The C2 Corvette is usually discussed as a styling triumph, and it was. But styling alone does not explain why a 1963 Sting Ray, a 1965 big-block car and a 1967 L88 sit in three very different tiers of the collector market. What separates them is factory intent. Chevrolet built the 1963–1967 Corvette Sting Ray as a design statement, an engineering project and, in a handful of cases, a barely disguised race car, and those motives did not always agree with one another. The tension is what collectors are really pricing.

Here are ten details that explain it.

1. Sales nearly tripled in a single year

Corvette production in 1962, the final year of the first generation, was 14,531. In 1963 Chevrolet built 21,513 Sting Rays, an increase of roughly 148 percent, split almost evenly between 10,919 convertibles and 10,594 coupes. Across the five-year run, the C2 totaled just under 118,000 cars. That is a large number, and it matters: the C2 is not scarce as a model. Scarcity lives in specific bodies, engines and options, which is where careful buyers should spend their attention.

2. The split window lasted one year, over an internal objection

The 1963 coupe is the only C2 with a divided rear window. Bill Mitchell, GM’s styling chief, wanted the central spine because it carried the roofline into the tail. Zora Arkus-Duntov, the engineer responsible for Corvette performance, disliked it because it compromised rear visibility. Duntov won the argument for 1964. A one-year feature that its own engineer wanted gone is a recipe for lasting desirability, and the market has treated the split-window coupe accordingly. It is the car most people picture when they hear “Sting Ray,” even though it is not the best one to drive.

3. The shape began as a private racing project

The Sting Ray’s lineage runs through the 1959 XP-87 Stingray Racer, a race car Mitchell pursued after General Motors withdrew from factory racing. Peter Brock’s early sketches informed the body, and Larry Shinoda, whose career we recently looked at in our Today in Collector Car History entry on the designer behind the Sting Ray, turned it into the roadster that became the production car’s visual blueprint. The tapered, fin-flanked silhouette was not invented for a showroom. It was invented for a racetrack and domesticated afterward.

4. The roof has a German ancestor

The coupe’s pointed, tapering greenhouse is attributed to the streamlined 1937–1938 Adler-Trumpf. It is a useful reminder that Detroit design in this period was global in its references, and that the C2’s look owes as much to prewar European aerodynamics as to American jet-age styling.

5. Independent rear suspension changed what a Corvette was

Beneath the fiberglass, the 1963 car replaced the old solid rear axle with fully independent rear suspension, using a single transverse leaf spring. It made the Sting Ray the first American production sports car with four-wheel independent suspension. For collectors, this is the detail that turns the C2 from a pretty roadster into a serious driver’s car, and it is why the model holds up so well when it is actually used. Four-wheel disc brakes followed as standard equipment in 1965, which is part of why 1965–1967 cars drive more convincingly than their early siblings.

6. The Z06 was a race package disguised as an option code

Regular Production Option Z06 for 1963 paired the fuel-injected 327 rated at 360 horsepower with a four-speed, upgraded brakes and suspension, and a 36.5-gallon “Tanker” fuel tank for endurance racing. Only 199 were built. The Z06 is the earliest example of a pattern that defines the C2 market: the most valuable cars are those on which Chevrolet spent the least effort making them comfortable.

7. Five Grand Sport cars were built, and they are not really Corvettes

Duntov’s lightweight Grand Sport program was meant to take on Carroll Shelby’s Cobra, but corporate policy against factory racing ended it after five cars. That scarcity, and the fact that these were purpose-built competition machines, is why the result in our recent report on the $18.7 million Grand Sport repriced one car rather than the model line. Chassis 003 totaled $18,705,000 with commission at RM Sotheby’s Monterey sale. The lesson for buyers is that the headline belongs to the Grand Sport. The market for a standard 1965 convertible, such as the Sunfire Yellow example Freije & Freije offered, trades on entirely different logic.

8. The big-block arrived late, and in small numbers

The 396-cubic-inch engine arrived in late 1965 in 425-horsepower form, and only 2,157 Corvettes were built with it that year. A 427 followed in 1966, and for 1967 the top street engine was the 427/435. These are the cars many collectors consider the C2’s performance peak, and the low 1965 count makes that first big-block year worth knowing about even among enthusiasts who assume all big-blocks are equally common.

9. The L88 was rated below the engine it was meant to beat

Chevrolet rated the 1967 L88 at 430 horsepower, five less than the 435-horsepower 427 offered on the same car. The figure was deliberately modest; real output is generally estimated at 550 to 600. Only 20 L88 Corvettes were built in 1967, followed by 80 in 1968 and 116 in 1969, for 216 across the three years. Chevrolet discouraged casual buyers with a price roughly $2,000 over the $4,388 base car, mandatory competition hardware, and no heater. A red-on-red 1967 L88 coupe sold for $3.85 million at Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale in 2014. Later cars are also instructive: read our analysis of a 1969 L88 convertible at auction with a replacement engine to see how much weight collectors place on original drivetrains.

10. Preservation is the real tie-breaker

Because the C2 was built in large numbers, documentation and originality separate good cars from great ones. Tank stickers, build sheets, matching-number drivetrains, factory color combinations and judged results from the NCRS or Bloomington Gold all move value. Corvette history is also well curated; the National Corvette Museum’s collections facility shows how seriously the community treats the record of these cars.

What it means for collectors

The C2 is not one market. It is at least four: the split-window coupe that buyers want for design, the 1965–1967 car that drivers want for capability, the Z06 and big-block cars that performance specialists chase, and the L88 and Grand Sport cars that function as race-car artifacts. Collectors rarely pay a premium for horsepower alone. They pay for evidence that Chevrolet meant it. If you strip the prices from this story, what remains is a simple guide for any buyer: find the cars where the factory’s intent is documented and original, and be skeptical of anything that is merely beautiful.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Ford has spent the past three years doing something collectors understand instinctively and manufacturers rarely do well: putting its history in one place. The result is the Ford Vault, a 79,000-square-foot facility in Romulus, Michigan, set inside a former Amazon fulfillment center, where roughly 125 cars from the company’s U.S. Heritage Fleet now sit under a single roof. Reports differ on the exact count, with some accounts citing about 150 vehicles, but the number is not the story. The structure is.

A Working Archive, Not a Showroom

Ted Ryan, Ford’s archives and heritage brand manager, and the company describe the Vault as a working archive, a place where current designers and engineers can study the ideas and experiments that shaped the brand. Ford CEO Jim Farley reportedly pushed for a U.S. collection comparable to those the company already maintains overseas. The difference between a display fleet and a reference library is significant. A display fleet is curated to flatter. A reference library has to keep the awkward cars too: the proof-of-concepts, the experiments, the machines that explain a decision rather than celebrate one.

The mix reflects that. Ford has said the collection includes more than 60 concept vehicles and roughly 50 race cars, alongside Hollywood Mustangs, historic police cruisers, a 1938 ambulance and World War II-era military vehicles, among them a 1941 Ford GP. Two Ford GTs reportedly greet arrivals at the entrance beside a 1910 Model T, a pairing that bookends Ford’s story from mass-market revolution to a modern supercar. Collectors following the first-generation Ford GT Heritage Edition market will recognize how deliberately that second chapter echoes the first.

The Cars That Explain the Collection

The most revealing car may be the least famous. A 2005 Mustang GT proof-of-concept, nicknamed “Johnny Cash” by Ford engineers after the song “One Piece at a Time,” reportedly paved the way for the Shelby GT350. It is being displayed for the first time. Collectors tend to chase production cars, yet a prototype like this documents how a modern Mustang performance model was actually argued into existence. It is the kind of vehicle that matters to historians long before it matters to the market, and Ford is the only party that could have kept it together with its paperwork.

Motorsport is the other anchor. The Vault includes the first three finishers from Le Mans in 1966, the result dramatized in Ford v Ferrari. For readers who track the GT40 Mk II or the early prototype roadsters that come to auction, seeing the factory’s own cars gathered in one place sets a benchmark for what originality and continuity look like. It also reinforces why the Mustang remains, as we have argued, the king of collectible American cars: its story is documented from the drawing board to the checkered flag.

What Serious Collectors Should Notice

Two acquisitions deserve attention. The 1910 right-hand-drive Model T was built in the United Kingdom and stayed there until 2025, when it joined the Heritage Fleet. A 1973 Mustang convertible used in The Mary Tyler Moore Show was sold in 1974, remained in private hands for decades, and was bought by Ford last year; its body was restored in 1999 while the interior is original. A pickup once owned by Jay Leno, a 1934 Flathead Ford, is also reported to be among the cars on hand.

The point is not that Ford is shopping aggressively. The reporting does not say how much the company buys, what it intends to keep versus sell, or how its U.S. fleet compares in depth with its overseas holdings. The point is that when a manufacturer with an archive of this size still buys back a car with a verified chain of ownership, it is acknowledging something collectors already know. A factory can restore a car. It cannot restore the chain of custody.

That is the lesson worth taking from the Vault. Provenance, documented use and original components are the things even a manufacturer cannot recreate, which is why they keep commanding attention at every level of the market. Whether Ford’s interest in its own history becomes a meaningful factor for buyers of Ford-related cars is not something the evidence establishes, and we would not speculate. But anyone who owns a Ford with a clean paper trail should note that the company with the deepest archive in the business still values the same things they do.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

In June 2023, Propstore asked $1 million to $2 million for a Batpod, and by published accounts the room declined. This December the same motorcycle returns with an estimate of £450,000 to £900,000, roughly $594,000 to $1.19 million at Propstore’s own conversion. In dollar terms, that is about 40 percent lower at both ends of the range. The sale is the Winter Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction, December 4–6, with the Batpod leading the first day’s session at BAFTA, 195 Piccadilly, London.

The number is not the story. The repricing is. A vehicle with no title argument, no matching-numbers argument and no mechanical-originality argument is being asked to find its level on one thing only: what the camera saw. That makes it one of the cleaner tests of how collectors value screen-used vehicles right now.

A Vehicle Defined by What It Isn’t

The Batpod was conceived by Christopher Nolan and production designer Nathan Crowley, and special effects supervisor Chris Corbould built six examples for The Dark Knight. Honda-powered, with a bespoke chassis, fibreglass bodywork and oversized racing tyres at each end, it was designed to look like nothing a manufacturer would sell. Propstore says this is the only one of the six that Warner Bros. has officially released.

That scarcity matters, but not for the reason it would on a Ferrari. Six built is a production number only in the loosest sense; there is no marque registry to consult and almost no public record of comparable sales to set a benchmark. What the scarcity does is concentrate the question. If Warner Bros. has released only one, a buyer is paying for a studio-sanctioned example, and the lot comes with a Warner Bros. certificate of authenticity.

Condition is where car people should read carefully. The Batpod is offered as a non-running object, as reported from the lot notes, with fluids drained and the battery, fuel tank and throttle controls removed. A hero prop of this kind was built for the lens. When it sold in 2016, Guinness World Records described the hero Batpod as largely non-functioning. Nobody should bid on this lot as a motorcycle.

Screen-Matching Is the Provenance

The lot is catalogued as Batman’s light-up hero Batpod from The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Propstore ties it to the Joker chase through distinctive marks and scratches on the right-hand side, a process known as screen-matching: identifying a physical object in specific frames of the finished film by its damage, wear and details.

Collectors of road cars will recognize the logic. A chassis number, a factory build record or a documented race history works because it ties a physical object to an event, and screen-matching does the same job with the film itself as the archive. The difference is that the evidence is more interpretive than a stamped number, which is why the authenticating party matters. A Warner Bros. certificate and a specialist auction house’s matching work are doing the work that a marque registry does elsewhere.

That is also why this market cannot be read as a car market with a costume. The object’s value rests on documentation and on an event that millions of people have watched, and the documentation is a frame of film.

A Bracket Between a Record and an Empty Room

The price history frames the estimate. In September 2016, Propstore sold a hero Batpod from The Dark Knight Rises for £312,000 including buyer’s premium against a pre-sale estimate of £60,000 to £80,000, which Guinness recognizes as the highest price paid for a Batpod at auction. Reporting on the current lot traces it to that sale and then to the unsold 2023 Los Angeles offering. Propstore has not published a full ownership chain that we could review, so treat that lineage as reported rather than confirmed.

If it is the same machine, the arithmetic is instructive. The current low estimate sits at roughly 1.4 times the 2016 price, and the high estimate at roughly 2.9 times. A decade ago the market paid a record for the bike. In 2023 it declined an ask of roughly two and a half to five times that price. The present bracket is Propstore’s attempt to find the clearing price between the two, and it is a more credible exercise than the 2023 figure was. Estimates are set before buyer’s premium, and the 2016 result included it, so the comparison is directionally useful rather than exact.

What Serious Buyers Should Watch

The Batpod is the purest version of a question running through the film-car market this month. In our look at the Batman Returns Batmobile at Julien’s, we argued that bidders are buying screen time rather than steel. The Batpod removes the steel altogether. There is no donor Chevrolet underneath it and no drivetrain story to rescue the case if the screen story is not strong enough.

Terms matter as much as price. The Batmobile’s Lot 13 carries a formal agreement with Warner Bros. Consumer Products, which we examined in what that rulebook does to a $5–7 million estimate. Any bidder on the Batpod should ask the same question about intellectual-property conditions, display and resale restrictions, because a motorcycle that cannot be ridden has little value to its owner beyond the right to show it and the right to sell it later.

Provenance does not guarantee liquidity. We saw that with the Elvis-delivered Honda Scrambler that missed its reserve, and it is the same reason we have been watching how a bankruptcy puts the Rain Man Buick’s provenance to its test. The market rewards documentation it can trust and punishes the ask that outruns it. The Batpod’s estimate reads like a seller who has learned that lesson.

Two other lots in the sale are worth watching as context: Christian Bale’s complete Batman Begins Batsuit, estimated at roughly $165,000 to $330,000, and the wider 1,400-lot sale, which Propstore puts at a combined pre-sale estimate of $13.2 million. The Batpod is on view in the lobby of The Cumberland Hotel, London, through November 29, with a public exhibition of highlight lots there from November 19 to 22. Bidding for the film and television session opens December 4 at 3 p.m. GMT, with in-room, online, absentee and telephone bidding available through the Propstore catalogue.

Film vehicles are priced by what the camera saw, not by what the engine does. The Batpod will test whether collectors will pay for that on a machine with no steel story to lean on. A result inside the estimate would suggest that documented screen use can reset after a failed ask. A result below it would say the 2016 record was the peak. Either answer is useful to anyone building a position in screen-used vehicles.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

On Nov. 13, 1997, Larry Shinoda died at 67 at his home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, while waiting for a kidney transplant. He was the designer who helped turn Bill Mitchell’s Stingray Racer into the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray, worked on the Mako Shark concepts that shaped the 1968 Corvette, and then styled the 1969 Ford Mustang Boss 302. Few designers have a hand in collector icons at both Chevrolet and Ford, and that range is why his name keeps surfacing in auction catalogs and Hall of Fame rolls.

What happened on Nov. 13, 1997

Shinoda died of heart failure after dealing with kidney problems that began in 1996. The National Corvette Museum, which inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1998, lists the date of his death as Nov. 13, 1997. He was 67. Shortly before he died, Chrysler settled a long-running dispute with him over the design that became the Jeep Grand Cherokee, paying him more than $200,000.

From Manzanar and hot rods to Detroit

Lawrence Kiyoshi Shinoda was born in Los Angeles on March 25, 1930. As a boy during World War II, he and his family were held at the Manzanar camp in California. After the war he studied at the Art Center College of Design and built competitive hot rods, including the “Chopstick Specials.” In 1955 he won the “A” Hot Roadster class at the first NHRA U.S. Nationals.

