The five silliest luxury-car options

Tuesday, 24 January 2017

There are many add-ons to stretch the wallet even further if you've just outlaid megabucks for that latest high-end motor.

It is obviously tough when you have too much money to actually know what to do with it all, but fortunately luxury car makers are here to soak up lots of those spare millions. But even they have to get really creative to appeal to the super-rich.

Here we take a look at five of the silliest and most excessive options available.

Just give me the night... or an approximation of it, if you order Rolls-Royce's Starlight roof.

Starlight roof

Ever wished you could admire the night sky from your car, but don't want to mess your hair up by buying a convertible?

Mercedes-Benz trim feels as solid as a rock. When it's made from rock.

Well, sir, Rolls-Royce has you covered there. Literally, thanks to its expensive and completely silly Starlight headliner system that features 800-1600 (depending on the model) fibre optic lights. Each headliner is hand made, with its very own unique constellation: one owner reportedly requested his coat of arms, while another had the Rolls logo set among the stars). So you can gaze at the stars without all that messy wind and fresh air.

Granite trim

Leather is a really cool trim to have in your car. Porsche likes to wrap it around air vents.

A dashboard slathered with wood, aluminium or carbon fibre not exclusive enough for you? Well then, how about stone? Yep, that's right, Mercedes-Benz offers a granite trim option in its Designo customisation range.

Sounds necessarily heavy? Fear not, the layer of stone is apparently only 1mm thick, which just makes it seem kind of, well, silly really. Oh, and it ain't cheap either. Mercedes doesn't talk about the price of Designo options unless you're actually buying, but when it offered a granite trim option in the Maybach limousine it was a staggering NZ$73,000!

The Bugatti Veyron's body is made of carbon fibre. It costs a lot extra to show it off by leaving it unpainted. A lot.

Leather vents

While it was possible to spend rather a lot of money on leather in the original Porsche Panamera, one option stood out from the rest, both for its price and its extreme silliness. For NZ$3500 you could - for some utterly unfathomable reason - get the slats in the air vents wrapped in leather.

Cygnet was offered to Aston buyers as just another option, like a keyring. Similar size actually.

Yep, you read that right: the Panamera could have leather air vents. You could also get a leather rear view mirror, leather sun visors and a leather luggage compartment cover. Why? No idea.

Carbon fibre

Okay, so you decided to drop a couple of million on the baddest Volkswagen out there, and yet you still stop and think to yourself: there must be a way to spend even more money and yet get slightly less.

Bugatti had you covered there, because for around NZ$430,000 you could get them to not paint it for you. That's right, the Veyron's body featured a lot of carbon fibre and if you wanted to show that off, it would cost you rather a lot of money to get them to not cover it in paint.

Another car

Okay, so the much-ridiculed and maligned Aston Martin Cygnet was originally conceived as a way to reduce Aston's range-wide emission average, which is all very worthy (and, it has to be said, very misguided), but it was the way the company chose to present and market it that puts it on to this list.

The Cygnet was originally only offered to Aston owners, pretty much like any other option on this list. So if you bought a shiny new DB9 or Vanquish you could also tick the box to add a tarted-up Toyota iQ to the garish leather headlining and awful James Bond-themed personalised number plate you also purchased.