🚩 The Jevons Paradox suggests that when something becomes easier or cheaper to use, we consume more of it.
The luxury-car market often does the reverse.
More production, more availability and more ‘special editions’ do not necessarily create more desire. They can quietly extinguish it.
In this world, scarcity is not an inconvenience. It is the product.
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♔ In 1865, economist William Stanley Jevons observed that making coal more efficient did not reduce consumption.
▪️It made coal more useful, so Britain burned even more of it.
▪️Perfectly logical. Unless, of course, you are selling luxury motor cars.
▪️Here, greater availability can produce the opposite effect.
▪️Once every fashionable postcode contains the same limited-edition supercar, it begins to look rather less limited.
▪️The velvet rope has become a revolving door.
▪️Classic cars understand this instinctively.
▪️A Ferrari 250 GT, Mercedes-Benz 300 SL or McLaren F1 is desirable partly because most people cannot have one.
▪️Supply is fixed, access is restricted, and ownership carries the quiet thrill of possessing something the market cannot simply manufacture again.
▪️Modern manufacturers attempt the same magic with numbered plaques, invitation-only allocations and increasingly imaginative definitions of ‘one-of’.
▪️Occasionally it works. Occasionally the factory produces so many rare models that rarity itself requires a spreadsheet.
▪️The lesson is simple: efficiency rewards the mass market; restraint rewards luxury.
▪️Producing more may increase revenue today, but it can dilute desirability tomorrow.
▪️And in the upper reaches of the motor-car market, desirability is the only currency that truly matters.
The bottom line: abundance sells cars.
📍 ‘Scarcity creates icons.’