He moved to Detroit in 1954 and worked briefly at Ford and Packard. At Packard he designed the body and paint scheme of the John Zink Special, the Watson-built Offenhauser car that Pat Flaherty drove to victory in the 1956 Indianapolis 500. He joined General Motors that September and contributed to the bat-wing fins of the 1959 Chevrolet.

The Stingray Racer and the 1963 Sting Ray

At GM, Shinoda joined Bill Mitchell’s Studio X. Shinoda was given the job of shaping a special body for the Corvette SS test car, the mule chassis from GM’s 1957 racing program that the company shut down after Sebring. In 1959 Mitchell bought the car for a dollar and ran it privately as the Sting Ray. Dr. Dick Thompson drove it to two SCCA class championships, in 1959 and 1960, with Shinoda acting as designer, mechanic, pit crew, and transport driver.

The racer became the template for the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray. Shinoda worked with designer Tony Lapine to translate the concept into a production car, and the National Corvette Museum credits him with co-designing the car with Mitchell. Shinoda himself took no credit for the split-window rear glass, and the credit for the Sting Ray’s shape is rightly shared. Peter Brock, for one, sketched the original concept at 21, a story we covered in our look at Brock’s one-off 1963 split-window Corvette.

Shinoda’s Corvette work continued with the Mako Shark concepts. He is credited with the Mako Shark II, shown in 1965, and the 1968 Corvette that grew out of it. He also worked on the 1965 Corvair redesign, which gave that car its “Coke bottle” shape.

Following Bunkie Knudsen to Ford

When GM executive Semon “Bunkie” Knudsen moved to Ford, Shinoda followed him. His first project there was the Mustang that became the Boss 302. Ford built it to homologate the 302-cubic-inch V8 for SCCA Trans-Am racing, a direct answer to the Chevrolet Camaro Z/28. Shinoda cleaned up the styling by removing the fake rear quarter-panel scoops and adding a front spoiler and a rear deck wing. The 290-horsepower road car was built in 1,628 examples in 1969. The “Boss” name was period slang for excellent, though Shinoda is said to have meant it as “the boss’s car,” a nod to Knudsen.

The race version delivered. Ford’s factory team, run by Bud Moore, won the 1970 Trans-Am championship, with Parnelli Jones edging Penske’s Mark Donohue for the title. Shinoda’s Ford stay was short. He was dismissed days after Knudsen was fired in late 1969.

A Jeep fight and a design firm

Shinoda co-founded Rectrans with Knudsen in 1970, later became design vice president at White Motor Company, and eventually ran his own studio in Livonia, Michigan. Clients included Roger Penske, Cragar Wheels, and Monaco Motorcoach, and his work reached as far as the Goodyear Blimp.

In 1985, he competed with an AMC in-house team and outside designers Giorgetto Giugiaro and Alain Clénet to design what became the Jeep Grand Cherokee. AMC agreed to pay $354,000 but paid only $135,000, and his design was advanced without him. He protested when the Grand Cherokee debuted in 1992, and Chrysler settled with him not long before his death. For more on Jeep’s earlier history, see our Today in Collector Car History on the first Jeep.

Why Shinoda’s date matters to collectors today

Shinoda’s fingerprints help explain why two very different cars hold their places in the market. The 1963 split-window coupe is the single most sought-after Sting Ray. Hagerty’s valuation tool showed a headline value of $116,000 for a 1963 split-window coupe with the 327-cubic-inch, 250-horsepower V8 in a January 2026 value history, and it describes documented, matching-numbers examples as the most desirable of the five-year C2 series. Our own coverage notes that most C2 Corvettes trade in the high five figures, while historically significant cars can reach six figures and beyond.

The Boss 302 sits in a lower but still serious bracket. A 2025 HotCars report citing Hagerty put a good-condition 1969 Boss 302 at about $74,000, and fewer than 7,000 were built across all years. A recent example on our pages, a Bright Yellow 1969 Boss 302 at Henderson Auctions, shows how the car still turns up with original paperwork, which is what buyers should insist on. For another look at how documentation drives Corvette values, see this NCRS Duntov Award 1967 Corvette.

Shinoda is a reminder that provenance can reach past the person who signed the car. A design that came out of Mitchell’s studio, or a Mustang built to win Trans-Am, owes something to the designers who did the shaping. For collectors, that is a reason to read the history of a car as closely as its condition report. For the Mustang’s origin story, see our Lee Iacocca anniversary piece.

Sources: National Corvette Museum Hall of Fame; Hagerty Media; Automotive History Preservation Society; Wikipedia; Boss 302 Mustang; Hagerty valuation tools.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

A 2014 SRT Viper GTS with 799 miles closed on Bring a Trailer on October 27 at $183,000, or $48,920 (36.5 percent) over the $134,080 window sticker. The arithmetic invites a tidy headline: about $61 of premium for every mile the car was driven. It is also a poor guide to what happened. The more useful number arrived three months earlier, on the same platform, and it makes the Viper market considerably easier to read.

The argument is simple. Below a thousand miles, the odometer stops pricing a Gen V Viper. The build sheet takes over.

The Comparison That Matters

On August 4, a 2013 SRT Viper GTS with 469 miles, roughly 60 of them added by its current owner, sold on Bring a Trailer for $230,000 against a $141,090 sticker. That is 63 percent over original price, and the same seller had bought the car on the platform in March 2025 for $138,500. The mechanical content of the two cars is identical: the hand-assembled 8.4-liter V10 rated at 640 horsepower and 600 lb-ft, a Tremec six-speed manual, a 3.55:1 limited-slip differential, rear-wheel drive. Both are the kind of unused example that collectors usually lump into a single category.

The market did not. The gap between them, $47,000, is almost exactly the entire premium the 2014 car earned over its own sticker. The 2013 car is a first-model-year GTS, and its listing described it as one of 12 produced that year in Shadow Blue Pearl with Billet Silver stripes, a claim worth confirming against factory records but one the bidding plainly took seriously. The 2014 car wears Gunmetal Pearl with black stripes over black Nappa leather and Alcantara. It is handsome and correct. Nobody is arguing it is one of a dozen.

Is 36.5 Percent Actually a Premium?

Not entirely. General consumer-price inflation since 2014 has run on the order of 35 to 40 percent, which means the 2014 car returned something close to its original price in real terms. That is not a criticism. A twelve-year-old supercar that holds its sticker in real money while sitting in a garage is a respectable outcome, and one that few performance cars from the same period can claim. But it frames the result correctly: the $183,000 is a fair price for a sealed example, not a speculative one. The genuine premium, the part inflation does not explain, belongs to the car that combined delivery mileage with scarcity of specification.

This also reads differently once you remember where these cars sat when new. The revived Viper arrived for 2013 after production had paused in 2010, and the 2013 and 2014 cars carried the SRT name. In September 2014, Dodge cut $15,000 from the price of the 2015 model to move slow-selling inventory. Early-run owners, in other words, paid the top of the Gen V price curve. The 2014 GTS stickered at $134,080 against a published base price of $122,390 (including destination, excluding a $2,600 gas-guzzler tax), a gap that presumably reflects that levy and factory equipment. A buyer who took delivery then was paying for a car whose successor the factory would soon reprice $15,000 lower.

What a Serious Buyer Would Weigh

The listing was well documented for a car of this type: the original window sticker showing delivery through East Tennessee Dodge Chrysler Plymouth Jeep in Crossville, two key fobs, manufacturer literature and a clean Tennessee title. The Carfax summary reported no accidents and three service records. Two details deserve the scrutiny a buyer at this level should apply. The Carfax summary lists two previous owners and a last registration in South Carolina, which sits awkwardly beside the listing's description of a car acquired new by the seller; the two may reconcile through a dealer or family transfer, but the record should be reconciled. And the seller confirmed in the comments that the open recall work had not been performed, which is easily corrected but is the sort of loose end that separates a truly turn-key delivery-mile car from one that still needs a visit to the dealer.

Service history, by the seller's account, was modest and sensible: annual oil changes, coolant renewed in 2014, brake fluid changed three times, a replaced battery with the original retained. Scratches on the underside of the front bumper cover were disclosed. They are a Viper hazard, since the nose sits low enough to catch a driveway apron, and they are cosmetic, but they remind buyers that a car with 799 miles has still been used, and that the age of its tires, fluids and rubber matters more than its odometer.

How the Bidding Behaved

The auction drew 37 bids. Early interest was in the mid-$150,000s, and the car sat near $159,000 into the final day. The real price discovery happened in the closing minutes, when a small group of bidders pushed it from $160,000 to $183,000 in about eleven minutes. That pattern is characteristic of a market with depth at the top and indifference below it: plenty of buyers will argue over a perfect car, and few care to pay for anything less. It echoes what we saw earlier this month when a GT2 Viper's $125,000 high bid failed to meet reserve, where the question was likewise whether sellers and bidders agree on the variable being priced. For Mopar buyers more broadly, the appetite for unused modern Dodges was tested in Michael Strahan's one-of-one Demon 170, which also failed to meet its reserve on Bring a Trailer.

We noted the sale briefly in our October 30 market brief; it deserves a longer look because of what it indicates about the next tier of modern analog supercars.

What It Means for Collectors

Gen V Viper production ended on August 31, 2017, and the car has the profile collectors increasingly prize: a naturally aspirated V10 assembled by hand, a manual gearbox and rear-wheel drive. It also has a supply question that headline prices tend to obscure: two sub-800-mile GTS cars crossed the same platform within three months. When delivery-mile cars are not unique, the market pays for the ones that are different.

That is the lesson to take from two sales three months apart. Mileage gets a Viper into the conversation. Specification, year and color decide what it is worth once it is there. Collectors should expect the best-documented, best-specified Gen V cars to keep drawing real premiums, and expect ordinary delivery-mile GTS examples to settle near their sticker adjusted for inflation. The $183,000 result is a market confirming that a 799-mile Viper is worth what it cost. The $230,000 result is a market telling you what it will pay for more.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

The headline says K.I.T.T. did not sell. The more useful number is CHF 200,000: the last bid on a 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am that Broad Arrow Auctions offered at The Dolder Grand on November 7, against a reserve of CHF 250,000. Nobody in the room would cover the gap, and a Broad Arrow spokesperson confirmed to the Keystone-SDA wire that the car is not changing hands.

That gap is the whole story. A reserve is the seller’s biography of a car. The last bid is the market’s review of it. When the two sit CHF 50,000 apart, the room is not rejecting Knight Rider. It is pricing the distance between a famous silhouette and a documented object.

A reserve parked at the floor of the range

The lot, Lot 148, carried an estimate of CHF 250,000 to CHF 500,000, as we noted in our preview of the sale. A CHF 250,000 reserve therefore sat at the very bottom of that range. Read plainly, owner Urs Kunz, the Lucerne musician who has held the car since October 1999, was not betting on the upper half of the estimate. He needed the lower edge of it, and the room stopped 20 percent short.

For a buyer the arithmetic is less forgiving still. Under Broad Arrow’s published terms the buyer’s premium is 15 percent, plus VAT on the premium, of the first CHF 250,000 of hammer price. If the reported figures are hammer bids, as is customary, a CHF 200,000 hammer would have cost a buyer roughly CHF 230,000 before VAT, while a hammer at reserve would have cost roughly CHF 287,500. The seller was asking bidders to cross a wider distance than the headline numbers suggest.

This was not a soft room

What makes the result worth reading is the sale around it. Broad Arrow reports a total of CHF 24,723,338, an 80 percent sell-through, and bidders from 31 countries, 47 percent of whom were new to the house. A 2015 Ferrari LaFerrari brought CHF 5,856,250, a 2012 Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse CHF 2,368,750, and a 2019 McLaren Senna CHF 1,131,250. We followed the LaFerrari and SLR Stirling Moss lots ahead of the sale, and the Geneva show-car Veyron too. Money was available, and bidders were willing to spend it.

Nor did story-driven cars struggle. A 2023 BMW 3.0 CSL, one of 50 built and owned by former Formula 1 driver Nick Heidfeld, who drove it to the auction, sold for CHF 906,250. A 2020 Aston Martin DB5 Goldfinger Edition, complete with replica gadgets, made CHF 765,625. Those are cars whose identity is fixed by a manufacturer’s build and a famous name. K.I.T.T. offers the famous name and a different kind of identity: a conversion, assembled to look like the television car and to travel.

What the file proves, and what it cannot

The paper is better than most. According to the lot essay, the Trans Am was one of the cars imported from the United States by Vienna’s Peter Malek for Profile Promotions, the firm of David Hasselhoff’s then-manager Herbert Fechter. A certificate from AMELI CAR AG dated December 29, 1989 says Thomas J. Oberhaus of Hollywood Productions converted it to original Universal Pictures plans, and that it appeared with Hasselhoff at concerts and promotional events across Europe. Swiss television showed it on November 26, 1990, when host Beni Thurnherr drove it into the studio. Swiss customs papers from December 1990 and a St. Gallen inspection report from July 1991 tie the chassis to the story, and the car sits in the Knight Rider Historians registry. K.I.T.T. historian AJ Palmgren inspected it in Switzerland in 2007.

That is a chain of custody for a conversion. It is not a link to the set. This is a tour car, built to be seen from ten feet away rather than photographed by a camera crew, and Broad Arrow’s own wording is careful on the point. The car was also stolen in Italy during Exclusa AG’s ownership in the 1990s and recovered through Interpol, but the thieves took the original dashboard electronics. They were replaced with a Season 1 and 2-style suite by Alessandro Zagni’s ZA Elettronica, with a voice box and twin LOTI displays. The original early-1980s dashboard shell, the Gullwing-style wheel and the overhead console remain, and the 305-cubic-inch Cross-Fire Injection V8 makes a factory 165 horsepower. The car runs and drives, but its modifications make it not road legal, and it shows the wear of years on tour.

Put together, that describes an honest, well-documented replica with a distinguished past and a partly reconstructed core. Collectors have learned to be exacting about exactly that combination. We reached a similar conclusion about the Rain Man Buick, where provenance faced its hardest test: the closer a car gets to the screen, the more precisely bidders want to know which rung they are buying.

What a no-sale does to the next consignment

A passed lot is not a dead lot. Broad Arrow’s results include post-sale transactions, and the 2009 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Stirling Moss, one of the sale’s headline cars, was recorded as sold after the auction. We have seen no indication of a similar deal for K.I.T.T., but the mechanics are open to it.

What has changed is the reference point. CHF 200,000 is now a public, competitive bid, made in a full room, on a car with a genuine file. Any private negotiation, or a return to the block, begins from it. A seller who re-offers at CHF 250,000 is asking buyers to ignore something they watched happen. Most will not.

For collectors, the lesson is narrower and more useful than “pop-culture cars are soft.” Pop-culture cars with factory-built identities cleared in Zürich. What stalled was a conversion priced as if the television character were part of the title. A reserve is the seller’s biography of a car, and the market reviews it one bid at a time. On November 7, the room read the file and wrote its own.

Results, estimates and lot details are drawn from Broad Arrow Auctions’ published Zürich results and lot essay; the reserve, top bid and spokesperson confirmation are from the Keystone-SDA report on swissinfo. Lead image courtesy of Broad Arrow Auctions.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Get the collector car market every weekday morning: sign up for the free Brief.

The 1967 Ford Mustang fastback that will cross the block at Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale Auction without reserve looks like every Eleanor tribute you have seen: a fastback roofline, a hood that changes the way the car reads from fifty feet. Photographs will not explain why it deserves attention. The paperwork does.

