The 11 biggest motoring white elephants

Lexus LFA

We’ll start with some really big obvious ones, to get you familiar with the concept. Perhaps the biggest, whitest of all elephants seen over the past 20 years, is the Lexus LFA. It took ten years to birth, was redesigned twice, got ruinously more expensive as development carried on and, as it appeared on sale right around the time the financial world fell apart, it sold terribly.

Examples of this beloved, now-valuable screaming V10 supercar were sat in Lexus dealers gathering dust for years. There were a handful of brand new unregistered cars lingering in US dealers as recently as 2017. Now, holding onto them ought to have paid dividends, as each of the 500 cars made is a sought-after collector’s item and a highlight of its era. After everything, Akio Toyoda, overseer of Toyota and Lexus, doesn’t regret it. He got every nut and bolt of the flagship, the timeless halo car, that he set out to build.

Bugatti Veyron

In fact, most white elephants are the brainchild of a figurehead with big ideas and belligerence enough to force them through. One of the best examples is the Bugatti Veyron, which was entirely the child of Ferdinand Piech and his sizable hubris, which as it turns out, did the same for a few cars to follow on this list. No sane board of directors would have sanctioned such a car, that was from the outset expected to lose its manufacturer six figures at minimum, for every unit sold. 

But this was the father of the Porsche 917, the father of the Audi Quattro, the architect of Audi as we know it and the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche. Piech’s dictation was that a flagship Bugatti named Veyron would be the fastest car in the world, the most luxurious, the most capable and the most desirable. It had to have over 1,000PS, be able to crack 400kmh and accelerate to 100kmh in under three seconds, while also being comfortable enough for a trip to the Opera. It took some five years to develop and put into production, with an all-new quad-turbo W16 engine, in a brand new Molsheim production facility. Small wonder the rumours say each Veyron lost VW over a million Euros at the point of sale. But what Piech, VW and Bugatti now have, is a timeless icon. Not just a car, but a footnote in the history books.

Audi A2

Which, sadly, is less than can be said for a few of Piech’s other passion projects within the Volkswagen Group at the time. Just as Bugatti were set to go for extremes in performance, the Audi A2 was a no-compromise push for paradigm-shifting efficiency. To get there, the A2 was shaped to be smooth and built to be lightweight, thanks to an expensive all-aluminium construction.

The former meant the A2 looked a little gawky when new and the latter meant it was pricey. The predictable result is that the A2, while an incredible car – widely beloved by critics as one of the most innovative and best-engineered passenger cars of the last 20 years – sold like ice to an eskimo and in the end, at a loss. The A2 is remembered and beloved by real car enthusiasts but to the layperson, it’s the last and weirdest Audi before the R8 made the company cool.

VW XL1

But the only lesson that was learned was that if you want to expand your horizons, don’t expect to make money while doing it. Enter the carbon-tubbed, diesel-engined, scissor-doored Volkswagen XL1, as near as makes no difference the ‘Veyron’ ethos, aimed at efficiency. It was incredibly light, incredibly slow, incredibly innovative and, shock horror, incredibly expensive. At some £100,000, what did the XL1 offer? A quite incredible 280mpg. That made the XL1 quite the addition to your car-themed deck of top trumps and not much else. Very few were sold, predictably and it was a certain loss leader. But once again, at the expense of the bottom line, Piech’s point was proven and the world is a more interesting place as a result.

Jaguar XJ220

A famously terrible time to develop and attempt to sell a groundbreaking supercar, is right on the eve of a historic financial crash. Jaguar proved as much in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the XJ220, perhaps the ultimate white elephant. Originally conceived to be all-wheel-drive, pack a V12 and have scissor doors, this beautiful car, while looking as intended, wound up with a twin-turbo version of Metro rally car’s V6, rear-wheel-drive and normal doors. It also never delivered on that ‘220’ promise and it also sold terribly. Such was the magnitude of this car’s flop, only recently have they become worth more than what owners originally paid in the early 1990s. Just 281 of the 350 cars Jaguar intended to build were made and even those were tough to sell, with some cars still in dealers some three years on from the close of production in 1994. Our advice? When you offer a V12, deliver a V12.

Maybach Xenatec

Then again, the XJ220 didn’t kill Jaguar. The Xenatech Maybach did. Maybach of course never built a coupe version of its leviathanic 57 and 62 luxury saloons, so the German coachbuilder took it upon itself to create one. The process of doing so and the struggle of selling them all but sent the company under, after controversies around build quality and of course. The price of €650,000 at the time was enough to make one’s eyes water, let alone for a car that wasn’t quite as well-resolved as you’d hope. It’s a cool thing but wow, white elephants don’t get much whiter than this.

