“Who in Ukraine buys the most expensive cars in the world and did 2024 beat the sales of the pre-war period? EP research.”, — write: www.epravda.com.ua
Although gradual restoration volumes of car sales in Ukraine, the mass segment of the car market is still about two times behind the “pre-war” indicators of 2021.
However, this does not apply to expensive models such as BMW or Mercedes-Benz. EP previously said that their sales are already reached the indicators three years ago.
The demand of Ukrainian millionaires for the most luxurious super and sports cars does not lag behind, if not exceeds.
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One of the largest collections of expensive cars is owned by Oleksandr Slobozhenko, who got rich on Internet arbitrage. He flaunted on social media the acquisition during the great war McLaren 720S Spiderwhich costs about 300 thousand dollars. In general, there are almost two dozen very expensive cars in his fleet. Recently Slobozhenko received suspicion in deliberate tax evasion in particularly large amounts. After that, the mass media wrote that he had left Ukraine.
Slobozhenko is not the only young man who likes expensive cars. According to the media, another blogger and cryptocurrency investor Dmytro Khitsenko at the age of 22, he had a Lamborghini Huracan supercar for $280,000 and a BMW i8 hybrid coupe for $100,000.
And Mykhailo Romanenko, who appears in the media as “crypto billionaire”in 2023 purchased supercar Bugatti Bolide worth 4.6 million dollars. Before that, he allegedly became the owner of an even more expensive Bugatti Centodieci, the price of which is more than 10 million dollars and of which only 10 units were produced.
It’s hard to say where the line is between showing off on TikTok and posing on Instagram, and where is real car purchases and registrations. To date, for example, not a single Bugatti has been officially registered in Ukraine, although the foreign-registered Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse WRC model has been repeatedly seen on the streets of Kyiv.
Other supercars from the list of young millionaires of the EP were identified among the open data of vehicle registrations available on the data.gov.ua portal.
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In general, the level of the first registration of such cars (more details in the Methodology at the end of the material) in 2024 is even higher than in the corresponding periods of 2021, according to data analyzed by the EP.
In particular, in the second quarter of the current year, three dozen such cars were registered at Service Centers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and since the beginning of the year – fifty.
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Among them, the largest, seven cars, is the Maserati Ghibli (approximate cost of $215,000). In second place with five cars is the Bentley Continental GT ($220,000).
The Rolls-Royce Specter of 2024 was the most expensive of all ($440,000). Immediately three such cars, which are the first fully electric cars from Rolls-Royce, received Kyiv license plates.
According to EP calculations, this car fleet could cost their owners 12 million dollars this year alone, and from February 2022 – 39 million dollars, provided that they are calculated at the prices of car dealerships.
However, more and more super and sports cars are first registered in Ukraine as used, so their value can be 20-40% lower. If by 2022 there was only one used car for every two new cars, then in 2023-2024 this pyramid turned upside down – out of 50 cars registered this year, only 16 are formally new.
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There are several reasons for the migration of luxury car sales to the aftermarket. First, it is a tax upon first registration. That is, with a car for 200 thousand dollars, you need to pay another 10 thousand. Secondly, the purchase process itself.
“Because of the officials and the bank, even if they spread out the payment in cash through the cash register, they have to confirm their incomes to financial monitoring, which is not easy for (“young crypto-billionaires”) to do,” the owner of a service station in the center of Kyiv, where such cars are sometimes serviced, explains to EP.
Moreover, the usage in this segment is really quite conditional. The average age of supercars registered in the last two years is 3 years (in the mass budget segment – 10 years), which gives their new owners many advantages in the form of a lower price, lower tax payments and a lengthy purchase process.
Therefore, it cannot be guaranteed that all such supercars are bought with money from which the necessary taxes have been paid before. In the end, the case against Slobozhenko began to move only after that public publicity and his personal conflict with journalists of “Ukrainian Pravda”.
Methodology. Information about vehicles and their owners is available on the open data portal data.gov.ua link. The list of cars for which the search was carried out was taken from the site motor1.comfrom which models were selected, the price of which starts from 150 thousand dollars.