A 964 sold for $95,000 here last month. This one is at $851,000.

Good morning. Ferrari told investors this week that it shipped 33 fewer cars than a year ago and made 13% more profit. If you've ever had to explain why a third set of wheels was a sound financial decision, print the release and leave it on the kitchen counter.

Today is about what people pay for things done the hard way: a 964 stripped to bare steel and rebuilt by hand in Los Angeles, a Lotus chassis glued together and baked in a Danish oven, and a quarter where the carmaker that sells options beat the carmaker that sells volume. It's also the first Friday of the month, so a reader's car takes the Garage Economics slot.

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

Let’s roll.

In October, a 1992 964 Carrera 2 we covered here sold for $95,000. This 1989 Carrera 2 left Stuttgart as roughly the same car. Then it went to Singer Vehicle Design in Los Angeles, and the gap between the two is now about $756,000 and still moving.

Singer, founded in 2009 by former Catherine Wheel frontman Rob Dickinson, strips each 964 to its steel unibody, welds in reinforcement, and replaces the fenders, bumpers, hood, and decklid with carbon fiber. This build was finished in September 2025, and the odometer shows 697 miles since. The car is offered on dealer consignment in Illinois with build sheets, literature, and accessories. Its Carfax history only starts in November 2022, which fits a non-US donor car that arrived shortly before Singer got hold of it.

What the money bought:

Singer's Classic Study pricing has been reported to start above $475,000, before the donor car and before options. Paint-to-sample Sapphire Blue with ghosted stripes, external fuel and oil fillers, and full-body paint protection film suggest the original owner said yes at most forks in the road.

The part I'd look at hardest is one most bidders never think about: how carbon panels live on a steel body. Carbon fiber barely grows with temperature, while steel grows about 12 millionths of its length per degree Celsius, so a fender bolted rigidly to a steel structure will fight it through every hot-cold cycle until the paint cracks or the gaps wander. Good builds solve it with slotted mounts, compliant bushings, and bonding only where the joint is designed for it. Singer's fit and finish has a strong reputation, and at 697 miles, the panels on this car have seen exactly one Midwest winter, almost certainly from inside a heated garage.

My call: $1.0 million to $1.1 million. A fresh 4.0 build with this little use doesn't come up often, and the buyer gets to skip the wait on a new commission. With the market bleeding this week, though, it's anyone's guess.

Ferrari reported third-quarter results on Tuesday. BMW followed on Wednesday. Both shipped fewer cars than a year ago, and the resemblance stops there.

Ferrari shipped 3,368 cars, down 33. Revenue rose 7% to €1.9 billion (about $2.13 billion), net profit climbed 13% to €431 million (about $484 million), and operating margin reached 29.7%. It raised full-year guidance again, crediting stronger-than-expected personalization spending, and said the order book now reaches into 2028. Shipments to mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan fell from 248 cars to 143. The quarter barely noticed.

BMW delivered 551,075 vehicles, down 6.3%, with China off about 25%. Operating profit in the car business fell 39.7% to €901 million, and margin dropped to 3.4% from 5.2%. Then BMW cut its full-year car-business margin forecast for the second time since June. The range was 4% to 6% at the start of the summer, became 1% to 3%, and now sits between minus 0.5% and plus 0.5%. Tariffs cost about 1.25 points of margin this quarter, accounting charges tied to its China joint venture took about 1.2 more, and fourth-quarter charges for retiring older models and batteries early are expected to cost roughly 2.5 points.

Run it per car:

Ferrari deliberately builds fewer cars than it could sell, so a 1% dip in shipments is a scheduling decision, and the margin comes from options and special series. BMW runs plants, engineering teams, and dealer networks sized for a China market that just shrank by a quarter. Those costs don't shrink with the sales, so every missing car takes a slice of margin with it.

BMW's side of the story isn't all bad. Demand for the Neue Klasse pushed its Debrecen, Hungary plant to three shifts early, fully electric cars hit 20% of deliveries, and Europe and the US both grew about 2.5%. Series production at Woodruff, South Carolina starts before the end of this year, and BMW says underlying margin before the one-time charges stays above 2%. Ferrari, for its part, tied its guidance to how the Middle East crisis plays out.

When the Elise launched in 1996, its bare chassis weighed about 68 kg, roughly 150 pounds and about half of an equivalent steel frame. It isn't welded. It's about 35 aluminum extrusions and three sheet parts, bonded with epoxy and backed up by fasteners, developed with Hydro Aluminium and assembled in Denmark. The Series 2 cars that reached the US for 2005 kept the same bonded-extrusion recipe, revised for crash rules.

Lotus had three reasons not to weld:

The joints interlock tongue-and-groove with wide, flat bonding faces. Raised ridges on the mating surfaces hold the glue line at 0.5 mm, because the adhesive is expensive and Lotus wasn't paying for extra. Before bonding, every surface is acid-etched and anodized. A single-part epoxy goes on by hand, and the whole chassis cures for about 40 minutes at 200°C (around 390°F). The adhesive is rated at 35 MPa in tension. On paper, a bond face the size of a business card could carry roughly 35,000 pounds-force.

Adhesives are strong when a joint is loaded in shear and much weaker when something tries to peel it open, which is exactly what a crash does. So each chassis also gets more than 130 thread-forming steel drive screws. They hold joints together under peel loads and clamp the assembly while it travels to the oven. Where aluminum touches steel, coatings and coated shims keep the two apart, since bare contact invites galvanic corrosion.

The economics sealed it. An extrusion die cost a few thousand dollars. A stamping die for pressed steel panels cost hundreds of thousands. For a car Lotus originally planned to build at 750 a year, that difference was the business case.

This month's reader, John H., wanted two things that rarely share a car: raw, uncompromising performance and open-top cruising. His answer was a 2005 Lotus Elise.

He watched the auction sites with a strict $40,000 budget, then placed the first bid he had ever made on Cars & Bids and won. The hammer fell at $39,500, which left a comfortable $500 for whatever a Lotus that had been sitting might need. When he went to inspect it in Greenwich, it was up on jack stands with a flat tire. A slightly rough car with promise was exactly what he was after, since the plan was a summer daily driver, not a concours lawn. The deal closed on May 15, 2023.

The car had about 34,300 miles, the six-speed manual, and the Touring Pack: leather, carpet, power windows, an upgraded stereo, extra sound deadening, and an insulated soft top. On a car engineered around leaving things out, it's the package for people who wanted a few of them back. 2005 was the Elise's first model year in America, and Lotus federalized it with Toyota's 1.8-liter 2ZZ-GE, which makes 190 hp at 7,800 rpm and switches to a high-lift cam profile near the top of the rev range. At about 1,975 pounds, that's roughly 10.4 pounds per horsepower, through a chassis you now know was cured in an oven.

Two problems defined the early ownership, and both are worth knowing about if you're shopping one:

He has put about 8,000 miles on it since 2023, which is a healthy number for a car that only comes out when the top can come off.

If you're shopping a 2005 to 2007 Elise, his experience boils down to two cheap habits: have someone look closely at any harness work a previous owner did, and keep the car on a battery tender whenever it sits.

That's a wrap. See you Monday — same inbox, lower gear.

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