Luxury Car Ownership per Capita (1 of 2)

Somewhat lighter programming today: a friend recently asked me whether I knew which country had the highest per capita Ferrari ownership. Off course I didn't know and offered a guess that it might be some of the usual suspects including Hong Kong, Singapore, Qatar, UAE, Luxembourg or Switzerland.

Turns out he didn't know either and there are really no good statistics available. So I became interested (in an admittedly rather irrelevant data point). As a first step I decided to make the exercise a little bit broader and included the following brands:

Ferrari	I	http://www.ferrari.com
Maserati	I	http://www.maserati.com/
Aston Martin	UK	http://www.astonmartin.com/
Lamborghini	I	http://www.lamborghini.com
Bentley	UK / D	http://www.bentleymotors.com/
Lotus	UK	http://www.lotuscars.com/
Rolls Royce	UK / D	http://www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com/
Morgan	UK	http://www.morgan-motor.co.uk/
Fisker	US	http://www.fiskerautomotive.com
Wiesmann	D	http://www.wiesmann.com/
Artega	D	http://www.artega.de
McLaren	UK	http://www.mclarenautomotive.com
Tesla	US	http://www.teslamotors.com/
Bugatti	F / D	http://www.bugatti.com

I appreciate that the list is somewhat random.

The following two approaches provide at least a a relative indication of car ownership per capita.

1. Counting car dealership per brand (which is public domain information and available on the above listed sites)
2. Counting used car offered online for individual national markets (which can be retrieved from used car websites or corresponding aggregators)

This post will focus on the first approach. Plotting the number of luxury car dealerships (per country) against population results in the following (own data compilation).

The car dealership metric is clearly biased towards smaller markets and comparison probably only makes sense for countries of similar population sizes. From smaller to larger population, Monaco, Luxembourg, Qatar, Switzerland, Italy, UK, Germany and USA are at the top of their respective population brackets. Italy, UK and Germany are closely clustered whereby for the first two there is clearly a home market advantage. Singapore, Hong Kong and UAE are in same population bracket as Switzerland but have a much lower number of luxury car dealership (so at least on this one my initial hunch was not confirmed).

For Ferrari the number of dealerships per million population looks as follows (also here eliminating countries with only one dealership to increase the meaningfulness somewhat) with Italy highlighted:

For Aston Martin the number of dealerships per million population looks as follows (also here eliminating countries with only one dealership) with the United Kingdom highlighted:

In one of my next posts, I will look at used car offerings as an an alternative to determine luxury car ownership.

Data can be retrieved here.