Scottsdale 2027 runs January 23–31 at WestWorld, and this Mustang arrives carrying official licensing from Gone in 60 Seconds LLC, a Tribute Edition certificate, genuine Eleanor certification paperwork, and an Eleanor body VIN plate and emblems. It arrives roughly eighteen months after the Ninth Circuit ruled that Eleanor, as a matter of copyright law, is not really a character at all. The question the lot poses is not how fast it is or how well it was built. It is what an “official” Eleanor is worth when the legal theory behind the word has been shaken.

What Is Actually Being Sold

The mechanical specification is not a period-correct one, and it is not meant to be. A complete GT350 drivetrain swap places the 5.2-liter V-8 behind a six-speed manual. The chassis has been reworked with Mustang to Fear independent front suspension and a 9-inch rear end with a Watts link and coilovers. Wilwood supplies six-piston front and four-piston rear brakes, backed by an electric power-assisted anti-lock system. Eighteen-inch American Racing wheels wear Toyo R888 tires, the cabin gets GT350 Recaro seats, an electric steering column and Old Air Products Hurricane air conditioning, and the body wears a complete Mustang to Fear Eleanor kit.

Read that list the way a restorer would and the car sorts itself quickly: this is a high-end restomod dressed as a film star, not a preserved Mustang. The VIN, 7T02A237604, is worth a look for what it suggests about the foundation. The structure points to a Metuchen-built 1967 fastback, and the engine code indicates it began life with a 289 four-barrel. That matters more than it first appears. Eleanor demands a fastback, genuine fastback shells are finite, and the difference between a car built on an authentic body and one assembled around a reproduction shell is exactly the sort of detail that separates a well-priced tribute from an expensive costume.

A Hierarchy Collectors Already Understand

Eleanor collectors recognize three tiers. At the top are the cars that appeared on screen: the yellow 1971 Mustang Sportsroof of H.B. Halicki’s 1974 original and the Pepper Grey 1967 fastbacks built for the 2000 remake. The hero car from the remake brought $1 million at Mecum’s Indianapolis auction in 2013. Below them sit the licensed cars, built to a sanctioned specification and sold with the rights holder’s paperwork. Below those sit unlicensed builds, from careful to careless.

The middle tier is where this Mustang lives, and the market has priced it before. We reported on the $550,000 result for a 25th Anniversary Limited Edition Eleanor at Barrett-Jackson Columbus, and on the first 25th Anniversary car at Mecum Indy. For the unlicensed alternative, see the 508-horsepower 1965 Eleanor tribute fastback offered by Freije & Freije. What those results share is that buyers paid for sanction and presentation, not for pedigree.

The Ruling Nobody on the Auction Block Is Talking About

On May 27, 2025, the Ninth Circuit decided Carroll Shelby Licensing, Inc. v. Halicki and concluded that the Eleanor Mustang is not entitled to character copyright protection. The panel described the car as closer to a prop than a character: no agency, no personality, an appearance that changed from film to film, and nothing distinguishing it from other sports cars in car-centric action movies. The court also said Shelby was entitled to a declaration that its GT-500CR replica did not infringe. Trademark and trade dress questions were left for the district court on remand.

It would be a mistake to read that as the end of Eleanor’s commercial architecture. Trademark and trade dress remain unresolved, and a license is more than a copyright instrument. It would be an equal mistake to ignore it. For years the premise that Eleanor itself was protectable underpinned the idea that an authorized car was categorically different from an imitation. That premise is weaker today than when most of these cars were sold. Anyone who intends to build, sell or insure an Eleanor tribute should take counsel rather than rely on a magazine’s reading of an appellate opinion, ours included.

What the license still delivers is real but narrower: a documented, sanctioned build, a body VIN plate and a chain of paperwork that a future buyer can examine. What it does not deliver is provenance. A license is not provenance. It is permission, and permission is only as valuable as the next buyer’s willingness to care that it exists.

What Serious Buyers Should Watch

The no-reserve designation makes this a cleaner reading than most. No seller’s floor will prop up the number, so the hammer will say what a room of bidders believes the certification package is worth, separate from the build. Anyone bidding should confirm what exactly transfers to a new owner, verify the donor body and its documentation, and understand that the GT350 powertrain and modern suspension make this a car to drive rather than a car to preserve. That is not a criticism. It is the category.

The broader lesson belongs to the tribute market in general. The strongest cars in it are not those with the loudest names attached. They are the ones whose builds, paperwork and legal standing hold up after the excitement of the auction fades. If you want to see how popularity and scarcity differ in Mustang values, our look at the softening early Mustang GT market is a useful companion, as is the list of the most expensive Mustangs ever sold, where the names at the top are Shelbys and race cars, not tributes.

Photos and lot details: Barrett-Jackson.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Broad Arrow's second Zürich sale made CHF 24,723,338 at The Dolder Grand on November 7, ahead of last year's debut total of just over CHF 22 million, with 80 percent of lots finding buyers. By the aggregate measures, that is a healthy room. The more useful reading sits lower in the results, where the cars that cleared and the estimates they cleared against tell a more selective story: this market is open, but it is no longer paying for the badge alone.

The top of the table is a modern one. Eight of the ten best-selling lots were built in 2008 or later. Only the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing, at CHF 1,100,000, and a 1985 Audi Sport Quattro, at CHF 703,750, came from an earlier era. In a room where, by the house's count, 47 percent of bidders were first-timers and 37 percent were Swiss, that is not an accident of the consignment list. It is a description of who is buying.

The LaFerrari Did Its Job, and Told Us Something

The 2015 Ferrari LaFerrari in Bianco Fuji led at CHF 5,856,250, including premium. The car showed 92 kilometers at cataloguing, was offered without reserve against an estimate of CHF 5.5 to 7.5 million, and arrived with a file that included a new high-voltage battery installed by Rossocorsa, Ferrari's dealer in Milan. We examined that pairing before the sale in our look at the 92-kilometer car, and the result answers part of the question. Collectors bought the car, but they did not pay a ceiling price for it; the result sits in the lower third of the estimate range.

That matters beside the Zoute result a month earlier, where a LaFerrari with 13,069 kilometers made €5,181,250. The currencies differ and so do the rooms, so a precise delta would be false comfort. But the premium for a near-delivery odometer is visibly narrower than the mileage gap would have implied a year ago. On a hybrid hypercar, the battery file and the car's mechanical readiness are doing work that the odometer alone used to do. The same logic, taken to its extreme, shaped the Las Vegas F50 result: preservation commands a premium, but not an unlimited one.

Where the Estimates Gave Way

The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse sold for CHF 2,368,750. Chassis 015 is the car Bugatti showed at the 2012 Geneva Motor Show, and Broad Arrow had estimated it at CHF 2.6 to 3.3 million. Even with the buyer's premium included, it landed below the low estimate. When we asked in our pre-sale analysis whether launch-stand provenance could separate one of 92 open-top Vitesse cars from the rest, the room's answer was a qualified yes: it valued the story, but not at the seller's number.

The 2019 McLaren Senna, number 181 of 500, showed just 131 kilometers and carried more than CHF 40,000 in options. It made CHF 1,131,250 against an estimate of CHF 1.1 to 1.4 million, which is to say at the floor. The 2017 Ferrari F12tdf reached CHF 1,547,500. These are strong, liquid results for cars that were once considered speculative. They are also consistent with the pattern we described in our look at how the modern exotic market is sorting rather than rising: the buyers are real, but they are pricing each car on its file and not on its category.

One further result is worth reading carefully. The 2009 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Stirling Moss, a one-owner car we covered in our look at the first-owner SLR, sold after the auction, and Broad Arrow published no price. The house ranks it second in its top-ten list, which implies a figure above the Veyron's CHF 2.37 million, but the number itself is unreported. Post-sale transactions are real sales, and they are also a reminder that a published sell-through rate includes negotiations that happen after the room has emptied.

What 80 Percent Actually Means

Broad Arrow calls 80 percent the strongest collector car auction result in Switzerland this year, and that claim is the house's own. The better comparison is with its own 2025 sale, which sold 87 percent of lots and made just over CHF 22 million. This year's total is higher and the sell-through is lower. With more than 100 lots offered, roughly one in five did not sell, and the release does not say which ones. Serious buyers should read the lot-by-lot results on the Broad Arrow site before drawing conclusions about any single category.

The sensible interpretation is not weakness. It is price discovery. A larger consignment list met a broader, newer, more international bidder base, and the cars with clean documentation cleared while the ones priced on aspiration did not. The mid-market held up too: a 1987 Testarossa made CHF 149,500, a no-reserve 1996 F355 Berlinetta reached CHF 161,000, and the ex-Nick Heidfeld BMW 3.0 CSL made CHF 906,250. The 2020 Aston Martin DB5 Goldfinger Edition, a continuation car, made CHF 765,625, a reminder that built-to-collect cars with a cinematic story find their audience.

What Collectors Should Take From It

Zürich suggests that the question for modern hypercars is no longer whether they are collectible. It is which version of a collectible car deserves a premium. A delivery-mileage Senna sold at the bottom of its range. A documented LaFerrari sold in the lower third of its range, with no reserve. A show-car Veyron sold below its range. An estimate is a seller's argument; the result is the room's reply.

For buyers, that is encouraging. Liquidity at this level exists, and it is rewarding preparation. For sellers, the lesson is harder: provenance, service files and condition are being priced individually, and an estimate built on the car's category will be tested against its paperwork. Broad Arrow's next stop is its first Paris sale on February 3, 2027, at the Peninsula Paris during Rétromobile week. If Zürich is the guide, the cars that do best there will be the ones whose files can answer questions before the bidders ask them.

Results include buyer's premium and immediate post-sale transactions, as reported by Broad Arrow Auctions. See the official Zürich Auction 2026 results for full lot detail.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

When RM Sotheby’s opens the 2027 collector-car season at the Arizona Biltmore on January 28–29, the headline lot will be a Mercedes-Benz. The more revealing part of the consignment is what surrounds it: thirteen cars from the late John D. Groendyke of Enid, Oklahoma, most of them American, most of them pre-war, and nearly all of them chosen for a reason that has little to do with the badge on the hood.

That is the thesis of this collection. Groendyke did not collect marques. He collected specific answers to a specific question: which exact body, on which exact chassis, represents the best surviving example of what a Full Classic could be?

A collector RM already knew well

This is not a first introduction. In 2019, RM offered seven Cadillac V-16s from his holdings at the January 2020 Arizona sale, all without reserve, describing a client and friend who had collected since the early 1990s and had assembled seventeen V-16s covering significant body styles and model years. RM also noted that the cars were well maintained and often driven on tours, and that they had earned awards at Pebble Beach, Amelia Island and the Concours of America.

Read the 2020 offering closely and the method is already visible. One car was the sole known survivor of its style. Another was one of seven built. A third carried a documented line of named owners. Those are not the credentials of a trophy hunter chasing the biggest number. They are the credentials of someone building a reference library in metal.

The Mercedes leads, the Cadillacs explain

According to RM’s announcement, the lead car is a 1935 Mercedes-Benz 500 K Cabriolet A by Sindelfingen, one of 33 built, later upgraded to 5.4-liter 540 K specification and delivered new to the violinist Adolf Busch. It later passed to Millicent Rogers, was found on a French farm around 1960, has been shown twice at Pebble Beach and completed the 1,000-mile Colorado Grand. Few supercharged pre-war Mercedes-Benz roadsters arrive with a story that coherent, and it will draw the international bidders.

But the Cadillacs are the collection’s spine. A 1936 V-16 Convertible Coupe by Fleetwood, restored by Steve Babinsky’s Automotive Restorations, took first in class at the 2019 Pebble Beach Concours. A 1930 V-16 All-Weather Convertible Sedan is a one-off by Pasadena coachbuilder Murphy, bought new by Charles S. Howard Jr. and later part of the Mozart and Andrews collections. A 1933 V-16 Convertible Coupe is the 117th of 126 V-16s built for that model year and is believed to be one of two surviving examples of its body style; its first owner was the inventor Theodore W. Case. A 1930 Roadster, a 1938 Convertible Coupe and further V-16s round out the group.

The V-16 rewards this kind of attention. Cadillac offered 54 body styles on the chassis, every one built by Fleetwood, which means the engine and the badge are constant while the coachwork is the variable. Anyone can own a V-16. Owning the right body on a V-16 is a different discipline, and it is the one Groendyke practiced. For a related example of how much that distinction matters in the room, see our report on the 1930 V-16 Sport Phaeton offered at Indy this year.

Beyond Cadillac: the rest of the argument

The supporting cast keeps the same logic. A 1936 Auburn 852 Supercharged Speedster is described as retaining its original body, frame, engine and firewall serial tag, with Auburn Cord Duesenberg Club Category One certification. A 1937 Cord 812 Cabriolet is a concours restoration from Brian Joseph’s ACD specialists, also Category One and a CCCA Full Classic. A 1932 Marmon Sixteen Victoria Coupe by LeBaron and a 1929 Rolls-Royce Phantom I Ascot Tourer in the style of Brewster extend the pre-war theme.

The final three are the quiet surprises: a 1956 Ford Thunderbird, a 1949 Cadillac Series 62 Club Coupe and a 2006 Maybach 57S. They suggest a man who owned cars he liked as well as cars he studied, and the lack of a conventional modern-supercar shelf says as much about his taste as the V-16s do.

What this means for the market

The pre-war American Full Classic category has spent several years in a more selective phase, with buyers separating the best-documented, best-restored cars from the rest. Our recent look at the Clark Gable Duesenberg and at the Buck Jones Cadillac at RM’s Hershey sale reached a similar conclusion from different directions: provenance and presentation now do much of the work that rarity alone once did. Single-owner collections like this one are useful precisely because they remove the guesswork. Every car has been chosen, maintained and documented by the same hand.

That also explains why the certifications matter. CCCA Full Classic status and ACD Club Category One designation are not decoration; they are the shorthand by which serious buyers confirm that a Cord, Auburn or Cadillac is what it claims to be. Concours results and restorer pedigree, whether Babinsky or an ACD specialist, serve the same function. Where a car is unrestored or older in its restoration, the discussion shifts from perfection to honesty, which a different group of collectors will prefer.

Collectors with an appetite for this era will also want to study how comparable institutional groups have been assembled. The Nethercutt Collection remains the benchmark for what a restoration-led approach to the same cars can produce.

What to watch in Scottsdale

RM’s Arizona page did not yet list the lots when we reviewed it, and no estimates have been published. Those numbers, when they arrive, will matter less than the sequence in which bidders react to them. Watch the one-of-two 1933 Convertible Coupe and the Murphy One-Off Convertible Sedan first. If bidders pay for specificity there, the Groendyke thesis will have been confirmed by the market he spent three decades studying.

A badge tells you what a car is. A body style tells you what it was for. John Groendyke collected the second, and the cars heading to Phoenix are the evidence.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Celebrity provenance usually inflates an estimate. Here it does something more interesting. Iconic Auctioneers will offer a 1973 Jaguar E-Type Series 3 V12 roadster at £60,000 to £70,000 and a 1928 Morgan Supersport 8-valve Anzani three-wheeler at £35,000 to £40,000 at the NEC Classic Motor Show on Saturday, Nov. 14, as Lots 137 and 138. Both come directly from the Ten Tenths Collection of Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, and both are priced as cars to be driven rather than trophies to be admired. That is the story, and it is a better one than the name on the consignment.

