The Ferrari California convertible test driven by Jerry Garrett of the New York Times was red – Corsa red, the red of a bad girl’s lipstick or a bankrupt’s bottom line. Based priced at less than $200,000, this Ferrari is the least expensive model from a very expensive maker. Even with extras – including handstiched leather rear seating and a computer-controlled suspension – the California is almost an economy car.
That makes the California a dilemma for Ferrari, the same dilemma every luxury brand faces: either democratize to improve profitability and dilute the brand’s exclusivity or ratchet up the mystique of the brand and achieve near unobtainability. Either can turn out to be a trap. Open any edition of Vogue and you can see luxury brands lurching to one pole or the other and without any guarantee of making the right choice in today’s woozy economy.
Brand anxiety isn’t what I find interesting about this Ferrari. Its name is. The California restores a designation that was applied to Ferrari 250 GT export models beginning in 1957, a time when the California brand promised youth and freedom and desires fulfilled – a sort of vast, half-adult Disneyland, Autopia without limits.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art once sought to sum up the extravagance of the brand – why Ferrari borrowed California to sell a car – in an art exhibition: Made in California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900-2000. Robert Hughes in a Time Magazine review of the exhibition pointed up the obvious problem with the California brand. The image of California by 2000, he said, was “luscious and poisonous at the same time,” an emblem of “a flawed and contradictory ex-paradise.”
If that’s California, why name today’s Ferrari after a failed state of mind?
Purists have complained that the California isn’t enough of a Ferrari. It has fake tailpipes, a front-mounted V-8, and an automatic transmission. That it’s a car – not an obsession. Perhaps that’s why the management chose the name – the California is a Ferrari for the disenchanted.
California isn’t the brand it once was, but the California Ferrari is selling. The company wants to assemble about 3,000 cars a year – more than a 50 percent increase in the company’s overall production. There’s even a waiting list for the California. It’s 18 months.
The image that accompanies this entry is from an ad for the Jordan Playboy. The company assembled adequate vehicles in the 1920s, but it wrote wondrous advertisements:
SOMEWHERE west of Laramie there's a bronco-busting, steer roping girl who knows what I’m talking about. She can tell what a sassy pony, that’s a cross between greased lighting and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he's going high, wide and handsome. The truth is - the Playboy was built for her. Built for the lass whose, face is brown with the sun when the day is done of revel and romp and race. She loves the cross of the wild and the tame. There's a savor of links about that car - of laughter and lilt and light - a hint of old loves - and saddle and quirt. It’s a brawny thing - yet a graceful thing for the sweep o' the Avenue. Step into the Playboy when the hour grows dull with things gone dead and stale. Then start for the land of real living with the spirit of the lass who rides, lean and rangy, into the red horizon of a Wyoming twilight.
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