Worried Buyers hit the Brakes on Luxury Purchases

Let's set aside the tailspinning news of domestic automakers' bottom lines and shed a tear for the little guys. Bentley is off "25-odd percent" this year, Aston Martin and Porsche have seen sales slip by as much as fifteen percent each, and Maybach is down eight percent — as is Ferrari. The one anomaly? Rolls-Royce is up five percent for the year, leading us to believe that there must be yet another seven-star hotel in Hong Kong that needed some taxis.

Luxury automakers are merely innocent casualties in a contracting market, where buyers with a net worth between $3 million and $5 million "are second-guessing their high-end purchases because of the economy," according to a spokesman for Bentley. In response, Bentley has been tweaking its event marketing to focus on more affluent prospects — Americans with a net worth of some $25 million or more.