by Brad Anderson
- Porsche faces a $300 million dealer lawsuit heading to trial in Miami.
- The Collection says its Porsche sales have fallen into a “death spiral.”
- Company claims dealer’s sales have been declining for over a decade.
Porsche will face trial in the United States next March over a $300 million lawsuit brought by a major luxury car dealership in Florida. The case, filed by The Collection in 2022, claims the German manufacturer pressured the dealer to build a standalone Porsche showroom and, when it refused, began restricting its vehicle supply.
Read: Florida Dealer Sues Porsche For Allegedly Trying To Force It To Build Standalone Store
It’s alleged that in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic, Porsche sought greater control over its American sales network, urging dealers to construct exclusive facilities dedicated solely to its brand.
Post-Pandemic Pressure
When The Collection first took legal action, the luxury car landscape was in flux. The chip shortage had just subsided, leaving manufacturers like Porsche in a seller’s market. Demand outstripped supply, and cars often sold before they even touched the showroom floor. Prices soared, and buyers paid premiums.
As the Financial Times reported, analysts referred to this shift as “the Ferrarification of Porsche,” describing the brand’s pivot toward scarcity and steeper prices. “Porsche, coming out of Covid, pushed pricing really, really hard and they just kept driving the price up on everything,” independent luxury car analyst Scott Sherwood told the paper. “If you’re looking to create loyalty and repeat customers, that’s not how you do it.”
Porsche’s price escalation wasn’t only a product of high demand. Dealers were setting their own numbers, and the same model could vary dramatically in cost depending on the markup. By 2022, Porsche seemingly wanted to bring some order to the chaos, tightening its control through brand-exclusive showrooms.
Who Holds the Keys?
Against that backdrop, The Collection, which also represents brands like Ferrari and Aston Martin, says Porsche urged it to invest tens of millions in a new facility for Porsche models in either Kendall or Cutler Bay in the Miami area. The dealer declined, calling the proposed sites “remote, suburban locations” with “relatively zero market for Porsches.”
The dealer believes Porsche violated Florida’s dealer franchise laws and caused The Collection’s sales to slip into a “death spiral.” Porsche denies this, noting that the dealer “intentionally decided not to invest in a new exclusive Porsche facility, despite experiencing declining sales of new Porsche-brand vehicles for nearly a decade.”
Parent company Porsche AG has repeatedly tried to recuse itself from the case as a foreign entity, but a judge in Miami recently dismissed these requests.
“This litigation is about the relations between dealers, their distributors, and manufacturers certainly throughout the state of Florida, but because much of America has similar regulations at issue, the litigation implicates the industry throughout the country,” Burstyn Law founder Sean Burstyn, who is representing The Collection, told The Financial Times.
The Collection also claims that after it declined Porsche’s request for a standalone showroom, the manufacturer began withholding pool-car allocations. These vehicles, distributed at Porsche’s discretion, can make up as much as 20 percent of a dealer’s total supply.
