Luxury buyers are walking away from EVs. The rest of the world is buying them up, but the rich? They’re hitting the pause button. Aston Martin put its first electric cars on ice. Lamborghini did the same. Bentley slowed down the launch of the Torcal. Ferrari unveiled the Luce into a storm of criticism.
Adrian Hallmark left Bentley for Aston Martin. He arrived in September 2024 with one clear mandate: stop bleeding cash.
He hit the brakes on Aston’s EV plans immediately. Not out of principle. Out of necessity. “The lack of BEV adoption means for Aston Martin to takethat gamble was crazy,” Hallmark says.
It’s cold arithmetic. The company lost £189 million before tax last year. Why burn cash on technology nobody is buying yet?
“It’s probably three-to-four yearsbefore we need to properly start those programmes.”
So Ferrari’s Jony Ive-designed Luce. Dead on arrival after that backlash? Hallmark doesn’t think so. He believes rich buyers care about status more than badges. If the leather is perfect, if the power is instant, they’ll switch. Eventually.
But what changes their minds? Not ethics. Taxes.
Hallmark drives a V8 Mercedes G63. Not the electric one. The roaring, 577-horsepower gasoline version. In Switzerland it costs him €6,000 in annual tax. A drop in the bucket for a multimillionaire. Still, he sees the horizon. “When the tax bill becomeunbearable,” he says, “the multi-millionaire exodus willstart.”
Everyone is waiting for that moment.
Jaguar is moving slowly too. Their electric Range Rover flagship is two years late. The all-electric Jaguar Type 01 faces a tough climb into a £100k segment that Porsche already cracked and then stumbled through.
Then there’s Rolls-Royce. The odd one out.
CEO Chris Brownridge argues their Spectre works because EVs naturally do what Rolls-Royce tries to do anyway. Silence. Effort. Wafting forward without sound. “A perfectly engineered electric powertrain… amplifies the characteristics youexpect.”
It worked. The Spectre was their second-best seller last year. They sold 1,001 of them. That’s out of a total delivery of 5,666 limousines. Not dominant. But respectable.
For the others? It’s still just noise. Until the government makes gasoline painful, the engines keep firing.
