- Ultra-luxury and supercar brands are shifting back their EV timelines and re-investing in gas cars.
- The automakers quickly found out that buyers have little interest in battery-powered supercars.
- Customers prefer gas and hybrid powertrains, which means keeping them alive for longer in halo cars.
It seems like only yesterday that brands were tripping over one another to announce that they were committing to an all-electric future. Nearly every badge under the sun sported some sort of electrification plan, though some were a bit more conservative with their approach than others. But now in 2025, automakers are sunsetting that electric-only approach and instead giving ICE another try—including the ultra-luxury set.
What seemed like a sure thing has quickly become quicksand for many brands. Luxury brands in particular have learned that their customer bases aren’t buying into battery power as quickly as the top brass had hoped. Now that’s forced these brands to do something very human: rethink the future.
Photo by: Chris Perkins / Motor1
Luxury And Premium Brands
Porsche has most recently found itself in the center of a perfect storm. Despite planning to convert 80% of its fleet to battery-electric by the end of the decade, the brand has since determined that its best course of action isn’t to go all-in on EVs, but instead look at what the spectrum of electrification can offer its customers. Basically, it’s a fancy way of saying that Porsche will favor a move to interim hybrids while still offering BEVs where appropriate.
Mercedes-Benz is another brand that has since slowed its rollout of EVs. The EQ family of EVs was never a best-seller, maybe because their designs were “too ahead” of their time, or maybe because electrification didn’t resonate with its core buyers. Either way, with tariffs making things worse, it recently paused the order books on its EQ family of EVs.
BMW also admitted that combustion engines “will never disappear” from its lineup as its previous electrification targets have been difficult to meet, especially as demand for electric cars is expected to fall as the U.S. gives up the federal EV tax credit.
The further you move up the segment, the less affected vehicles are by the loss of that tax credit. That goes for BMW, Mercedes and Porsche. But what’s truly interesting is that ultra-luxury, up-market automotive brands aren’t affected by the EV tax credit at all, yet nearly all of them still anticipate weak demand for EVs.
Photo by: Bentley
Ultra-Luxury Segment
Bentley planned to phase out gas engines completely by 2035 as part of its “Beyond100” strategy. Its CEO, Frank-Steffen Walliser, now says that the brand will instead draw out the ICE age even longer as part of a shared investment with other brands under the Volkswagen Group umbrella.
“There is a dip in demand for luxury electric vehicles, and customer demand is not yet strong enough to support an all-electric strategy,” said Walliser in a statement to AutoCar. “The luxury market is a lot different today than when we announced Beyond100. Electrification is still our goal, but we need to take our customers with us.”
But that doesn’t explain why other marques like Aston Martin or even Lotus have doubled-back on the process. Those brands cater to different customers, yet they’re also slithering away from EV-heavy fleets. However, Bentley’s Walliser identified that its core buyers were also “rejecting electric cars” back in 2024 in favor of the “novel bridging technology” known as hybrids.
Photo by: Rimac
Exotics And Hypercars
If there is one high-dollar segment that seems to be pushing back on electric cars the most, it’s the extremely niche supercar and hypercar segments.
Mate Rimac has said that buyers of both Bugattis and Rimacs simply don’t want fully-electric hypercars. That’s it, full-stop. His counterpart, Christian von Koenigsegg, also echoed something similar, noting that “the appetite in the market for this level of car, fully electric, is extremely low.”
Supercar maker Lamborghini has had cold feet for electric cars for a while now. Its CEO celebrated that fact recently after noting that the move has paid off for the brand in the long-run since its customers are in the same boat as Bugatti, Koenigsegg and Rimac:
“We could do a very powerful, very fast fully electric car, but it’s not about what we are able to do, it’s about fulfilling the dreams of customers,” Lamborghini CEO Stephan Winkelmann said in an interview with ABC News in August. “The customers want internal combustion engines.”
Winkelmann justified the brand’s decision to go all-in on hybrids earlier this year after kicking the electrification can down the road for years. Since at least 2023, the brand claimed it wasn’t “the right time” for an all-electric supercar—it’s since pushed its first all-electric vehicle, the Lanzador EV, back until at least 2029 and is even reportedly considering turning it into a plug-in hybrid instead.
Ferrari is planning to launch an electric car in the near future, but one report suggests that it’s worried about a similar demand issue. Despite being publicly vocal about the brand’s excitement to bring an electric supercar to the world, internal sources told Reuters that there is “zero” demand for high-performance EVs.
Ultra-Luxury Buyers Aren’t Normal Buyers
The Ferrari insiders’ comments to Reuters speak to a larger problem with the customers targeted by high-dollar performance brands. They say that “real, sustainable demand is non-existent for an electric sports car.” Perhaps that’s the real key here—that the core customer group that these brands sell to simply aren’t interested in what EVs bring to the table.
Maybe it’s because electric motors remove something from the driving experience that buyers crave. Sure, EVs have instant torque and wild acceleration—but one could argue that many supercars are able to offer a similar experience. Couple that with the loud rumble from an exhaust or high-revving, large-displacement engine under the hood and drivers have a sensory experience that is completely different than anything a battery-powered car can deliver.
As our Mack Hogan pointed out, supercars and other high-dollar vehicle purchases are generally driven by emotion. They’re dream cars that people have been waiting to get their hands on for decades—a car by the same brand displayed proudly on a poster tacked to their bedroom wall throughout high school. And now that they’re old enough to afford it, they’re buying the brands they know and love with the powertrains that made them famous; that means a screaming combustion engine, not a whirring electric motor.
Or, maybe EVs are a harder sell when you aren’t worried about running costs. When it comes to normal car buyers, EVs are a way to escape hefty maintenance fees and fluctuating fuel prices. By investing that money up front into a BEV, owners aren’t footing the costs of oil changes, gasket replacements, or many other ICE-specific maintenance costs. Meanwhile, those wealthy enough to afford the ultra-luxury aren’t sweating $20,000-plus brake jobs.
Could this change as EVs become the new global superpower of motoring? Sure—and the same kids who would have posters on their walls might even sport some sort of EV on their phone’s lockscreen. But for now, they’re not the ones dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars on their dream car. So as the generational interest in high-dollar cars shifts, so might what powers the wheels.
These brands dragging out the timeline doesn’t that the EV dream is dead, of course. It just means that the early buzz of electrification is fizzling out for now, and the major brands that thought throwing money at the problem to be first to market would give them an advantage were wrong. The ultra-luxury crowd will still build electrified cars—just with a more deliberate focus towards electrification as a whole, which includes both BEVs and hybrids, where appropriate. Electric supercars will surely come, it may just take longer than we first thought.
