With an extensive background in marketing in the motorsports and automotive industry, Dany Bahar of Ares Performance comes with an impressive CV for offering customers the opportunity to design their own cars.
Bahar launched Ares Performance last year. Following his key executive roles at Ferrari and Lotus, Bahar set up his own firm in Italy specializing in the design of “bodykits, interior upgrades and power improvements.” Is anyone else doing this? Well, it could just be the case that Bahar is one step ahead of the computer giant Mac. In a recent article in Extreme Tech, Bill Howard suggested “the time is ripe for Think Different vehicles.” He said, “Great things may come when the automaker, not just the design, is a fresh sheet of paper.”
But even with Howard’s idea, car design seems to still just be relegated to design technology in the dashboard, giving the driver “adaptive cruise control, blind spot detection and lane departure warning,” etc. Bahar, on the other hand, is offering something much more holistic. He feels that if one is spending over a million dollars on a top car like a Bugatti, they might not want to see another 400 just the same as it on the road. He believes: “Having something you cannot buy anywhere else is what fascinates clients. This was the main reason we launched Ares… to take, for example, a Bugatti and give it a makeover, a real makeover. We don’t touch what Bugatti is famous for: the engine, gearbox, fantastic aerodynamics. We give it a new look that is whatever the client wants so it’s a Bugatti but covered with a different skin.”
Today, Ares is providing clients with “unlimited personalization, tailored to perfection,” via its philosophy, ‘beyond performance, beyond design, beyond expectation.’
