Mercedes is trying to stop Project One owners from reselling their new hypercars for a huge profit.
It seems like Mercedes-AMG is taking a page out of Ford’s playbook. Ford famously made people buying their second generation GT sign a contract that prohibited them from reselling the car for at least two years after taking delivery. The expectation was that whoever Ford allowed to actually buy the car would become a brand ambassador for the company. Owning a GT wasn’t just buying a car, it was also getting in bed with Ford.
Now it looks like Mercedes is trying to do the same thing for their upcoming Project One hypercar. According to a new report from German car site Auto Motor und Sport, Mercedes is having similar language written into their purchase agreements for the people that buy the $2.72 million cars.
We don’t have specifics on how long Project One buyers have to hang on to their cars, but we know that at least one person is already breaking the deal by posting their car on a German car-swapping site. Their asking price is 4.5 million euros, or about $5.2 million USD--almost double the asking price from Mercedes.
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Mercedes is only building 275 of their hybrid hypercars and even though they received many times more requests to buy one they’ve refused to build more in order to maintain the Project One’s exclusivity. And as anyone who’s taken first-year economics knows, limiting the supply is going to drive up demand, and there are plenty of billionaires in the world with nothing better to spend their money on than fancy toys like the Project One.
Built off the successful Mercedes-AMG's F1 W07 Formula One car, Project One will have the same 1.6-L turbocharged 90-degree V6 engine but have four electric motors added to turn it into a hybrid. Power is measured at somewhere between 1,000 and 1,100 hp, although the Formula One engine will need to be sent back to Mercedes every 31,000 miles for rebuilding.
Mercedes is reportedly testing the Project One on closed race tracks in England and Spain. Deliveries are expected to proceed on schedule in early 2019, with lawsuits against resellers set to begin almost immediately afterward. We’ll be sure to drop names as soon as we get them.