√VFACTS December 2022: Lamborghini races to a record as other supercar brands stall in Australia

Some supercar brands soared in Australia last year while others hit reverse. Here are the winners and losers in the fast-car stakes.

A pair of high-performance SUVs, the Lamborghini Urus and Maserati Levante, were the stars of Australia’s top-end sports car showrooms in 2022.

The Urus helped drive Lamborghini to a record sales total of 176 cars last year, while the Levante ensured Maserati improved to its second-best result on record with 594 deliveries.

McLaren and Lotus, which do not have an SUV in their portfolio, both went backwards and even Aston Martin – with the DBX SUV in showrooms – also took a hit.

The Lamborghini record saw the company boost its Australian sales by more than one-third in 2022, with a 34.4 per cent improvement to 176 deliveries that took it well past the brand’s previous record of 134 cars in 2018.

The Urus accounted for 90 deliveries of Lamborghini cars in Australia last year, a 40.6 per cent improvement over 2021.

The Australian result came as Lamborghini claimed a global record total of 9233 cars for 2022, a 10 per cent improvement from 2021.

“Australia … is one of the top performing markets in Asia-Pacific,” the regional director of Automobili Lamborghini Asia-Pacific, Francesco Scardaoni, told Drive.

The Maserati result in Australia was an overall improvement of 6.1 per cent over 2021, from 560 to 590 cars, although the brand record still stands at 642 cars from 2018.

The Italian brand claims it is now poised for a new all-time high in 2023 as the smaller Maserati Grecale SUV arrives to boost the Australian range.

“We are carrying our biggest order bank ever into 2023 and we are only ordering the MC20 supercar for customers, not for stock,” the general manager of Maserati Australia and New Zealand, Grant Barling, told Drive.

“We estimate 55 per cent of our market this year will be the Grecale. It will get here in late February or early March.

“The interesting thing for us is that the Porsche Macan grew by 18 per cent last year and that is where we will compete with Grecale.

It was the British sports-car brands that suffered most in 2022, as Aston Martin’s sales dropped by 5.7 per cent from 140 to 132 cars and Lotus fell by 12.7 per cent from 71 to 62 cars.

McLaren, which is now talking about adding an SUV to its range, saw its sales drop by 30.7 per cent last year from 88 to 61 cars.

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