Dacora's CEO Hopes to Revive the US's Ultra-Luxury Car Market

Newsweek

5 days ago

The modern age of electric vehicles will allow coachbuilding to make a resurgence. That high level of customization is the intended bread and butter for Dacora, a startup automaker that calls New York's Hudson Valley home.
Dacora's CEO and co-founder Kristie D'Ambrosio-Correll, who will speak at Newsweek's Women's Global Impact forum on August 5, grew up "under the hood" with her father, spending "many, many hours in the garage with him." She later "fell in love" with engineering, a career path that would lead from her schooling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) studying computer electrical engineering to Mirror, a startup company that created exercise equipment and was later acquired by Lululemon, as the Chief Technology Officer.
"I studied AI while I was in college, and really wanted to understand how innovation could be brought to the automotive space. In that time, Tesla was just emerging, so no one was really innovating in the automotive space," D'Ambrosio-Correll told Newsweek. Despite initially going into the consumer electronics space instead of the automotive industry, she never lost her love of cars.
That love bonded her with her husband, Eric, who felt similarly, having grown up in a family that restored classic vehicles.
Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Dacora
Instead of going into the automotive space straight out of college, D'Ambrosio-Correll went to work in consumer electronics. "[I] looked around and kind of saw that consumer electronics was where everything was happening at that time. And so, I went into the consumer electronics space instead," she said.
D'Ambrosio-Correll reminisced about a conversation she had with her father when she was a teen: "I said to him, 'What if I'm very successful and I make a lot of money? What's the best American car I can buy? Not the British version, not the Italian version... What's our version?' And we had a long conversation about Duesenberg and some older cars. But basically, he was like, 'There isn't one. There isn't an American ultra luxury vehicle."
She acknowledges that the Cadillac Celestiq, which retails for $340,000 and up, is the closest the industry comes to American ultra luxury, but Cadillac isn't exclusively an ultra-luxury brand in the way Rolls-Royce is. Dacora's models are priced to start significantly higher, closer to $500,000.
To get to today, D'Ambrosio-Correll and her husband, under the Dacora brand, completed two rounds of funding in 2024, and they debuted the car this year. "It's been kind of a lifetime in the making, but really a pretty short time from when we pressed go on it," she said.
Dacora plans to make its vehicles in the Hudson Valley, using artisans to create a coachbuilt model. "What we really want to do is bring an ultra-luxury brand back and do it in a way that's coachbuillt, similar to the cars of the 1930s, 1920s. A lot of you ask me this: 'Why has it not been done before?' You look at a lot of American cars, and you'll see they have a similar pattern. They start high and then they go mass market. And that has worked for many of them. It hasn't worked for all of them, but it has been a strategy," she said.
D'Ambrosio-Correll plans to bring vehicle making back to Upstate New York. "Historically, there's been many, many car companies from New York," she said. "I'm born and bred in New York, born and raised here. The Hudson Valley holds a lot of personal memories for me. It is where my family took countless vacations and holidays when I was a kid."
Her technology industry experience has made the Dacora sedan a human-centric, tech-forward vehicle. "I've worked in very, very large companies, and I worked at startups. The first thing I took away is my experience from Mirror was building immersive technology and really thinking 'human first.' Immersive experiences is something we were known for, and how to do that in a way that didn't feel like technology was breathing down your throat, but rather that it was about human connection," she said.
The CEO calls the relationship between humans and technology "sacred" and that technology should "not disrupt someone's experience" but rather complement it. "This car is very intimate, and it'll be part of your daily experiences," she said.
Dacora's new car sits in the sunshine, parked.
Dacora's new car sits in the sunshine, parked.
Dacora
The personal nature of a Dacora vehicle ownership experience leans on its coachbuilt nature and goes beyond the initial purchase, D'Ambrosio-Correll explained. "This is a relationship not only between us and the client, but also between the client, and their vehicle over time, and so that means being able to upgrade your upholstery, being able to swap out your interior," she said.
A variety of configurations are available – three, four, five or six seats – and clients can specify the type of console package they want with options like an espresso machine, bookshelf and bonsai garden on the menu.
"We have had many, many requests at this point for unique things... Let's say, on the weekends, this person has a family, and they spend time with them, and maybe they want to drive out to their Hamptons home, or they want to take a road trip and visit family. They can do so by swapping out that rear seat, and put in a bench seat with three so you can fit your three kids.
"We are the only direct-to-consumer brand in this price point. And so we really are able to have that constant conversation and communication with the client to meet their needs," she said.