a service of the News Record, Greensboro, North Carolina
SUMMERFIELD Say ciao, Summerfield. Come February, Steve Barney likely won’t be peddling new Italian sports cars on Summerfield Road. No, this longtime dealer of luxury cars has plans to take his Lamborghinis on a road trip to Greensboro. Barney, 64, is spending $1.2 million to build a new dealership on West Wendover Avenue, just a hop from downtown.
The swank new digs of Lamborghini Carolinas will open early next year and include a display catwalk for the Italian cars, an upper floor full of used luxury vehicles and a cappuccino bar. That’s a far cry from Barney’s current outpost on Summerfield Road, where blazing yellow Lamborghinis mingle with used Porsches, Maseratis and Ferraris around a simple brick building. But cars with six-digit price tags think $200,000 to $400,000 can’t be shown off just anywhere.
This is what Lamborghini is doing, Barney said, describing worldwide showrooms with the same carpet, the same tile, the same lights and the same furniture. This pretty building out here in Summerfield doesn’t conform to their standards. That wasn’t an issue in 2002, when Barney won dealership rights to North and South Carolina, east Tennessee and southern Virginia.
At the time, he’d been running Sport Auto in Summerfield for almost two years after selling his stake in Foreign Cars Italia and making a failed attempt to relax. All I was doing was breaking out of the boredom of retirement by putting up a small, tasteful dealership in the small town where I live, said Barney, who had sold 75 percent of Foreign Cars Italia to an executive at Sherrill Furniture and the rest to Hickory-based Paramount Automotive Group.