Sales of luxury cars have absolutely skyrocketed - it seems every other driver is in a BMW or Mercedes.
As MMM said, it used to be that luxury implied a certain level of badass - you needed cash to afford something, which you most likely earned. Now you don't.
With that said, to build on the previous topic of supercars rarely being profitable. High-end doesn't pay the bills. The R&D required to sell a high-end car costs so much that the high-end car can't be sold in enough quantities or at a high enough price to pay both production costs and R&D costs - for most supercars. This is true for most things - cars, computer components, you name it.
What drives the revenue, and profit, for almost all of these products, is the low end. High end has excellent margins, and high end acts as advertisement for the low end, and the low end gets bought. This is why the three-teir product line is so popular: you have phone x1, x2, x3; x3 is too expensive, but x2 is just a bit more expensive than x1 with a major plus side, so most people buy the x2. But plenty buy the x1, fewer than those who buy the x3.
So Porsche, for example, was not doing so hot - until they released the boxster at something like $40k. That's a high-end car for many people, but it's a low-end for Porsche, and it may well have saved the company. Pay attention to the luxury cars on the road: BMW 3-series, Mercedes 2- and 3-series, Porsche Boxster, Audi 4 (or now 3), and so on. Luxury cars that ain't. At least a 3-series beamer is a nice car; a 2-series mercedes is a piece of shit.
So, we have credit, and we have cheap versions of luxury cars that are more accessible.
Ferrari had Maserati for example, basically as its low-end version. Lambos have $200k-ish models. Rolls has Bentley. Actually, this has all gotten much fuzzier than it used to be because Volkswagen owns seemingly most of the supercar and high-end luxury car lines (a bit of an exaggeration but not that much).
Very few girls care about fancy cars, as it turns out. I mean, $200k, they might notice - but there's hardly a lady out there who cares about classic muscle or whatever. And you might be surprised how many girls you have to talk to leaning on your ferrari before one cares.
You know what a girl wants from a guy's car? For it to be
clean.
Now, you're not gonna attract a girl off the street with your Civic, but once she wants to get to know you better - your clean civic won't scare her off; your corvette filled with McBeetus wrappers just might.
