toyota badge on the front of the GT86.

It's better to think of them as what they are, which is different branding for the same vehicle, that was jointly developed and manufactured.

It's not just that they're expensive markers of conspicuous consumption, it's about exclusivity. Exotic car manufacturers like Ferrari intentionally make fewer cars than the market demands. Only "special" customers are even allowed to buy them regardless of price. Ownership, especially of the higher end models, marks a consumer as a member of a high-status exclusive club. (I am not claiming that this is rational or sensible, but it is an effective marketing strategy for luxury goods.)

Back in the 90s a Japanese sports car actually offered a noticeable performance advantage relative to regular passenger cars. The regular passenger cars generally had weak engines, terrible suspensions, slow shifting automatic transmissions, and little in the way of driver assistance features. Now any generic modern crossover SUV can be driven well beyond the legal speed limit on any public road without really approaching the vehicle's limits, so except for hard core enthusiasts who intend on tracking their cars there's just not much advantage to buying a sports car any more.

It always surprises me how quickly people forget nuance.

OK so we're discussing niche vs mainstream, or "what most people want" vs "what a few want".

The few cars you listed are not popular in the ownership sense, but they are well-known and aspirational.

People can buy them to show off status / money / exclusivity, or perhaps beauty. Speed is table stakes, of course. They have to objectively be better than most cars but also special. They can be strikingly beautiful or strikingly hideous but they must not be ordinary.

If you watch / read reviews of those cars, then it tends to be from the enthusiast driver point of view. Is it good at racing, cornering, reading the driver's intentions and reacting instantly and accurately? But then more often than not, those that can afford them do not buy them to use them for that purpose (or at least not frequently.) Many are treated a bit like investments or merely items in a collection.

What a long-winded way to get back to the original point of faster horses and enshittification of software, eh?

Netflix and Spotify might as well be a Toyota Corolla or Prius. I lost my train of thought. I think I just wanted to pontificate about exotic cars for a while.

(I drive a Polestar 2. It looks like a Volvo, is heavy as a dump truck, but damn is it fast as hell.)

Right, they still exist, but now they’re budget sports cars, which isn’t really what I was talking about. A GR86 is cheaper than most SUVs. A miata is even cheaper. The civic type r is neat, but that’s not a sports car. That’s a performance model of a family car.

The comment I was replying to said that people buy porsches because they’re beautiful.

That’s not it, because the NSX is beautiful, the LFA is beautiful, the FD is beautiful, but nobody wants to spend 200K on a Toyota.

Cars are a signifier, and the viewer needs to understand that sign. Luxury car makers bank on that. Put an LFA and a Cayman next to each other and 9/10 people would think the Cayman is worth more.

The original commenters idea works for content, because content is not a signifier of money. Rich people can’t have more expensive media taste than you, so the enthusiasts set the pace.

But they can have a more expensive car, so no matter how awful a car a lamborghini is, nobody envies the Integra type R next to it.

Key word was, because nobody wants to spend 200K on a Honda no matter how many F1 drivers swear by it.

hahahaha, yeah the RX450h is soulless

You're more of a car guy than me

Didn't the US put in a trade agreement that crushed the Japanese economy by overvaluing its currency?

The Plaza Accord was 1985. And it wasn’t just between the US and Japan. iIf included France, Germany and the UK.

The Japanese economy continued to grow until the mid 1990s. I think the real culprit was low birth rate in the prior 20 years did not train the next generation of productive workers. China, South Korea most of Europe face similar issues