Mason is one of the rare famous collectors whose reputation rests on use as much as ownership. He has raced at Le Mans, and his cars have a habit of turning up on tracks and rallies instead of behind velvet ropes. The catalogue language is consistent with that: the E-Type is described as “used and enjoyed rather than simply displayed.” For a buyer, that distinction matters more than any liner-note connection.

The Series 3 that the market still discounts

The E-Type is a 1973 Series 3, the final iteration, introduced in 1971 with Jaguar’s 5.3-litre V12 and a longer wheelbase, wider track and flared arches. Purists have always preferred the leaner Series 1, and the market has mostly agreed with them: the early cars command the headlines, the documentation obsession and, as we have seen with Rowan Atkinson’s 1963 car, the provenance premiums. The V12 roadster has been left to the drivers. It is the easiest E-Type to use at modern speeds, and it is the one that rewards a buyer who prefers a good history to a famous one.

This example is in Signal Red over black, right-hand drive with a manual gearbox, the specification most enthusiasts want. It shows 24,087 recorded miles, was supplied new in the UK, and the registration document lists three former keepers. Mason acquired it from Lord Litchfield in 2007, so the car has been in one set of hands for nearly two decades. It entered a Spanish regularity rally in 2024.

What a serious buyer should examine is on the lot page itself. The paint is older and the seller says it contributes to the car’s “honest, used character,” which is a fair way of saying it is not a concours finish and should not be bid as one. Recent work went into the cooling system, the V12’s traditional pressure point, and the invoices for that work belong at the top of the history file, whose contents are not itemised in the listing. Chassis 1S1505 and engine 7S8044SB should be checked against the Jaguar Heritage Trust certificate, the same exercise we outlined for Series 1 cars. Anyone new to the twelve-cylinder cars should also read our XJ-S buying guide, since the engine and its cooling and fuel-system quirks are shared. Jaguar itself marked 50 years since the E-Type’s final production in 2024, which keeps the model in the conversation without lifting the Series 3 above its station.

A three-wheeler with a documented life

The Morgan is the more interesting car, and the harder one to value. Its chain of ownership is unusually complete. Jim Thoms of Five Docks, Sydney, bought it new around September 1928 through Williams Brothers, and in January 1929 it won at Penrith Speedway, beating Ford and Alvis entries. It stayed in Australia through the Finglass brothers, whose motorcycle collection reportedly ran to some 150 machines, and then to Joe Wilson, who bought it in March 1972 for $200, restored it, and raced it for years in historic and vintage events. Photographs from 1979 show the restored car with Thoms and his friend Mitch Marks, about fifty years after the Penrith win. Mason acquired it in 2014.

The compromises are as instructive as the history. The original JAP engine was gone by the 1960s. After a cylinder barrel broke at Lakeside in 1987, Phil Spencer rebuilt the unit as a 1,320cc Anzani with a concentric supercharger and a large SU carburettor. The car is no longer supercharged, the blower needs reconditioning and is included in the sale, and the car is running but needs recommissioning. The Morgan Three Wheeler Club inspected it in August 2014 and its registrar found the chassis, steering, suspension and axles appear original, recommending an age-related 1928 registration. The vendor puts the included spares at roughly £4,000 to £5,000. It is not a matching-engine car, and the estimate says so.

Interest in Morgan’s performance models has not faded; our recent analysis of the Morgan Supersport 400 traced how the name still carries weight. The 1928 car is where that weight comes from.

What the numbers say

The buyer’s premium is 12.5 percent plus VAT, or 15 percent inclusive. At estimate, the E-Type therefore costs roughly £69,000 to £80,500, and the Morgan roughly £40,250 to £46,000, before transport. Collection from the NEC is required by 2 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 16, and Iconic’s listed uplift to storage is £195 plus VAT. For a buyer outside the UK, the right-hand-drive E-Type and the Australian-delivered Morgan raise their own registration questions, which are best answered before bidding.

The test of this sale is simple. If both cars sell inside their estimates, the market is paying for the cars: a usable V12 E-Type with a documented single-ownership stretch, and a competition-proven Morgan with an unbroken paper trail. If they sell well above, it is paying for the name, which is a different and less durable kind of value. Provenance from a collector who drives is worth more than provenance from one who stores, because the first leaves a record of how the car behaved and the second leaves only a record of who owned it. On Nov. 14 we will learn how much the room agrees.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

BMW Z3 M Coupe vs Lotus Elise looks like an odd pairing until you read the recent sale listings. Both are small, rear-drive, manual-only two-seaters from the early 2000s, both were built to be driven rather than parked, and both have built a cult following among enthusiasts. A 2002 M Coupe sold for $83,728 on Hagerty Marketplace on October 27, 2026. A 2007 Elise sold on the same platform in June for $31,298. The gap is real, but it says less about which car is better than about condition, scarcity and what each one asks of an owner.

The Short Answer

The M Coupe is the scarcer, heavier and more polarizing car, with a longer record of high-dollar sales and shared hardware that makes parts easier to source. The Elise is the lighter, more focused and generally cheaper way in, with a much wider spread in condition and a body structure that can be expensive to repair after an accident. If you want a rare BMW M product with a documented price history, the M Coupe is the match. If you want the purest feedback in a road car of this era and can tolerate a cramped cabin, the Elise is. Neither is a sure appreciator, and nothing in this comparison is a forecast.

Why These Two Cars Belong in the Same Conversation

BMW built the Z3 M Coupe from 1998 to 2002 on the Z3 Roadster platform, adding a fixed roof to stiffen the chassis. RM Sotheby’s catalog notes that many body panels are shared with the Z3. Its wagon-like shape earned the nickname “clown shoe,” and Hagerty has described the styling as polarizing but the car as a blast to drive. U.S. buyers got the 240-horsepower S52 six in 1999 and 2000, then the 315-horsepower S54 from the E46 M3 for 2001 and 2002. This comparison focuses on the S54 cars, the ones collectors chase hardest. For more on that engine in other BMWs, see our look at the Honda S2000 vs. BMW Z4 M Roadster and the one-of-one Imola Red M Coupe that surfaced earlier this year.

The Lotus is a different kind of small car. The Series 2 Elise arrived in 2001, but its airbags did not meet U.S. rules, so Americans had to wait. After NHTSA granted Lotus an exemption in 2005, Federal Elises went on sale and ran through 2010, with the facelifted Series 3 following for 2011, according to Hagerty. The car pairs a bonded and extruded aluminum chassis with a 1.8-liter Toyota 2ZZ-GE engine carrying a Yamaha-designed head. That makes our comparison window the U.S.-market 2005 through 2010 Series 2. The two cars did not overlap on showroom floors, but they target the same used-market shopper: someone who wants analog feel, manual shifting and a car that is easy to tell apart from the usual German sports coupe.

BMW Z3 M Coupe vs Lotus Elise: Side-by-Side

On paper the two are closer than they look. Using the figures above, each makes roughly 0.10 horsepower per pound, which helps explain why both carry a 4.8-second claim. The Elise gets there with about 1,100 fewer pounds and 125 fewer horsepower, so it feels different at every speed.

Production and Rarity

The M Coupe is the scarcer car where it matters. Hagerty and Classic Trader both put U.S. S54 production at 678 cars, against 2,180 S52 cars for 1999 and 2000. Classic Trader counts 6,291 M Coupes in total, though Wikipedia notes that sources conflict on exact figures. Factory-option details matter to buyers. The Hagerty Marketplace car sold in October carried the 25 percent limited-slip differential, electric glass roof, heated seats and Harman Kardon audio, plus the window sticker.

Elise numbers are less official. The most detailed U.S. counts come from owner-maintained registries on LotusTalk, which cite certificates of provenance and correspondence with Lotus archivist Andy Graham. Summing the Elise and Elise SC lines for 2005 through 2010 gives about 5,078 cars, and roughly 3,323 of those, about 65 percent, were 2005 models. The later years are far scarcer: only 217 supercharged Elise SC cars arrived across 2008 to 2010, and the 2010 model year shows just 29 Elise and SC cars combined. Hagerty independently says Lotus sold more than 6,000 Elises and Exiges in the U.S., which is consistent. Treat every Elise figure as an estimate.

Driving Characteristics

The Elise has the clearer evidence. MotorWeek called the steering precise and the car agile, noted the light, unassisted steering, and found the six-speed shifter improved but still vague and notchy. The same review said the cabin is very low and tiny, getting in is a challenge, and the pedals are not suited to large feet. The ride, though, was described as comparable to small commuter cars. That is the honest profile of an Elise: sharp, light and demanding of the person behind the wheel in ways that go beyond speed.

The M Coupe offers less published driving evidence, and much of what circulates is promotional. The RM Sotheby’s catalog says the car was meant to handle better than most sports cars on the road, which is a sales claim rather than a test result. What can be said with sources is that the S54 is the same inline-six used in the E46 M3, that the chassis is stiffer than the roadster it grew from, and that Hagerty’s writer found it a blast to drive. Expect a heavier car than the Elise, with a fixed roof, a hatchback body and a six-cylinder engine.

Reliability, Maintenance and Parts Availability

Classic Trader’s buying guide flags the M Coupe’s S54 VANOS system, which can rattle at idle and feel weak at low rpm, along with valve clearances, shell bearings that can fail, a boot floor that can shear around the differential mounts, worn rear mounts and bushings, and calipers that seize on stored cars. Uprated bearing shells are available. The sale listing of the October car shows what attentive ownership looks like: VANOS adjuster, gaskets and seals replaced in 2022, new tires and refurbished wheels in 2026. Because the S54 is shared with the E46 M3 and many Z3 panels are interchangeable, sourcing parts can be easier than for a low-volume exotic.

The Elise has its own set of risks. Hagerty cites camshaft lobe wear on the 2ZZ engine and an oil-cooler line recall. The aluminum chassis does not rust, but the front and rear clamshells are costly to repair, which is why Hagerty notes rebuilt-title Elises are common and can be a cheaper entry point with a careful inspection. The June 2026 Hagerty Marketplace example shows how wide condition can run: 75,700 miles, a replaced engine per the seller, missing soft top and hardtop headliner, a damaged front valance and worn leather. We could not verify dollar maintenance costs for either car from credible sources, so none are quoted. Get a pre-purchase inspection from a specialist for either car.

What They Have Sold For

Prices below are from named sales, not a price guide. Samples are small, mileage and condition vary, and listing prices may include buyer fees. We could not retrieve usable current Hagerty price-guide values for either car, so no condition-tier numbers appear here.

Read together, the sales suggest the M Coupe trades at a clear premium to what it cost new. At about $46,000 in 2002 dollars per Sports Car Market, the October car sold for roughly 1.8 times that sticker, before any inflation adjustment. The Elise started near $40,000, and the Elise sales in the table that were not flagged as high-mileage fall between about 1.2 and 1.6 times that figure (different model years, so only a rough guide), while the 75,700-mile June car sold below it. Hagerty’s March 2023 article put median #2-condition values at $57,600 for base cars, noting the pandemic-era run-up had slowed. Several of the sales above sit below that median and the May 2026 sale sits above it, but these are a handful of cars, not an index.

Demand and Liquidity

The M Coupe rarely changes hands publicly. Hagerty said as much in 2019, and with only 678 S54 cars in the U.S. that remains the practical reality. When one does appear, bidders show up: the October Hagerty Marketplace auction drew 67 bids, versus 20 for the June Elise. That is two data points, not a trend. Elises trade more often, and the Classic.com page for 2007 Series 2 cars lists 15 sales between January 2022 and May 2026, though some were modified and some were dealer sales. A buyer should expect easier searching for an Elise and a longer wait for the right M Coupe. For other Lotus ownership context, our pieces on the Esprit V8 vs. TVR Griffith 500 and the Elan Sprint originality check cover earlier cars.

Strengths and Weaknesses

BMW Z3 M Coupe

Strengths: scarcity among S54 cars, a proven engine shared with the E46 M3, a fixed roof and hatch that make it easier to live with, and a longer record of public sales. Weaknesses: polarizing styling, a much higher entry price, known VANOS and bearing concerns, and less independent testing evidence in the public record.

Lotus Elise

Strengths: under 2,000 pounds, a rust-free aluminum chassis, strong feedback, and a lower entry price. Weaknesses: a tiny, hard-to-enter cabin, expensive body panels after a crash, common rebuilt titles, cam-wear and oil-cooler line concerns on the engine, and a wide spread in condition and modification.

Which Car Fits Which Buyer

The M Coupe suits the collector who values a rare BMW M product, wants a usable fixed-roof car and accepts a high entry price. The Elise suits the driver who cares about weight, steering feel and a lower buy-in, and who will do the inspection homework on engine health and accident history. Neither car should be bought on the assumption that values will rise. These are past sales of a few cars, and market direction can change.

What We Could Not Verify

We could not confirm a worldwide Elise Series 2 production total, a coupe-specific M Coupe curb weight, or dollar maintenance costs from credible sources. Published S54 torque figures conflict (251 lb-ft in Hagerty and reference sources, 215 lb-ft in one auction catalog), so we used the more common number. Both 0–60 times are claims, not independent tests. Bring a Trailer data was not accessible to us, so recent BaT results are not included. Elise production figures come from owner registries, not an official Lotus release. Images are from the two Hagerty Marketplace listings linked in the captions.

Sources

Hagerty Media: The BMW M Coupe stakes its claim as a collector car (Jan. 2019); BMW M Coupe sells for $92K on Bring a Trailer (Feb. 2019); Lotus’ pocket-sized supercar is still (somewhat) affordable (Mar. 2023). Hagerty Marketplace: 2002 BMW M Coupe. Hagerty Marketplace: 2007 Lotus Elise. Classic Trader Z3 M Coupe buying guide (Jan. 2021). Sports Car Market, 2002 BMW Z3 M Coupe profile (Dec. 2016). RM Sotheby’s, Hilton Head 2016 lot 125. MotorWeek, 2005 Lotus Elise. KBB, 2005 Lotus Elise specs; KBB, 2002 BMW M specs. Wikipedia, BMW Z3. PCarMarket, 2005 Lotus Elise Supercharged. Classic.com, Lotus Elise Series 2 sales. LotusTalk registry threads: US production numbers and production figures 2005–2011.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Mecum Auctions is bringing one of the most remarkable Camaros ever assembled to the block, and it rewrites what collectors thought they knew about the first generation. This 1968 Chevrolet Camaro Z28 convertible is the only first-generation Z28 convertible ever produced, and it crosses the block as Lot U100 on Sunday, January 17th, at Kissimmee 2027.

The story begins with a gift. The car was built for Chevrolet General Manager Elliott “Pete” Estes and presented to him by Vince Piggins, the division’s product promotions manager, a title that roughly translated to racing director. Estes had a personal stake in the model, having helped choose the Camaro name, so this one-of-one Z28 convertible was a fitting tribute to the man who helped launch the nameplate.

How it came to exist is half the appeal. Piggins ordered the car through the Fleet Special Order Department, and the Norwood assembly plant temporarily paused its line to build it. The convertible was ordered, produced and delivered on the same day, and the NCRS Shipping Data Report confirms a production date of July 15, 1968, with delivery to the Chevrolet Motor Division Central Office.

From there, the car went to the GM Tech Center, where it received a hand-laid fiberglass cowl hood that served as a prototype for the ZL2 Special Ducted Hood. Estes put the Camaro to work as a driver, logging more than 2,000 miles before the end of summer 1968.

Its résumé includes a turn in the spotlight as well. On September 1, 1968, this Camaro served as the pace car for the Road America Can-Am, with racing legend Sir Stirling Moss behind the wheel, a moment that adds motorsports pedigree to an already extraordinary story.