Aston Martin Lagonda

Aston Martin seems to deliver a car every decade that threatens to kill it off. This decade, it was the Valkyrie. Last decade, it was the One-77. One car loomed across three decades, however and it’s perhaps Aston’s biggest white elephant. The Lagonda sold just 645 units in the 14 years between 1976 and 1990. Was it a fairly conventional, inexpensive car for Aston to develop and produce, you ask? Not a bit of it. It was weird-looking and featured weird tech, being the first car to feature a digital dash – an LED display, no less. It also had touch button controls. Word has it that the development of the electronics alone came to four-times the cost allocated for the development of the whole car. So yes, the fact that fewer than 1,000 were sold probably means the Lagonda lost Aston a lot of money. Why didn’t it sell? It was as you’d imagine, too expensive, too strange for contemporary tastes and very early on, did not have a reputation for reliability.

MG SV

Because the depths of financial turmoil are exactly the right time for a car company to buy a supercar platform from a struggling company. We can’t decide if the MG SV was a white elephant, or a white whale, hell-bent on expediting the sinking of the good ship MG/Rover.

Based on De Tomaso/Qvale Mangusta underpinnings, the MG SV was a crack at an English super coupe for a worldwide audience. V8 power, muscular looks, and potential for more than 400PS. What’s not to love?

The truth of MG’s own supercar was that it was barely more than a kit car that arrived pre-built. Even if it used carbon-fibre for its bodywork, it was glazed inside and out in bits from, of all places, the Fiat parts bin, which you can immediately tell by the Coupe rear lights and Punto fronts. No, it wasn’t that expensive to develop – we’re sure the Qvale platform wasn’t particularly expensive to buy – but 82 cars sold is serious white elephant territory.

Honda NSX

The second NSX was the troubled sequel to an absolute tonic of analogue values, simplicity and exquisite chassis calibration. The second, in spite of living up to the eXpermental bit in NSX, was too complicated and as a result, too expensive, both to develop and to buy. Like the LFA, it was also a long drawn-out project with a couple of false starts (if you count the mothballed HSV 10, more than a couple). The mid-engined NSX Concept similar in appearance to the production car appeared in the early 2010s. It was to have a naturally-aspirated V6 paired with a hybrid system. That powertrain was then scrapped and a new twin-turbo V6 hybrid powertrain developed from scratch. 

And for what? Fewer than 2000 NSXs were sold over the course of its six-year production run, which ended in 2021. That’s a real shame, because we really like the second-gen NSX here at GRR. While incredibly complicated, it was a brilliant exercise in system calibration to deliver a genuinely cohesive driving experience.

Mercedes AMG One

Mercedes won’t admit it but it probably regrets this one. In fact, it sort of did admit it, with the AMG CEO saying “I’m sure we were drunk when we said yes”. We are of course talking about the AMG One, which as we all know packs a genuine F1 engine paired with a hybrid system. It’s a 1.6-litre turbocharged V6 based on the architecture of that found in the 2015 Mercedes-AMG WO6 with which Lewis Hamilton secured his third world drivers’ championship. 

But as the Mercedes-AMG engineers found out, running flat-out in an F1 race is one thing. Idling smoothly and passing a road-based emissions test, is really quite another. This hurdle of getting a highly sophisticated, highly-strung F1 engine to run with even remotely palatable manners on the road saw the car suffer delays and cost Mercedes hugely. The designers also failed in part with the engine, given that the US would not homologate the car for road use in the form it was to take throughout the rest of the world. Merc took the L and decided not to clip its wings any more to get it over the line, so US buyers were basically told ‘sorry, you can’t have it’. All 275 have been sold at the eye-watering £2million+ price point, we can’t imagine the balance sheets for this project show any profits at all.

Tesla Cybertruck

Speaking of balance sheets, here we have the Tesla Cybertruck. Elon Musk couldn’t just build a normal truck, could he? He couldn’t even just innovate massively under the skin alone – steer by wire, 48-volt ancillary electrics, a 900-volt architecture and more are significant features of the Cybertruck, remember. 

He had to clothe the thing in stainless steel which required an entirely new factory and patented manufacturing process to achieve. In fact, clothe is the wrong word, given much of the Cybertruck’s outsides are in fact, its insides. They are one and the same. It’s a project that took too long, was too expensive and is surely too divisive to be a sales hit, in a way that will see a return on the costs to conceive it. And the cars that are being sold? Questionable panel fitment and bodywork that’s not exactly standing up to the outside world all that well are just a couple of the issues owners are having. White elephant status is pending, if not guaranteed. Time will tell.

So that’s our list of the 11 biggest white elephants, at least that we can think of. We’re sure there are more and would live to hear your suggestions. Which is your favourite?