Most Expensive Cars Sold In Auction
This is a list of the most expensive cars sold in auto auctions through the traditional bidding process, consisting of those that attracted headline grabbing publicity, mainly for the high price their new owners have paid. A 1954 Mercedes-Benz race car sold for a record $30 million at an auction in England on July 12, 2013. While collectible cars have been sold privately for more, this is the highest price ever paid for a car at a public auction. The record was previously held by a 1957 Ferrari Testa Rossa Prototype which sold at an auction in California in 2011 for $16.4 million. The Mercedes W196R Formula 1 race car, powered by a 2.5-litre 8-cylinder engine, was one of a group of race cars that won 9 World Championship-qualifying Grand Prix races in 1954 and '55. The previous record was $16,390,000 for a 1957 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa, sold on August 21, 2011 in an auction hosted by Gooding & Company in Pebble Beach Equestrian Center, the site of the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in Pebble Beach, California, United States.
The 1904 Rolls-Royce 10 hp Two-Seater is currently listed on the Guinness World Records as the most expensive veteran car to be sold, at the price of US$7,254,290 ($8,031,993 in 2013), on a Bonhams auction held at Olympia in London on December 3, 2007.
This list only consists of those that have been sold for at least $3 million in auction sales during a traditional bidding process, inclusive of the mandatory buyers premium and does not include private, unsuccessful (failing to reach its reserve price, incomplete) and out of auction sales.
Read more about Most Expensive Cars Sold In Auction: Common Contributing Factors, World Records, Annual Records, Absolute Record
Famous quotes containing the words expensive, cars, sold and/or auction:
“The mystical nature of American consumption accounts for its joylessness. We spend a great deal of time in stores, but if we don’t seem to take much pleasure in our buying, it’s because we’re engaged in the acts of sacrifice and self-definition. Abashed in the presence of expensive merchandise, we recognize ourselves ... as supplicants admitted to a shrine.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.”
—Al Capp (1909–1979)
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)