Under the hood sits the original matching-numbers 302 cubic-inch V-8 rated at 290 horsepower, topped with a Cross Ram intake and two four-barrel carburetors. A four-speed manual transmission sends the power rearward, delivering the high-revving Z28 experience the model was built to provide.

Restored in its original color combination of Fathom Green with white stripes, the Camaro also carries a Positraction rear end, special suspension, the Z21 Style Trim Group, bumper guards, and front and rear spoilers. Every detail is presented as it left Chevrolet, and the shifter and driveline show the same care.

Inside, a Parchment interior is dressed with the Z87 Custom Interior Package, including woodgrain dash moldings and molded door armrests. Comfort and convenience features abound: a center console with special instruments and speaker controls for the AM/FM Multiplex stereo, power windows, a tilt steering column, a fold-down rear seat and a rear defroster.

With just 41,700 miles since new and extensive documentation, this Camaro arrives with a paper trail to match its story. Ownership has passed from Estes and General Motors through a short list of caretakers to Dana and Patti Mecum, who have held it since 2007. For anyone who values provenance, a one-off Z28 convertible with ties to the man who named the Camaro is a rare chance.

To see even more vehicles, register to bid and to consign your collector vehicle, please visit Mecum.com. Mecum Kissimmee is the auction house’s signature event. The fun starts January 5th and ends January 17th. Over 4,500 vehicles will be for sale!

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

On Nov. 11, 1950, Pierre-Jules Boulanger, the president of Citroën, died when his Traction Avant struck a tree on a road in central France. He was 65. Boulanger never saw the car that would carry his thinking into the 1950s and beyond, the DS, and the 2CV had been on sale for barely two years. Yet the cars that defined Citroën after its 1934 collapse, the 15-Six, the 2CV and the DS, all trace through his desk. For collectors, that makes the date worth marking.

What happened on Nov. 11, 1950

Boulanger was returning with his wife from a week of work in Paris to their home at Lempdes, near Clermont-Ferrand, when the car left the road near Broût-Vernet in the Allier department. Most accounts say he was driving a Traction Avant 15-Six. He was killed, and his wife was seriously injured but survived. He is buried at Lempdes, and a stone marker was later placed beside the road at the crash site. Accounts differ on the circumstances: one Citroën-community history describes fog and rain on a straight road, while the French-language Wikipedia article says he lost control while overtaking.

A note on the date: the Nov. 11 date appears in several Citroën-community histories, in a French regional-press reference cited by French Wikipedia and in motoring-history calendars. The English-language Wikipedia biography gives Nov. 12, citing a Chicago Daily Tribune report dated Nov. 13. Because most of the sources we found point to Nov. 11, we are using that date, and we flag the discrepancy so readers can weigh it themselves.

The people and cars behind the story

Boulanger was born in 1885 at Sin-le-Noble in northern France, studied fine art, worked in the United States for a time and returned to France in 1914. After service in the First World War as an aerial photographer, he joined Michelin in 1918 and reached its board in 1922. He was not a car designer by training. He was a hard-headed manager with strong opinions about what a car should do for the people who bought it.

In December 1934, Citroën filed for bankruptcy, and Michelin, its largest creditor, became its principal shareholder. Boulanger moved in as assistant to Pierre Michelin and head of engineering and design. When Pierre Michelin died in an accident in 1937, Boulanger became president, a post he held until his own death.

The best-known result of his tenure began in 1936 as the TPV, short for Très Petite Voiture, or very small car. His brief was famously practical: four wheels under an umbrella, room for four people and a load of farm goods, low fuel use, and a ride soft enough to carry a basket of eggs across a plowed field. Looks were an afterthought. By 1939 the design was ready after 47 experimental prototypes, and a pilot run of 250 cars was under way when the war intervened. Several TPVs were buried at secret locations and others were destroyed. Until three were found in a barn in 1994, it was believed that only two had survived.

The Traction Avant itself predated Boulanger. It was presented in Paris on April 18, 1934, and is described as the world’s first mass-produced front-wheel-drive car with a semi-monocoque body. But the six-cylinder 15-Six arrived in June 1938 on his watch, and the first one was delivered to him on June 25 of that year. A later hydropneumatic variant, the 15/6 H of 1954, served as a field trial for the DS suspension.

The historical context

Citroën’s early reputation rested on bold engineering funded by borrowed money, and the Traction Avant helped push the company into the 1934 collapse. Boulanger’s Citroën was a different animal: Michelin-owned, cost-conscious and focused on a small number of well-considered products. Biographical accounts also say he refused to deal directly with German authorities during the occupation and that his name appeared on a 1944 German blacklist of “Enemies of the Reich.”

The 2CV finally appeared at the Paris Salon on Oct. 7, 1948. The company that Boulanger rebuilt was also working on a larger project, the VGD, or Voiture à Grande Diffusion. It was still unfinished when he died. After his death, control passed to others, and the project was redefined and became the DS, which Flaminio Bertoni and André Lefèbvre styled and engineered.

Why it mattered at the time

Boulanger’s death ended the era in which one strong-willed executive, with Michelin behind him, set Citroën’s product direction. His successors did not abandon his ideas. They finished them. The DS 19 was introduced on Oct. 6, 1955, at the Paris Motor Show, with 12,000 orders on the first day and 743 in the first 15 minutes. The 2CV stayed in production until July 27, 1990, when the last one left the Mangualde plant in Portugal, after 3,867,932 saloons had been built.

Why Boulanger still matters to collectors

Collectors rarely buy a car because of its executive, but Citroën is a marque where the executive’s priorities are visible in the metal. The 2CV is a car designed around a farmer’s checklist. The Traction Avant 15-Six is the six-cylinder flagship of an engineering landmark. The DS is the project Boulanger approved and did not live to see. Documentation that ties a car to its factory records, build date and early ownership carries real weight in this market, because so many of these cars were used hard and modified over the decades.

If you follow Citroën on this site, the story connects to several others. Our look at the Eendenmuseum’s 300-plus 2CVs shows how a single collection can reset a niche market. Our Citroën SM buying guide covers the later Maserati-powered flagship the company built after the DS. We also covered a 1953 Peugeot 203 cabriolet, a French postwar contemporary, and the story of another founder-led independent, Carl Borgward.

Citroën market context: what recent results show

Recent figures from the auction-data aggregator Old Cars Data, which tracks results from sources including Bring a Trailer, give a rough sense of the market. The samples are small, so a single sale can move the numbers noticeably.

• 2CV: 19 completed sales over the past 12 months, with a median of $13,750 and a middle range of $10,110 to $16,625. The highest recent result listed was $18,000 for a 1965 car sold on Bring a Trailer on Aug. 26, 2026.
• Traction Avant: only four sales in the past 12 months, with a median of $10,100 and a middle range of $7,650 to $16,375. The top sale in that window was $32,500 for a 1954 car on Bring a Trailer on May 27, 2026. The page’s all-time high was $48,000 for a 1952 car in February 2025.
• DS: 10 completed sales, with a median of $36,500 and a middle range of $25,000 to $54,875. The strongest results were $215,000 for a 1969 DS21 on Feb. 17, 2026, and $196,500 for a 1967 DS21 on April 21, 2026, both on Bring a Trailer.

Hagerty’s valuation guide adds that DS19 station wagons are worth more than the standard sedan and that the DS19 is rarer than the later DS21 and DS23. The 2CV market faces a supply event of its own: our report on the Eendenmuseum describes a collection of roughly 450 vehicles, more than 300 of them 2CVs, that is expected to be offered at auction in the spring of 2027.

What collectors should take from Boulanger’s anniversary

Boulanger’s career is a reminder that the Citroëns collectors prize, from the humble 2CV to the DS that Citroën presented five years after his death, were shaped by a manager’s clear brief as much as by a designer’s flair. The market data suggest the range is wide: the typical 2CV sale sits around $13,750, while strong DS21 results have passed $190,000. Buy the documentation, the originality and the story, and treat any single auction result as one data point rather than a verdict.

Sources for this article include biographical and model histories on Wikipedia, Citroën-community histories at Citroënvie and Passionnement Citroën, Hagerty’s valuation tools and Old Cars Data auction statistics. This article is for historical and informational purposes and is not investment advice.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Michael Strahan’s one-of-one Demon 170 Jailbreak did not sell, and the number it stalled at is the more interesting part of the story. When bidding on Bring a Trailer closed on Nov. 5, the Dark Green Challenger had reached $250,000 across 18 bids and fell short of its reserve. That is roughly 54 percent over the $162,836 on its window sticker, and within $3,000 of the $253,000 high mark for a standard Demon 170 that we cited in October. It was still not enough.

The reflex is to read that as a verdict on a famous name. It is closer to a verdict on a paint chip. Celebrity ownership told the market who ordered this car. It did far less to tell the market why anyone should want it next.

What a Jailbreak actually adds

Dodge opened Demon 170 ordering on March 27, 2023, at a $96,666 starting price, capped production at 3,300 cars (about 3,000 for the U.S.), and positioned the car as the seventh and final “Last Call” edition before the Hemi-powered Challenger and Charger ended at the close of 2023, according to Dodge’s own announcement. The Jailbreak program sat on top of that. Per the listing, a select group of invited customers could specify one of 40 exclusive colors for $29,995, first come, first served. The Strahan car is the only one finished in Dark Green (F8).

Nothing about the machine changes. The supercharged 6.2-liter Hemi is rated at 1,025 horsepower on E85 and 900 on pump gas, with a claimed 0–60 time of 1.66 seconds. What Jailbreak sells is the one thing a Demon buyer cannot otherwise order: singularity.

Singularity is not the same as demand

The two Jailbreak results that frame this sale both came on Bring a Trailer in 2025. A Panther Pink car sold for $450,000 on April 2. The ex-Kevin Hart Cream Sickle car was bid to $400,000 on June 11 without selling. The drivetrain is identical in all three cars. The variable is paint, and what the paint says.

Dark Green is a quiet choice on a car whose entire personality is volume. It reads as an exceptionally clean Challenger rather than as something Dodge built once, and commenters on the listing reached the same conclusion about the color. A one-of-one is only as scarce as the audience for that one. Being the only example is not the same as being the example everyone wants.

What the name was worth

The documentation here is real, and it is the kind that makes provenance stick. The serial number, 00092, was chosen to echo Strahan’s NFL jersey number. Under-hood plaques identify the car as “01 of 01” and “Last Call,” the Jailbreak plate lists him as owner, and the window sticker records that it was built for him and delivered through Teterboro Dodge in New Jersey.

But provenance moves money when it is attached to a story the car lived, not just a name on the order. We made that argument about a very different car in Paul Newman’s Mustang at Mecum Nashville, where the history was in the use. At 347 miles, this Demon has very little of that. The same logic applied to a 663-mile Camaro Z/28 in our Bring a Trailer result analysis: buyers pay for the odometer and the originality it protects, and a car that has been driven a little but not enough to have a story sits in an awkward middle.

There is also a practical wrinkle. The seller confirmed in the listing comments that the car is titled to a company, and the title is from Montana. Registering through a Montana entity is a common arrangement for high-value vehicles, but a buyer outside the state should confirm with their own DMV and counsel how re-titling and use tax would work before bidding, because it affects both resale and the cost of ownership.

A market that no longer pays sticker-plus by default

Context matters here. As we laid out in our look at the Demon 170’s fall from $225,000 to sticker price, standard cars have repriced hard: a 13-mile example brought $225,000 at Mecum Las Vegas in November 2023, while an 8-mile car sold for $129,000 on Bring a Trailer on Oct. 5, 2026, and Hagerty’s October update showed the model’s values down an average of 18 percent over the quarter. Against that backdrop, a $250,000 bid is nearly double the roughly $129,000 median we calculated for recent sales.

So bidders are still willing to pay a real premium for singularity. They want to choose the singularity. Jailbreak is also a very thin sub-market, with only a handful of public data points, and it would be a mistake to build a thesis on any one of them, including this one. For perspective on where modern Mopars sit against the marque’s all-time auction records, see our ranking of the ten most expensive Mopars ever sold at auction.

What serious buyers should check

Read the sticker line by line. The listing cites more than $88,000 in options against a $162,836 total, and on their face those figures do not reconcile with Dodge’s $96,666 starting price, so the Jailbreak documentation and the Monroney itself are the source of truth. The listing also notes a damage-free Carfax report with at least one open recall, which should be resolved and documented. Confirm the Jailbreak paperwork, the ownership kit and the title chain, and decide in advance how much of any premium you are paying for the car and how much for the name on the plate.

Under Bring a Trailer’s rules, only the seller and the highest bidder may negotiate after a reserve-not-met close, so this car may yet change hands privately. If a price ever surfaces, it will be worth watching. Hemi-era Challengers will be collected for a long time, but the market is now sorting the Last Call cars the way it sorts every limited run: by the specific car, not the program. Celebrity provenance explains who ordered it. Color explains who wants it next.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

The most interesting thing about Ayrton Senna’s Williams FW16B is not a lap time. It is a clause in his contract.

RM Sotheby’s will offer chassis 01 as lot 1 of The Now & Contemporary Evening Auction in New York on November 16, with an estimate of $4 million to $6 million. The car is unrestored, has not been publicly offered before, and stayed with the Senna family from the end of 1994 until 2024. The catalog calls it one of two surviving Williams grand prix cars Senna drove that season. Those are the facts. The argument is that this is a sale about custody, not competition.

A Williams Without a Result

Senna started three races for Williams in 1994, took pole position at all three, and finished none. He led in Brazil until a pit stop let Michael Schumacher through, retired on lap 55, was hit from behind in the Pacific Grand Prix, and did not finish at San Marino. There is no victory attached to any Williams he drove, and nothing in this chassis’s race history changes that: the catalog’s record for 01 contains no Senna race start.

What it does contain is work. Senna drove 01 in the Sunday morning warm-up at Interlagos, where he lapped faster than the eventual race winner. A week later it went to Jerez, where Senna and Damon Hill shared roughly 842 kilometers across three sessions, with the test sheets surviving. That is the kind of documentation that moves a race car from “associated with” to “used by,” and it is the reason the car was chosen for what happened next.

The Clause

According to the catalog, Senna’s contract entitled him to a chassis from the season if Williams won the championship. Williams won the Constructors’ title and honored the arrangement, giving FW16B-01 to the Senna family because he had tested it extensively and driven it at Interlagos.

Most race cars leave a team by sale, by loan to a museum, or by quiet dispersal. This one left through a clause in a driver’s contract. For collectors that distinction matters, because it produces the shortest and cleanest chain a Formula 1 car can have: the team, the driver’s family, and one subsequent owner, who acquired it through RM Sotheby’s in 2024, the thirtieth anniversary of Senna’s death. Race cars are notorious for foggy histories, with chassis numbers reused, tubs rebuilt, and identities argued over for decades. A car handed over under a contractual entitlement is a different animal.

Three Champions, One Development Chassis

Chassis 01 was never the hero car. It was a working chassis, and that is part of its credibility. Hill ran it at the Silverstone and Jerez tests and as the spare, or T-car, at Monaco, the European Grand Prix, Japan and Australia. David Coulthard raced it in Spain, where he qualified ninth and retired, then to fifth in Canada and fifth again at Silverstone. Nigel Mansell drove it in the French Grand Prix and retired on lap 45 with gearbox trouble. Three world champions, then, in a single tub, plus Coulthard’s points.

It was also updated to FW16B specification after the British Grand Prix, so it carries the mid-season evolution that defined the car’s year: the higher front wing, taller endplates, shorter sidepods and the revised airbox that followed the rule changes after Imola. It is a record of how Williams developed the car under pressure, in a season that none of the people involved would remember as ordinary.

