Spyker Cars has ambitious plans to increase annual sales sevenfold within two years with its new EUR198,000 (US$240,000) C8 Aileron.
Sales manager Peter van Rooy told Bloomberg the company wants to sell 250 C8 Ailerons in 2012. Spyker sold just 36 cars last year and a total of 214 since 2002.
The company, which held its initial public offering in May 2004, has been unprofitable since at least 2001 but Van Rooy said the boost in sales will also see the company move into profit in 2012.
Spyker is cutting the cost of making its supercar by moving production to CAPP Manufacturing in Coventry, England, and plans to capture US sales by offering an automatic transmission on the C8 Aileron for the first time in one of its cars, Van Rooy told the news service.
The option of automatic transmission will also appeal to buyers in Russia, China and the Middle East.
The company plans to hand over the first model to a Russian customer at the end of next month.
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By GlobalDataShifting the C8 Aileron to Coventry from Zeewolde in The Netherlands has allowed Spyker to almost halve the production time in the car from 500 and 275 hours. Van Rooy added that a further 80 jobs may be created in the UK as orders ramp up.
Bloomberg noted that Spyker’s peak production and sales year was 2006, when it built 94 cars and sold 74.
Van Rooy said the current C8 Spyder and C8 Laviolette models, which are built at Zeewolde will be phased out slowly.