Lamborghini Faqs

Next year is going to prove to be a good year. Especially for Steve Barney, a longtime dealer of luxury cars is taking his Lamborghinis to Greensboro to turn things around and make business more worth while for him.

Barney, 64, is spending $1.2 million to build a new dealership on West Wendover Avenue, just a hop from downtown. The swank new digs of Lamborghini Carolinas will open early next year and include a display catwalk for the Italian cars, an upper floor full of used luxury vehicles and a cappuccino bar.

That’s a far cry from Barney’s current outpost on Summerfield Road, where blazing yellow Lamborghinis mingle with used Porsches, Maseratis and Ferraris around a simple brick building. But cars with six-digit price tags, think $200,000 to $400,000, can’t be shown off just anywhere. “This is what Lamborghini is doing,” Barney said, describing worldwide showrooms with the same carpet, the same tile, the same lights and the same furniture. “This pretty building out here in Summerfield doesn’t conform to their standards.”

That wasn’t an issue in 2002, when Barney won dealership rights to North and South Carolina, east Tennessee and southern Virginia. At the time, he’d been running Sport Auto in Summerfield for almost two years after selling his stake in Foreign Cars Italia and making a failed attempt to relax. “All I was doing was breaking out of the boredom of retirement by putting up a small, tasteful dealership in the small town where I live,” said Barney, who had sold 75 percent of Foreign Cars Italia to an executive at Sherrill Furniture and the rest to Hickory-based Paramount Automotive Group.

But things have changed some at Lamborghini since the Italian sports car maker was picked up by Volkswagen’s Audi unit in 1998. The company has experienced a publicity boom, with chief executives and celebrities jumping behind the wheel and helping to drive sales from a few hundred cars in the late ’90s to nearly 2,100 last year. Barney, who receives 24 of these carefully controlled Lamborghinis each year, sells most of his cars within the area, to doctors, executives and bankers, mostly.

Moving those sales to Greensboro and adding showroom space might help him grow that annual allotment and bring in new shoppers. “Our comment we’ve always gotten, and we continue to get, from residents of Greensboro is that they didn’t know we were out here,” he said of the Summerfield location. That’s no surprise, as most of Barney’s advertising is national and appears online or in automotive magazines. Customers from across the country contact him for high-end used cars, which he sells at a rate of 15 to 18 a month.

Some of these used cars will make their way to Wendover, where Barney, ever unconventional in his approach, has carved out a niche far away from the endless procession of dealerships for which that road is known. Surrounded by offices, restaurants and shops, Barney will bring more variety to the used-car mix, including BMW, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz and maybe a Jaguar or two. “We’ll just have to learn what sells in different locations,” he said. “We don’t know. It will be a learning process.” Barney will continue to sell used cars at Sport Auto in Summerfield.