Reading the Estimate

Set the $4 million to $6 million range beside the Lotus 98T Senna drove in 1986, estimated at $9.5 million to $12 million, and the pattern is plain. That Lotus raced to two victories and five poles in Senna’s hands. The Williams has none of that. RM’s estimate is less than half, which suggests the house is pricing provenance rather than results.

We made the same argument about the red NSX in London, where the estimate priced the paperwork, not the car, and the result, £871,250, arrived on the back of a Honda fax. The same logic runs through the Broad Arrow helmet sale, where documentation outran fame. The FW16B is the strongest test yet of whether that holds for a full car, one with a genuine entitlement trail and a famous name but no famous result. Williams material has been through the market before, as with the 1998 FW20 offered in Paris, but not with this chain of custody.

What Serious Buyers Should Weigh

The listing is bill of sale only, which is normal for a car that was never meant for the road. Preservation is the asset here, and it cuts both ways. The car has been untouched for three decades apart from the addition of Senna’s personal seat, which is arguably the most meaningful non-original element on any Formula 1 car in private hands and deserves its own documentation. Beyond that, a buyer should establish what the sale includes in terms of the Renault RS6 V10, gearbox and spares, and what a sympathetic return to running would require, because an unrestored car of this era is a preservation decision before it is a driving one.

Then there is the other surviving car. The catalog does not say which it is or where it lives. If scarcity is part of the price, the buyer should know exactly what it is being compared to.

The Real Significance

Strip the estimate from this story and the lesson survives. Racing cars usually earn their value on the circuit. This one earned it on paper, through a contract, a test log and an unbroken line of ownership, which is why it reads more like a document than a trophy. It sits first in a New York evening sale, in a room built for objects whose value rests on authorship and provenance. That is the right place for a car whose entire argument is that the story is the object.

For registration and lot details, see RM Sotheby’s lot page. Image via RM Sotheby's.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Most limited editions begin with a number and work backward to a reason. Bentley Mulliner’s Olympia Collection begins with the reason. Twelve numbered Continental GTs mark a century since the 6½ Litre made its production debut at the 1926 Olympia Motor Show, and nearly everything about them, from the paint to the embroidery to the watch that accompanies each car, is arranged to answer a question collectors usually spend decades resolving: what, exactly, is this car a record of?

A Centenary Anchored to the Right Car

The choice of the 6½ Litre is more considered than it first appears. The 3 Litre was Bentley’s first model, launched in 1921. But the six-cylinder car is where W.O. Bentley’s ambition outran his own catalogue. In 1924, while testing a six-cylinder prototype between the European Grand Prix at Lyon and Dieppe, he and three colleagues met a rival test team on the road and ran side by side at more than 80 mph. W.O. came away convinced the engine needed more capacity, and enlarged it from 4.5 to 6.5 litres. The production car that resulted appeared at Olympia in 1926; in Speed Six form it went on to win Le Mans in 1929 and 1930.

That is a richer story than another nod to the Blower or the Le Mans cars, and Bentley tells it in physical form. An animated projection of the Lyon-to-Dieppe drive plays on the ground when a door opens. The route is embroidered into the ski hatch, in Champagne Gold thread against blind Cumbrian Green stitching. Bentley has already shown how seriously it takes the six-cylinder lineage with its own first new Speed Six in 94 years; the Olympia cars approach the same history from the opposite direction, as a Continental GT carrying the story rather than a recreation of the car.

Provenance, Delivered at Handover

The overlooked detail is not the colour. It is the kit. Each car’s individual number appears on the Bentley Rotating Display alongside a clock and dials inspired by the 1926 car, and a handcrafted Brooklands Watch Co. chronograph is numbered to match. The watch carries two interchangeable tachymeter bezels referencing the Outer Circuit and Double Twelve Circuit at Brooklands. A green car cover, a commemorative handover box and a book complete the set.

Experienced collectors will recognise what this is doing. The documentation, accessories and matched components that normally accumulate over decades, and that are so often incomplete by the second or third owner, are issued as a single, numbered package on day one. A watch that stays with its car, a box that stays with its watch, a book that stays with both: this is provenance by design. It also quietly raises the cost of an incomplete car. A 1960s Bentley missing its tool roll loses something at auction; an Olympia Collection car missing its numbered chronograph will start its resale life with a gap that cannot be recreated.

The Finish Is Not New. The Argument Is.

Mulliner’s hand-graded paint is a technique collectors have seen before, most recently in the Ombré collection shown at Rancho Mirage and the side-to-side fade applied to the Supersports. Here it is rendered in Verdant to Midnight Emerald, a process that takes 56 hours of hand work, with Champagne Gold badging, a lower-body pinstripe and black 22-inch Mulliner wheels. What distinguishes the Olympia cars is not that technique but the reason attached to it.

Set it beside the rest of Mulliner’s recent output and the positioning becomes clear. The Speed Six Continuation Series is a twelve-car programme built around a recreated 1930 chassis. The Batur Convertible is a sixteen-car coachbuilt run. The Olympia Collection is different in kind: a series-production Continental GT dressed, numbered and documented as an homage. Bentley’s announcement is silent on price and on any mechanical change, which tells you how to read it. The premium here will be paid for completeness, narrative and a number between one and twelve, not for performance.

What Serious Buyers Should Watch

Twelve cars make a thin market. Liquidity will depend less on demand than on how many owners choose to hold, and on whether the original sets stay intact. The first resale will be instructive: if cars trade with their numbered watch, cover, box and book together, the edition’s logic holds. If the pieces begin to separate, the provenance Bentley built into the package begins to erode.

Marque specialists will also compare this against Crewe’s other heritage-led work, including the 80th Anniversary Continental GTC and the Torcal, and ask which of them carries a story that will still read clearly in 2056.

A limited edition tells you how many were made. A centenary edition tells you why, and the why is the part that survives resale. The Olympia Collection will be judged in ten years not by its paint, but by how many of the twelve are still complete.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

The 1949 Buick Roadmaster from Rain Man has spent most of its public life standing for something larger than a car: a film that changed how many viewers understood autism. Its next chapter may turn on something far less romantic. The question now is who holds title, and what a creditor-driven sale does to a car whose entire value is a chain of custody.

In mid-October, a federal jury in Detroit found for Bishop George Bloomer against broadcaster Kevin Adell and The Word Network on claims of race discrimination, hostile work environment and retaliation, awarding $62.2 million. On October 23, Adell filed for Chapter 11 protection. The petition lists more than $101.8 million owed to his 20 largest creditors, a group that includes Bloomer and the IRS, and estimates liabilities of $100 million to $500 million against assets of $10 million to $50 million. Adell, who bought the Buick in 2022 and has used it in autism-awareness work, is also known for a garage of screen cars. Local reporting has now put that garage in doubt.

The headline number is not the story. The story is that screen provenance is the most emotionally persuasive kind of provenance in the hobby and, in a forced sale, one of the least self-proving.

What is, and is not, established

The public record is thinner than the headlines suggest, and it is worth being exact. Reporting names the Roadmaster and notes that other recognizable cars have passed through Adell’s garage, among them a replica Ferrari 250 GT California from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a General Lee Charger and a Smokey and the Bandit Trans Am. What has not been established, in anything I could verify, is who holds title to any of them, or whether they remain in his possession. Even the identity of each car is a separate question. The California is described as a replica, and a replica sells on its own merits, not on a film’s.

The most concrete detail concerns cars that were never his to sell. A November 3 filing reportedly has Adell surrendering leases on four vehicles: a Ford F-150, a 2024 Ineos Grenadier, a Maybach and a 1965 Shelby Cobra. A lease return is not a liquidation. The lessor owns the vehicle, and it goes back to the lessor, not to the creditors.

That is the least dramatic part of the story and the most instructive. A garage that photographs like a collection can be part collection and part ledger of obligations. Serious buyers should treat the distinction between owned, leased and titled-to-an-entity as the first question about any celebrity-adjacent garage, well before asking what is in it.

Why the Buick is the car that matters

It is not valuable because it is a Roadmaster convertible. The car is an agreeable one, with Buick’s 320-cubic-inch straight-eight making 150 horsepower through a two-speed automatic, independent front suspension and four-wheel drum brakes. It is an attractive and accessible postwar convertible, and the market prices it as one. What lifted it was the film.

Bonhams offered the car at its Scottsdale sale in January 2022 with an estimate of $150,000 to $250,000. The listing identified it as one of two Roadmasters used in the 1988 production, bought by Dustin Hoffman after filming and kept by him for decades. The second car went to director Barry Levinson, according to coverage at the time. The price reported at the sale was $335,000, above the high estimate, with later local coverage citing $350,000. The spread between a good Roadmaster and this one is a premium paid for a chain of custody that runs from the production to Hoffman to Adell.

That pedigree is unusually strong as screen provenance goes. The fact that two cars were used cuts both ways, since it makes the paperwork the whole case: anyone bidding must tie this car to this chain. Here the chain is documented by a major auction house’s consignment from the actor himself. We have seen what happens when it is not. The Miami Vice Daytona Spyder was never a Ferrari at all, as our look at the court fight over that car shows, and the Hasselhoff Knight Rider tour car carries a wide estimate for exactly the reason that documentation, not fame, sets the price.

What a bankruptcy does to a screen car

The mechanics matter more than the drama. In Chapter 11, a debtor generally remains in possession of the estate’s property, but selling outside the ordinary course requires court approval and notice to creditors, and a trustee can be appointed for cause. A court-approved sale can convey property free and clear of liens, which is a real advantage to a buyer who cares about clean title. Exemptions that might shield a vehicle are typically modest next to a six-figure collector car, and venue affects how they apply. Whether any of this reaches the Buick depends on whose name is on the title, which is the one fact the public reporting does not yet give us.

If it does reach a sale, the setting changes the price in ways that are hard to predict. A creditor-driven timetable can compress marketing, and a compressed field is rarely kind to a car that depends on a story. It can also work the other way: the autism-awareness history gives the Buick a constituency, and a museum, institution or mission-minded buyer may value the car in ways a room of collectors does not. The market has been inconsistent here. Ferrari reportedly spent about $1 million on a one-off Mondial pace car that sold in 2004 for $85,330, while an Avengers one-off was bid with no title in hand and still drew serious money. Provenance is priced by who is willing to believe it on the day.

Screen-car collections also tend to be worth more together than apart, a point we made about the Boeckmann Collection. A dispersal that splits a documented car from its related materials loses something no catalog essay restores.

What serious buyers should watch

Four things will tell us more than any price. First, whether the Buick is titled to Adell personally or to an entity. Second, whether the docket shows a motion to sell, a trustee request or a valuation in the schedules. Third, how any sale is marketed, and whether the Hoffman and Bonhams documentation travels with the car. Fourth, whether the buyer pool is allowed time to form.

A movie car is worth what its paperwork can prove, and a bankruptcy is the one setting in which everyone reads the paperwork carefully. If the Rain Man Buick comes to market, it will be a rare test of whether a famous car’s provenance holds up when the person selling it is not the one telling the story.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

On Nov. 10, 1890, Carl Borgward was born in Altona, now part of Hamburg. He went on to build delivery tricycles, a Bremen car empire, the pontoon-bodied Hansa 1500 and a fuel-injected racing engine that Stirling Moss used to win Formula Two races. Then he watched it all collapse into bankruptcy in 1961. Borgward is a lesser-known name in the collector hobby, but his best-selling Isabella still trades at prices that look modest beside its engineering and its place in postwar German history.

What happened on Nov. 10, 1890

Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Borgward was born on Nov. 10, 1890, in Altona, according to both English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia. The date is also the anchor for Borgward Group’s own “born 125 years ago” anniversary release from 2015. He earned an engineering degree from the Technical University of Hannover in 1913, the English biography says, and by 1919 he was a partner in a Bremen tire company that became a radiator maker the following year.

The business that made his name started small. In 1924 he developed the Blitzkarren, a three-wheeled delivery vehicle. By 1931 his Goliath brand had a small passenger car on the market, the Goliath Pionier, and he had taken over Hansa-Lloyd-Werke, creating what became the Borgward Group, per the same biographies.

The people and cars behind the story

The first big postwar statement was the Hansa 1500, presented at the Geneva show in March 1949. English Wikipedia describes it as the first postwar German car with a pontoon body, a smooth, slab-sided body with the fenders blended in.

The car that defined the brand followed in 1954. Isabella production began in June of that year in Bremen, according to Wikipedia’s Isabella entry, with a launch price of DM 7,265 aimed at the Opel Rekord and Ford Taunus. It used a 1,493 cc four-cylinder engine in a unit-body pontoon shell. The base engine made 60 PS, and the TS version made 75 PS, German Wikipedia’s Isabella entry says. Borgward sold 11,150 in the first year, and total Isabella output across all body styles reached 202,862.

The halo version was the Isabella Coupé. After sales fell by almost a third across 1955 and 1956, Borgward built four hand-made coupé prototypes, and series production began in January 1957 using the TS engine. German Wikipedia puts coupé production at roughly 9,500 to 10,000 cars, a small slice of the Isabella run. It is also the body style that dominates the top of the market.

Borgward also raced. The Borgward 1500 RS was shown at the 1951 Frankfurt show, and Wikipedia’s RS entry says only nine were built through 1958. The later racing engine was a 1.5-liter, twin-cam, four-valve, fuel-injected four-cylinder that made about 134 hp, rising to roughly 153–155 hp by 1959. Fritz Jüttner, Borgward’s test driver and head race fitter, kept the engines running. When Borgward quit racing at the end of 1958, the engine did not die: a 1959 supply deal put it in the British Racing Partnership’s Cooper T51 Formula Two cars, and Stirling Moss won four F2 races with it.

The historical context

Borgward’s rise belongs to West Germany’s postwar recovery. In 1949 he split the business into three separately owned companies, Borgward, Goliath and Lloyd, a structure German Wikipedia says helped him obtain more scarce raw materials. By the 1950s the group was the largest employer in Bremen.

The biography is not tidy. German Wikipedia records that he applied for Nazi Party membership in 1937 and was named a Wehrwirtschaftsführer, a title for industrialists tied to the war economy, in 1938.

Why it mattered at the time

In the 1950s Borgward offered a family car with modern construction, then a coupé that sat above it in the range. English Wikipedia says the 1959 P100 was introduced with air suspension. By then the company was in financial trouble. German Wikipedia says the Bremen Senate withdrew a promised loan guarantee in January 1961. The group sought composition proceedings in July, and Borgward and Goliath were declared bankrupt in September, with Lloyd following in November. Nearly 18,000 jobs in Bremen were lost.

Carl Borgward died in Bremen on July 28, 1963. Wikipedia’s Borgward entry adds a footnote that makes the story harder to dismiss as a failed business: creditors were reportedly paid in full, with 4.5 million marks left over. Equipment for the Isabella and P100 was sold to a buyer in Monterrey, Mexico, where production began in August 1967 and ended in 1970.

Why Carl Borgward still matters to collectors

Borgward is a closed chapter with a long tail. The Bremen plant was acquired by Henschel in 1969 and later became a Mercedes-Benz factory. Mercedes built 199,517 W123-series estates there between 1978 and 1986, as we noted in our look at the $252,000 W123 wagon. That ties Borgward’s old Bremen floor to one of the most collected Mercedes of the 1970s.

The name has also been revived, with mixed results. Borgward Group AG was formed in 2008 and sold SUVs from January 2017. Wikipedia reports that Beijing Borgward filed for bankruptcy in April 2022. For collectors, that history argues for treating the original Bremen cars as the real thing and the modern badge as a footnote.

