Ferrari has historically sold street cars at outrageous profit margins in order to finance their racing efforts. They’ve never been a big company, and have only recently started strengthening their ties to Fiat in order to actually try and make a buck. Lamborghini exists… well, I think because of raw Italian chutzpah, but they historically haven’t been interested in racing and only recently became notably profitable under VW, where they can leverage their technology in a wide range of super-ish cars.
Meanwhile, Toyota, GM, Ford, et al are publicly traded companies with a duty to their shareholders to make gobs of money, and the way you make gobs of money in the car business is by selling lots and lots of cars. Low slung 2-seaters ain’t gonna cut it.
To the extent that companies have tried - Honda Del Sol, Audi TT, Hyundai Tiburon (sort of), they prefer to using an existing architecture in order to cut down on costs. In most cases, that means a bulky mac strut suspension and certain hard design points (like the location of the fuel tank, the lower windshield attachment point, etc) that are cost-prohibitive to change, and these realities will compromise the shape and sexiness of the resulting car. Even cars like the aforementioned Fiero utilized a buttload of off-the-shelf components that resulted in lots of compromises in terms of style.
In cases where the companies have done a ground-up design, they’ve sometimes succeeded, sometimes not. The Miata is a nice little package, but it’s not exactly sexy. The 93 RX-7 is dead sexy, and frankly is as beautiful as any Ferrari of the era. The Pontiac Solstice is a great looking car, although it doesn’t exactly aim to be a Lambo.
More often than not, though, the cars either don’t make a profit, or they sell in such small numbers that they’re rather meaningless for the bottom line. In tough economic times like this, most automakers have shelved plans for similar niche sports cars.
Companies that rely entirely on the sports car niche often fold in rough times because they don’t have the volume to ride it through. TVR made sexy cars in England and they’re gone now. Lotus has a history of barely surviving, and their new CEO is fattening up their cars to appeal to a larger audience because he realizes that Lotus can’t stick around forever doing what it’s doing.
So, the tl;dr version is that it’s harder than it looks to make a car look like a Ferrari and still make money on it. And there’s always fiberglass body kits and 25 year old Fieros if you want to make your own.
