Right now there is $1 billion worth of Lambos driving around Singapore. Given there’s only 164km of fast roads, the whole place would fit into Canberra, and a Lambo costs nearly $2 million (only $754,600 here), that’s not a bad effort by Andy Goh.
Andy is Mr Lamborghini in Singapore. He has been in the car business all his life. His father sold and serviced Nissans, but after working in the family business for a while it became clear to him that it was better to negotiate over a $1m car than a $10,000 one.
Now he and his brother Melvin run the publicly listed EuroSports, which sells luxury sports cars in the most expensive place in the world to own a car.
The Singapore government really doesn’t want you to buy a car. First up you have to bid in an auction for a certificate that entitles you to go and look for one. So there’s $75,000 before you have spoken to the dealer. The dealer will have paid about 40 per cent duty to get the car on to his lot.
Then you pay registration of 150 per cent of the car’s open-market value. You can borrow only 50 per cent of the vehicle’s value. And so it goes.
That’s why a BMW 3 series will lift $250,000 out of your pocket and a Porsche Cayman $500,000.
Oh, and the speed limit is 90km/h and there are fun-police cameras everywhere, but that doesn’t matter all that much because some of Andy’s customers don’t drive their Italians all that often and, besides, they usually have another two or three cars in the garage.
“Buyers used to be in their 40s or 50s but they are getting younger with some of them spending 60 per cent of their income on their car,” he told me in his showroom surrounded by about $100m worth of pre-owned and new European metal.
“Some of them only keep their car for a year or less. They love whatever is newest. “
So Singapore will have more pre-orders in the Lambo factory outside Modena for a new model than any other country. Four of the 15 Reventon Roadsters built are driving around the Lion City.
But there are only so manly laps of the little red dot on the map you can do.
That’s why Andy regularly gets together with a few of his customers and leaves the speed limits behind with a quick five-hour drive to the Genting Resort up the mountain in neighbouring Malaysia.
Ironically, Lambo was owned by a Malaysian investment group in the 1990s. It was also owned by Chrysler. Now the Sant’Agata Bolognese-based outfit is a VW company. Founder and former grape farmer turned tractor maker turned oil-heater maker Ferruccio Elio Arturo Lamborghini would be pretty proud of what the Germans have done with his iconic Italian brand and the headquarters building that dominates the town.