Borgward market context: what recent results show

There is no deep price-guide market for Isabellas, and the data are thin, so treat the figures below as snapshots rather than a trend. Classic.com’s Borgward page lists 21 Borgward listings and reports a five-year high sale of $35,000 for a 1961 Isabella Coupé in September 2023. The same page lists a 1959 Isabella Coupé at £26,400 in May 2020 and a 1959 Isabella TS at $17,920 in October 2020. The page mixes currencies, so the figures are not directly comparable.

The bottom of the range looks very different. At RM Sotheby’s Cliveden House sale in June 2024, a 1959 Isabella Coupé with an older restoration sold for £5,750, according to the RM Sotheby’s lot page. It had been on prolonged static display, needed a mechanical inspection and was offered on a bill of sale only, without registration papers, on a UK temporary import bond. A Sports Car Market profile of a right-hand-drive 1959 TS Coupé recorded a $25,517 sale at Bonhams in November 2006 and judged very good examples to be worth mid-teens to about $20,000 at the time of its writing.

What collectors should take from Borgward’s birthday

The gap between a £5,750 project and a $35,000 coupé is the lesson. In a market this small, condition, documentation and paperwork explain most of the spread, so a coupé with a clean history and registration should be priced very differently from a static-display car on a bill of sale. Buyers should also confirm body style and engine specification, since the TS engine and the coupé body are what separate a collectible Isabella from the 200,000-car mainstream.

Borgward built a car that sold more than 200,000 copies, made a racing engine good enough for Stirling Moss, and still ran out of money. Today his cars cost far less than the story behind them, which is the case for paying attention to them.

More from this series: Yoshisuke Aikawa, the industrialist behind Nissan and Datsun and Phil Hill’s win in the first Pebble Beach road race.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

On a Chevelle SS 396, the badge is the least reliable evidence on the car. The SS emblems are cheap, the trim is easy to source and the body is among the most reproduced in the hobby. What separates a $50,000 car from a six-figure one is not what is bolted to the fender. It is what the plates, the engine and the paper say underneath.

This is a buyer’s guide for the 1966–67 cars, the years when the SS 396 arrived and when the hierarchy of engines was most clearly drawn. Our thesis is simple: in this market, buy the evidence first and the horsepower second.

Know the hierarchy before you look at a car

According to Hagerty’s 1964–67 Chevelle buyer’s guide, the 1966 SS 396 came with three versions of the big-block: the L35 at 325 horsepower, the L34 at 360 and the L78 at 375. For 1967 the L34 lost 10 horsepower, and the L78 was available only late in the model year, from around late April or early May. Only 612 L78-equipped SS 396 cars were built that year.

Put that in context. Hagerty’s Chevelle market reporting put SS 396 production at more than 72,000 in 1966 and more than 62,000 in 1967, so an L78 1967 car is roughly one in a hundred. That is the fact to keep in your head when a seller describes a 1967 as “a 375-horse car.” Most weren’t. SS cars came standard with a three-speed manual, with a four-speed optional, and the SS 396 was sold only as a coupe or convertible. A sedan or wagon presented as an SS 396 is not the real thing.

The plate, the tag and the paper

Start with the VIN plate on the front hinge post of the driver’s door and the trim tag on the driver’s side firewall. Hagerty notes that from 1965 the plates were riveted with rosette rivets, which is worth checking against the build date. Because SS cars are so easy to replicate, the guide singles out emblems in the wrong location as the most common error on clones. SS cars also have small brackets on the rear lower control arms that other Chevelles lack. And no Chevelle left the factory with a 427, whatever a seller’s story suggests.

For paper, Hagerty calls the original bill of sale, build sheet and original-owner documentation the “gold standard” on high-dollar cars. We have made the same argument about other muscle cars where the VIN cannot prove a model, from a 1964–65 Pontiac GTO to a 1969 Camaro Z/28. On a Chevelle, the logic is identical: the engine and drivetrain should be traced to the car, not assumed.

What the market is paying for

Hagerty’s guide puts general SS values at roughly $50,000 to over $100,000, with the Z16 cars, about 200 1965 Malibu SS cars with the 375-horsepower L37 396, near $200,000. Those figures come from a guide Hagerty first published in 2023 and should be checked against current Price Guide numbers. Hagerty’s explanation for the Chevelle’s staying power was cachet, cross-generational appeal and an enormous parts and knowledge base, with demand from Gen Xers and millennials as well as baby boomers.

Condition: where these cars rot

Hagerty calls the platform mechanically sound with excellent parts availability, so the inspection is largely about metal. Check the passenger-side floorboard, often damaged by leaking heater cores; the rear corners of the back window; behind the rear wheels; the bottoms of the front fenders; and the door bottoms. Later cars use butyl tape on the windshield, which the guide flags as a rust risk. Hagerty’s advice is blunt: buy the best-condition car you can afford, because restoration costs often exceed value.

The short version

Walk away from a car that cannot show matching plates and a sensible paper trail, however good it looks. A modified or re-created car can be a fine driver; it just is not an investment-grade original. If you want a large-car comparison, our report on a big-block 1968 Camaro SS shows the same dynamics.

On a Chevelle SS 396, the badge tells you what the seller hopes. The plates tell you what the car is.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Collector car headlines this autumn have split into two camps: muscle cars are cooling, or muscle cars are surging. Hagerty’s October Price Guide update says both are true, which is the point. The muscle car market is not cracking. It is sorting, and it is sorting by the quality of each car’s story.

The numbers come from Hagerty’s quarterly Price Guide review, published Oct. 29. They are average changes in condition #2 (excellent) values over the prior quarter, which makes them valuation data rather than a tally of sales. Read that way, the spread between the best and worst performers is wider than the market’s overall direction.

Three cars up, three down

On the rise: the 1968–70 Dodge Charger with the 426 Hemi, up 15% on average, with #2 values now running from $160,000 to $189,000. Hagerty ties the move to strong summer sales. The 1968–72 Buick GS 400 and GS 455 gained 4% after several quarters of declines, and the 2005–14 Mustang GT is up 7% for the quarter and 34% since January.

On the way down: the 1970 Plymouth Road Runner Superbird, off 9%; the 1965–68 Mustang GT, off 4%; and the 1968–71 Pontiac GTO, off 3%. Hagerty notes that Ram Air IV GTOs held flat because there is too little reliable sales data to move them, which is an absence of evidence rather than a sign of strength.

The Superbird tells the real story

Look inside the Superbird’s 9% decline and the pattern is hard to miss. Hemi cars fell 4%, to $384,000. The 440 cars rated at 390 horsepower fell 9%, to $265,000. The 440/375 cars fell 14%, to $154,000. The less rare the powertrain, the harder the fall. In a softer market, buyers keep paying for the car with the strongest claim and walk away from the one that leans on the wing alone.

That is consistent with how Superbirds trade when paperwork is in question. As we noted when a Superbird with a replacement nose reached Hagerty Marketplace, the nose is replaceable and the documentation is not. Our Fall Carlisle report reached a similar conclusion about where buyers put their money.

Why the Charger is moving the other way

The Charger’s rise is not a Hemi story alone. Hagerty’s 2026 Bull Market List called the 1968–70 Charger the “undisputed pop culture heavyweight” of its picks and reported that 52% of Charger owners in its database are Gen X or younger. A car that a new generation of buyers grew up watching has a deeper bench of bidders than one built to win a homologation race. For more on how far Chargers and their relatives have come, see our list of the most expensive Mopars ever sold at auction.

The wider market is sorting, too

This is not unique to muscle. In June, Hagerty reported its Blue Chip Index at 75.54 and its Hagerty Hundred, the most commonly insured vehicles, at 48.32. The 27.22-point gap had widened, and Hagerty called them two different markets. Earlier in the year, the Hagerty Market Index hit a four-year low even as the top end set records. Muscle cars are following the same script inside their own segment.

What serious buyers should take from this

Three things. First, treat a quarterly percentage as a direction, not a price; Hagerty’s own flat Ram Air IV figure shows how thin the data can be. Second, the cars losing ground are not bad cars. They are cars whose story is carried by an option, a nose cone, or a sheet of paper that can be questioned. Third, rebounds tend to start where values have already fallen for several quarters, which is the Buick GS case. One quarter is a signal, not a verdict.

Collectors do not pay for muscle. They pay for evidence that a particular car matters. This autumn, the market is simply charging more for the evidence.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

When Hagerty named the 1968–70 Dodge Charger to its 2026 Bull Market List, the pick looked almost too obvious. Everyone knows the Charger. The real news is what has happened since: in its October Price Guide update, Hagerty reports Hemi Chargers up 15% on average in a single quarter, with condition #2 values now running from $160,000 to $189,000. The call was not about the car. It was about who is buying it.

Our view: the Charger is the rare muscle car whose collector base is turning over without the market flinching, and that handoff, more than the Hemi itself, is the story.

What Hagerty actually said

In the Bull Market List, Hagerty placed the second-generation Charger first among its eleven picks, with #2 condition values of $91,450, a #1 value of $121,350, a #3 value of $61,250 and a #4 value of $45,500. The argument was brief. Values for #3 cars had dipped but remained above pre-pandemic levels, and younger buyers were expected to push prices up. Hagerty described the 1968–70 Charger as “the undisputed pop culture heavyweight of the bunch.”

The supporting facts are worth knowing. Chrysler sold more than 230,000 Chargers across the three model years, roughly 40,000 of them R/Ts. The most powerful engine was the 425-horsepower, 426-cubic-inch Hemi; the more common 440 Magnum was rated at 375. The car was the antagonist in the 1968 film Bullitt, and a Charger took the 1970 NASCAR Grand National title with Bobby Isaac. And 52% of Charger owners in Hagerty’s database are Gen X or younger.

The Hemi premium, in dollars

Here the numbers become useful. Hagerty’s headline #2 figure for the 1968–70 Charger is $91,450. Its October range for Hemi cars is $160,000 to $189,000. The difference, roughly $69,000 to $98,000, is what an engine code and a documented build sheet are worth in this family. We would caution that the two figures come from different Hagerty pieces and are not a like-for-like comparison, but the order of magnitude is clear.

It also explains why the Hemi cars lead a rising market while Hagerty’s earlier note about softer values concerned #3 cars; this quarter’s strength showed up in the Hemi range. As we explored in our look at the most expensive Mopars sold at auction, the top of the Mopar market has always belonged to cars with provable Hemi pedigree.

A demographic handoff, not a price spike

The younger-owner data matters because muscle car demand has long been shaped by the people who bought these cars new, or who wanted to. Hagerty’s figure suggests the Charger has a bench of buyers whose reference point is film and video, not the showroom. That tends to produce steadier demand than a single auction record. It is the same dynamic we see in the October Price Guide, where cars with broad cultural recognition gained while those with narrower stories slipped.

The list’s other Mopar-adjacent pick is instructive. Hagerty also named the 1981–93 Dodge Ramcharger, with #2 values of $25,300, pointing to rising prices that remain low compared with Bronco-badged SUVs and growing interest from younger owners. Different price tier, same pattern: younger owners are driving the interest.

What serious buyers should watch

A Hemi Charger is a car where the paper decides the price. Verify the engine through the broadcast sheet or build documentation, match casting numbers, and expect the market to treat a replacement engine as a different car. Be wary of the leap from a quarterly percentage to a forecast; Hagerty’s 15% describes a model’s valuation moving, not every car at auction. And be honest about the base: a Charger with a 440 Magnum is a very good car in a very different price bracket.

A Hemi is an engine. The Charger is the reason a new generation of collectors wants one.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Buick’s Gran Sport is the muscle car the market keeps forgetting to price. In its October Price Guide update, Hagerty reports 1968–72 Buick GS 400 and GS 455 values up 4% on average, the first meaningful gain after several quarters of declines. A single quarter is a modest signal. But it lands on a family of cars whose spread, from entry level to trophy, may be the widest in the segment.

Our view: the GS is the clearest example of a muscle car that was priced for what it was not. It was never a Hemi or a Boss. It was a fast, heavy, torque-rich car from a company that did not shout, and the market is slowly learning to read that as a virtue.

A spread worth studying

According to Hagerty’s review, #2 (excellent) values across the 1968–72 GS 400 and GS 455 run from $27,700 for a 1972 GS 455 Sport Coupe to $129,000 for a 1970 GS 455 Stage I convertible. That is a spread of more than four and a half times inside one model family. Few cars in the hobby offer a collector a seat at the table for under $30,000 and a blue-chip option at more than $120,000 without changing badges.

Why the top of the family is not the whole story

The expensive end of the GS range is governed by the same forces as every other muscle car: engine, body style, documentation. A Stage 1 convertible is a different asset from a 1972 coupe, and the gap in Hagerty’s numbers reflects it. That is why buyers should be careful about reading the 4% as a rising tide. It is an average over cars that behave very differently.

We have seen how much the details matter. As we explained in our report on a 1970 Buick GSX with no VIN of its own, a GSX cannot be proved from the VIN alone, and a genuine Stage 1 GS is a valuable car but not a GSX. The Stage 1 decal on an air cleaner is not proof of anything. The verification lies in the block code, casting numbers and carburetor number.

Why now

Two readings are reasonable. The first is simple recovery: after several quarters of declines, buyers see a car with a strong build story priced well below its Detroit rivals. The second is the broader pattern we describe in our look at the October Price Guide, where cars with a verifiable story hold up while those depending on a single feature slip. The Buick sits between those camps. Its story is real but quiet.

There is also the Buick halo. The turbocharged era that followed, led by the Grand National and GNX, gave the brand a performance credibility that older Gran Sports can borrow. Our list of the most expensive Buick GNXs ever sold shows how seriously collectors take that lineage once a car carries the right paperwork.

What serious buyers should do

Be skeptical of any claim of Stage 1 or GSX without documentation, and look to the numbers on the engine rather than the decal. Decide whether you are buying a driver or an asset; at the low end, a clean GS 455 is among the least expensive entries to real big-block torque in the segment, while the top of the range demands a paper trail. And do not treat a 4% quarter as a trend. Hagerty’s own data shows a rebound after several quarters of losses. The market has yet to prove it is more than a pause.

Muscle car collectors have a habit of paying for noise. The Buick GS may be the first place the market stops.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

That is the real subject of Broad Arrow's Global Icons: Memorabilia Online sale, the last online auction of the house's season. Its 207 memorabilia lots begin closing at 19:00 CET on November 22, with 98 artwork lots following the next day. The helmets lead the catalogue, and they form a useful lesson in how motorsport relics are valued: the name gets a helmet into the catalogue, but the paper decides whether it belongs there.

Why a Helmet Is the Hardest Relic to Trust

No piece of a driver's kit is more personal, and none is easier to reproduce. A livery can be repainted, a replica can be signed, and a driver could use several helmets in near-identical colors across a season. That is why the strongest lots in this sale are the ones that arrive with documents rather than adjectives.

The Mansell helmet (Lot 148) is an Arai GP-3 painted by Mike Fairholme Designs and numbered F1 94 2. It carries the aerodynamic "ear" trims and original radio equipment from his final Grand Prix victory, his 31st, at Adelaide in 1994. Broad Arrow states that it comes with a Certificate of Authenticity from Fairholme and a copy of a letter from Mansell confirming it was used at that win. Two independent voices, the painter and the driver, point at the same object. That is what turns a famous-name helmet into a documented one.

The market has been paying attention to this particular win. In 2023, RM Sotheby's sold a 1994 Rothmans Williams Arai helmet from Mansell's own Legacy Collection, described as worn at the Australian Grand Prix, for £42,000. It is a useful reference point rather than a direct comparison, since a driver can use more than one helmet in a season and the two lots are separate pieces with their own documentation. It does show that buyers will pay real money for the Adelaide story when the source is the driver himself.

