I don't know about supercars, but what about simply sleek, small sports cars? Something like the Lotus Elan, Triumph Spitfire or the Porsche 911.
First-gen Mazda Miata is the only low-end car that I know that actually looks reasonably sleek and designed (the second-gen looks like a stupid ordinary car). It's no 911, but it has a nice retro charm.
A well-designed sports car doesn't need lots of power or anything else that should be particularly expensive. It just needs to look good.
There are many answers in this thread about performance, manufacturing tolerances, undermining your high-end brand etc., but none of that should apply here.
I'm asking partly because I think almost all modern cars are hideous, but I also can't afford a 911.
There are four generations of Miata. I think the newest looks better than most of the stuff on the street today, honestly. (how do you not like the Miata RF?) It's all shockingly generic looking now, IMO. Somehow, incredibly, Maseratis have become popular where I live, but they seem to have done it by looking like Toyotas. (at least they still sound incredible) Even Aston-Martin and Jaguar make stuff that barely rates above "cool."
I spend a fair amount of time wondering why nobody makes anything with a more bug-eyed look similar to either the classic 911 or even the classic 60s sports cars (Lola, GT40, 904, etc.). Modern safety standards and crumple zones probably have something to do with it.
The RF is pretty good looking, though the newer generations tend to have "evil reptilian eyes"-type [1] headlights and bodies with a kind of blunt chunkiness that a lot of modern cars have. I assume the intention is to impart a sense of muscularity, but to me that just looks misguided and embarrassingly macho, like the car equivalent of body building. I like the round front of the version shown in this 2012 article, was it ever made? [2] The RF's hood has those muscular side ridges which I think look terrible. Edit: The 2005 model has a round front like that [3], and is less evil.
(Agreed about the rest. I don't really know cars, so before I commented I just googled the various Miata generations and seem to have misread Wikipedia.)
I had a first-gen Miata. It looked great and handled well but it was quite impractical. No back seat, tiny trunk, and not even a powerful engine to get excited about. Then I moved to snow country where I could only drive it half the year because of its real wheel drive. Now I have a car that looks rather ordinary, has a huge trunk, a real back seat, four wheel drive, and which can easily cruise at 140 mph if I'm stupid enough to want to do so. The stealth approach is better for me.
Sure, a small sports car is less practical than a big one. But sports cars exist, so that is irrelevant to the whole question; clearly there are some people who don't want a big, ugly car.
By analogy, Asus (and several other brands) now makes laptops that look almost exactly like a MacBook Pro — unibody aluminium enclosure, glass screens and everything — at a tiny fraction of the price. So why won't anyone create a Porsche 911 replica that is as good-looking and as good to drive, only without the insanely high price?
I was trying to answer the question from my perspective but I did a poor job.
Impractical cars exist, but they sell in low volumes, so they have to be expensive because the tooling for any car is horrifically expensive -- much more so than for a laptop computer. A cheap 911 clone cannot exist because the body style is too impractical to sell in high volumes.
First-gen Mazda Miata is the only low-end car that I know that actually looks reasonably sleek and designed (the second-gen looks like a stupid ordinary car). It's no 911, but it has a nice retro charm.
A well-designed sports car doesn't need lots of power or anything else that should be particularly expensive. It just needs to look good.
There are many answers in this thread about performance, manufacturing tolerances, undermining your high-end brand etc., but none of that should apply here.
I'm asking partly because I think almost all modern cars are hideous, but I also can't afford a 911.