Environmentalists will want to cover their eyes: The least fuel-efficient luxury cars make for a fantastic-looking group of automobiles.
Included in the bunch are Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Maybachs from DaimlerChrysler. Recently, two European manufacturers, Bugatti and Spyker, began selling their exotic cars in America, and they can already count their otherworldly sports coupes among the market's most wasteful cars. The $1.2 million Bugatti Veyron 16.4 is, along with Lamborghini's Murciélago two-door, the market's least fuel-efficient luxury vehicle.
Of course, people who buy blue-blooded sedans such as Rolls-Royces or exotic sports cars such as Ferraris know they're in for gas guzzling. And they can probably draw upon deep pockets to fill their fast-emptying tanks.
View a slideshow of the most gas-guzzling luxury cars.
What's surprising is that among the very pricey cars on our list of the market's least fuel-efficient 2006- and 2007-model luxury cars, one finds more commonplace vehicles. For example, in the slideshow, you will find Ford Motor's Land Rover LR3 SUV, which starts at $39,000, and its Lincoln Mark LT pickup, which starts at $40,000.
We based our luxury-car rankings not on city/highway mileage but on annual fueling costs as determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, because in many cases, one car has better city mileage than another, but not better highway mileage. Annual fueling cost -- which the EPA calculates based on 15,000 annual miles per car and fuel prices that get updated every week ($3.15 per gallon for premium at press time, $2.95 per gallon for regular) -- is the best arbiter of the bottom line for fuel economy.
While the annual fueling costs on our list range only from $2,627 to $4,725, the vehicle prices range from the million-dollar Bugatti to the comparatively affordable Land Rover LR3.
If a car was not ranked by the EPA, we did not include it in our calculations. Some manufacturers provide their own fuel-economy figures, but these numbers are usually estimates prepared to give the press something to write about while the automakers wait for the EPA to provide official testing results.
In our research, we only considered one entry per nameplate: the most expensive one to fuel. For example, Mercedes-Benz's E-Class line will generate different fueling costs depending on what kind of model you get: sedan or wagon, rear-wheel or all-wheel drive, big engine or small engine.
Perhaps the most tricky distinction is what counts as a luxury car and what does not. For the most part, the difference came down to brand identities. We consider Honda Motor's Acura and General Motors' Cadillac subsidiaries luxury brands; we do not think of Buick or Hummer as such, even though the crude Hummer H2 SUV starts at a luxury-like $54,000.
Some non-luxury brands produce the occasional luxury car -- for example, the excellent but anomalous $67,000 Volkswagen Phaeton sedan. Then there are some sports cars with premium prices, such as the Chevrolet Corvette and Dodge Viper SRT-10. We did not include these vehicles in our calculations because they are more about sportiness -- way more -- than about luxury. The Ferrari sports cars, however, achieve a sufficient balance of luxury and performance to count as premium automobiles.
We only evaluated cars issued by their original manufacturers, not modifications of other companies' vehicles. We also excluded from consideration such purpose-built, limited-edition body styles as the limousine and hearse versions of Cadillac's DTS flagship. (We did, however, count the armored DTS in our tally, because it is a treatment of a typical DTS four-door.)
Though we had intended to rank the ten least fuel-efficient luxury cars, we found that each ranking point resulted in a tie. In one case -- fifth place -- we concluded that a 16-way tie was in effect.
You will find, as we did, that as much as the cars in the slideshow are an affront to the environment, they are also a feast for the eyes.