The Hill Helmet and the Value of a Chain of Custody

Graham Hill's 1974 Embassy Racing helmet (Lot 127, estimate €40,000 to €60,000) offers a different kind of proof. It is a Griffin helmet, from the British maker founded by former racing driver Terry Ogilvie-Hardy, and its history reads like a ledger: displayed at the Guinness World Records Centre in Piccadilly in 1985, bought at the Guinness clearance auction in 1995, then sold by Sotheby's in 1997 and Bonhams in 2007, according to the lot description.

Hill is the only driver to complete motorsport's Triple Crown of the Formula 1 title, the Indianapolis 500 and Le Mans, and Broad Arrow calls the number of his helmets in circulation limited. The scarcity matters less than the continuity. Each earlier sale left a catalogue entry, a photograph, and a set of eyes that examined the object. For a buyer, a helmet that has already been scrutinized by two major houses carries a different kind of confidence than one that appears with a letter alone.

Original Versus Replica: Where the Estimates Get Interesting

The catalogue also mixes originals with official replicas and signed replicas, and the estimates blur the line more than purists might expect. Michael Schumacher's signed 1998 Japanese Grand Prix replica Ferrari helmet (Lot 107) carries an estimate of €10,000 to €12,000, the same range as Esteban Ocon's original 2021 Brazilian Grand Prix Alpine helmet (Lot 232). His 1996 signed promotional Ferrari helmet (Lot 123) is estimated lower still, at €6,000 to €8,000, so even within one driver and one team the house is pricing the type of object and its story, not the signature alone. Lando Norris's original 2020 McLaren race helmet (Lot 115, €35,000 to €40,000) is a Bell painted by Jens Munser Designs and numbered LN-R-15/20, which marks it as a 2020 season race helmet, with a certificate signed by Jens Munser. The numbering gives a modern piece an unusually clear identification system, and the estimate sits well above the other contemporary originals in the sale.

The Senna replica (Lot 136) has its own paper: it was a competition prize, with a letter from News International confirming that. It also sits in the shadow of January's sale in this series, where Broad Arrow reported that a replica of Senna's 1988 McLaren helmet realized €55,625, well above what replica estimates typically suggest. That result shows how far a single name can stretch a category, and it is a reminder to read each lot's paper before reading its estimate.

What the Early Bids Do and Do Not Say

Every helmet noted here is offered without reserve, and as of Monday morning the bidding sat far below the estimates: €4,500 on both the Mansell and Hill lots, €6,000 on Norris, and €20 on the Senna replica. Read that with care. In a timed sale, early bids on no-reserve lots are placeholders. Serious buyers commonly wait for the final days, and the closing window runs through November 22. The estimates are a statement of what the auction house believes the documentation can support, and the result will show whether the room agrees.

What It Means for Collectors

Motorsport memorabilia is a smaller and less liquid market than the cars it sits beside, and it rewards the same habits that serve car collectors well. Treat provenance as the asset. Ask who documented the piece and when, whether the documentation comes from the driver, the team, or the painter, and whether anything independent confirms it. The logic is familiar from the car market, and we have followed it in Broad Arrow's recent Las Vegas results, including the $18.7 million F50 and the Daytona SP3: condition and documentation matter as much as the badge. It applies equally to celebrity and racing ephemera, from the Billy Joel motorcycle collection to a driver's own tribute car such as the Gunther Werks Brundle Edition. For wider context on the house's parent company, see our look at Hagerty's third-quarter auction numbers.

A helmet is the most personal piece of a driver's kit, which is also what makes it the easiest to imitate. The lots that will hold their value are the ones where the person who wore it, or the person who painted it, put their name to the claim.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

The cars left first. By July, the free museum at Exit 369 on Interstate 40, just inside New Mexico at the Texas line, had been emptied of its vehicles, leaving a dozen or so pedal cars and a marquee that still read “Free Car Museum.” What followed in October was the more revealing part: Assiter Auctioneers of Canyon, Texas, began selling the rest of Russell’s Truck & Travel Center museum with no reserves, and the bidding told a clearer story about collector priorities than any single car could.

The thesis is simple. When a private museum is dismantled, the market stops paying for the idea of the collection and starts pricing each object on its own merits. At Russell’s, the objects that carried the most conviction were not the ones most people would have named in advance. They were the glowing, branded, period-correct pieces of roadside furniture that gave the building its atmosphere.

What the first sale actually measured

Assiter’s first online sale closed at 10 a.m. on October 10 and combined collector cars, pickups, motorcycles, Cushman scooters, a 1925 Ford fuel truck, a 1903 mule-drawn tanker wagon, gas pumps, neon, and porcelain signs. The auction house’s lot pages show where the competition concentrated. The 1940 double-sided Texaco sign, at $5,000, drew 181 bids, the most of any lot we reviewed. A reproduction Wayne Model 615 Gulf visible pump drew 171 and reached $7,600. A Gilbert & Barker Texaco Sky Chief visible pump took $11,500 on 145 bids, and the animated Mobil Pegasus neon, a full eight feet of porcelain enamel and glass tubing, closed at $13,250 after 90.

Those are listed final bids; Assiter’s pages do not state the buyer’s premium, so treat them as the floor of what buyers paid. The Chevron double-sided neon sign, catalogued as 1946-47, finished at $13,750, the highest figure among the signs and pumps, and the Phillips 66 neon from Federal Electric reached $11,250.

The detail worth noticing: a reproduction out-earned an original

Two lots share a model number. Lot 18 was an antique Wayne Model 615 in Gilmore Red Lion livery; it sold for $3,950. Lot 22 was a reproduction Model 615 in Gulf livery; it sold for $7,600. Nothing in the catalog data we reviewed describes condition, so it would be a mistake to read too much into a single pair. Still, the gap points to something petroliana buyers have long understood. Brand recognition, finish quality, and display impact often outweigh strict originality, especially for buyers furnishing a garage or showroom rather than assembling a documented archive. That is the opposite of how the same people would behave over a Ferrari or a Duesenberg, and it is a useful reminder that “original” is not a universal price driver. It matters most where a market has decided it does.

One more pattern deserves a mention. A single registered New Mexico bidder, identified only by number in Assiter’s results, took six of the sale’s top lots: the Phillips 66, Mobil Pegasus, and Chevron neon signs, the 1940 Texaco sign, the 1923-24 Fry “Mae West” Texaco visible pump at $7,500, and the Gulf reproduction. Together those lots account for $58,350 in listed bids. We do not know who that buyer is, and it would be speculation to say. What the data does show is that serious demand in this category can be concentrated in very few hands, and that a no-reserve sale gives a determined buyer a rare chance to clear a shelf in one morning.

A collection, a clause, and a calendar

The museum was the work of Emory Russell, a former truck driver who restored many of his trucks and cars and, with his wife, Barbara, opened the free museum in July 2010 beside the family’s truck stop. The site sits over the ruins of the old Longhorn II restaurant on a 1952-1980 alignment of Route 66. Barbara Russell has said her husband owns more than 200 trucks, which suggests that what visitors saw was an edit, not the whole. Admission was always free; a donation box raised more than $520,000 over roughly 15 years for food banks in Amarillo and Tucumcari.

In 2023 the Russells, both in their 80s, sold the travel center to TravelCenters of America so the family could retire. As part of that deal, TA agreed to keep the Russell’s name and keep the museum running for three years. The vehicles were gone by July, the Russell’s sign had been replaced by a TA logo, and the auction closed in October, almost exactly at the end of that window. The reporting to date includes no statement from TA about the future of the space. Collectors should notice the structure more than the outcome: a three-year commitment attached to a corporate acquisition gave a family-built museum a defined shelf life from the day it was signed.

Why it matters to collectors

Private museums are rarely endowed. Many depend on a founder’s energy and a landlord’s patience, and when either changes, the collection returns to the market. That pattern has been playing out at every scale, from the Harrah Collection to the Eendenmuseum’s 300 Citroën 2CVs. It also explains why a car that spent decades on public display, like the numbers-matching 1967 Pontiac GTO that spent 35 years in a museum, can carry a distinct kind of provenance. And it is the logic behind the Thoroughbred Motorsports Collection, which cleared 99 no-reserve lots, where the builder’s documentation mattered as much as the metal.

Two more Assiter sales were listed as coming soon after the October 20 sale of Coca-Cola machines, jukeboxes, pedal cars, and vending equipment: one built around NASCAR, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans material, toys, and military uniforms, the other around Route 66 items, movie posters, and Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and James Dean memorabilia. Those categories tilt toward entertainment and Americana rather than automotive history, and they will show how far the Russell’s name carries once the gasoline signs are gone. For buyers, the lesson from the first sale is practical. Illumination, livery, and recognizable branding pulled the deepest bidding, while condition and originality questions were priced in more quietly.

A collection holds together only as long as someone insists on it. When that stops, every object has to answer a plain question: what are you worth on your own? At Russell’s, the neon answered loudest.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

The most popular collector car in America is having a quiet year, and that is not a contradiction. Hagerty’s October Price Guide update shows 1965–68 Mustang GTs down 4% on average, with individual cars off between 2% and 8%. The Mustang did not stumble. It ran into the central problem of every car that sold in the hundreds of thousands: popularity creates a deep market, and a deep market has nowhere to hide an ordinary car.

Our view: the early Mustang is not a rare car with a premium. It is a common car with pockets of rarity, and collectors who treat the whole family as one asset are misreading it.

A car built to be everywhere

The order book made the case. According to Hagerty’s profile of the 1965 Mustang, Ford reportedly took 22,000 orders on the first day. The 1965 run came to roughly 559,500 cars, or 680,989 if the extended model year that began in April 1964 is included, followed by another 607,500 in 1966. Nearly three-quarters of buyers chose a V-8. A notchback listed at $2,320, a convertible at $2,557 and the fastback, which came later, at $2,553.

Hagerty still ranks the 1965 Mustang first among its clients by insurance quoting activity, with the 1966 second. That is a remarkable statement about demand. It is also a statement about supply. The collector market cannot treat a car that half the hobby already owns as scarce.

Where the premium actually lives

Value in this family sits in codes and documentation, not in the pony badge. The GT package arrived in April 1965, and the K-code High Performance 289, rated at 271 horsepower, was the hottest option through 1966. Hagerty’s numbers separate the 289/225 GT from the 289/271 GT for exactly that reason; the same sheet metal commands meaningfully different prices depending on what is under the hood and whether the car can prove it.

That is also why the family attracts imitation. A fastback is one of the easiest cars in the hobby to dress up, and the market is full of Shelby and Eleanor homages. We looked at one in detail when a 508-horsepower Eleanor tribute fastback came to auction. There is nothing wrong with a well-built tribute. The problem arises when a car is marketed as something else, and the clean, original GT sells beside it at a price that reflects the confusion.

The market has been sending this signal for a while

Hagerty flagged the weakness early. In May 2025, its list of slumping American classics showed the 1965–66 Mustang GT down 12% in a single quarter, called it “a sure sign the market is cooling,” and noted that the Shelby GT350, built on the same car, remained strong. The pairing matters. Ordinary GTs soften while the car with a harder claim holds. That is the same sorting we describe in our look at the October Price Guide.

Set against this, the 2005–14 Mustang GT is up 7% for the quarter and 34% since January in the same October update. The old pony car is cooling at the very moment its modern descendant is attracting buyers who grew up with it. Collector demographics are shifting beneath the badge.

What serious buyers should pay attention to

Buy the evidence, not the family name. Confirm the engine code against the car’s data plate, ask for original paperwork on any GT claim, and treat a K-code as a car that must prove itself on paper, because the price depends on it. Verify that a fastback has not been created from a coupe. For Mustangs of later vintage, the principle is the same; our Terminator Cobra buying guide shows how much spread a single option code creates.

A 4% dip in a car this widely owned is not a warning about Ford’s first pony car. It is a reminder that no one pays for a badge that everyone already has.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Classic Promenade is offering a 1912 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost in the style of the Barker Roi des Belges at $575,000, and the listing makes a persuasive case for a rare all-brass car that is equally at home on a concours lawn or a long tour. Chassis 2006 retains its original engine, number 7W, and wears Burgundy livery with Maroon accents over a Cordovan leather interior, as described in the Classic Promenade ad.

The history in the Classic Promenade listing reads like a tour of the Silver Ghost world. Chassis 2006 was ordered new as a landaulette by Australian wool entrepreneur James M. Niall of Goldsborough Mort & Co., who kept homes in Melbourne and London, and it reached Melbourne in the summer of 1912. It passed through several Melbourne owners before Maurice R. Markoff acquired it around 1958 and commissioned a new tourer body, with the completed restoration advertised in the Rolls-Royce Owners’ Club publication in 1965.

According to the ad, the car sold the following year to James Leake of Muskogee, Oklahoma, who sent it to London for a complete restoration under Harry Ferguson-Wood, longtime service manager for Jack Barclay. Leake displayed it in his personal museum until November 1987. In 1989 a Danish collector commissioned Wilkinson & Sons of England to carry out a comprehensive restoration and to reconfigure the body into its current Barker-style Roi des Belges form, a style favored by the monarchs of Belgium.

The current owner acquired the car in 2022 and recommissioned it for touring, a point the Classic Promenade description emphasizes. Upgrades include electric start, turn signals and an alternator sourced from the SGA, along with a new tan Haartz-cloth convertible top and all-new wooden artillery wheels. Those changes are aimed squarely at making a century-old car confidence-inspiring to use.

Outside, the listing describes beautifully polished brass throughout, including the Spirit of Ecstasy mascot and radiator surround. Lucas Auto Lite headlamps, Lucas King of the Road cowl lamps and tail lamps, and dual cobra horns that hide turn signals in their mouths add period character, while a polished brass fold-down windscreen can be adjusted for different styles of driving. The new top includes storage straps for hats.

Inside, the Classic Promenade ad describes Cordovan leather in overall excellent condition, an aluminum dashboard with beautifully restored instruments, and brown horsehair mats. The electric start button and turn signal switch are tucked out of sight under the driver’s seat, which keeps the cabin looking correct while adding everyday convenience.

Mechanically, the listing points to the original 7.4-liter inline six and three-speed manual, with both magneto and coil ignition. Classic Promenade says it starts on a quarter turn of the crank, shifts easily and has an easy-to-steer, stable front end, and the chassis and engine compartment have been detailed to concours standard.

The sale includes build records, historical articles, brass accessory covers, and spares and tools, according to the Classic Promenade listing. The car is available for inspection at the Phoenix showroom, with FaceTime or WhatsApp video inspections, worldwide shipping coordination and financing options also offered. For collectors who value an all-brass Silver Ghost with documented history and a drive-it-anywhere setup, this Roi des Belges is worth a close look.

This fine motorcar is being represented by long-time Rolls Royce enthusiast Harry Clark and Classic Promenade.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Bring a Trailer is offering one of the more distinctive Defenders to cross a collector’s screen this season: a blue-and-white 1986 Land Rover 110 built by Arkonik and powered by a 6.2-liter LS3 V8. The truck, Lot #273,320, is being sold by Cascio Motors of Scottsdale, Arizona, at no reserve, which means the high bidder owns it when the clock runs out. Bidding stood at $48,000 as of Monday, with the auction closing Tuesday, November 10 at 1:41 p.m.

The foundation is a proper British restoration. According to the listing, the 110 was refurbished and modified by Land Rovers UK/Arkonik of Somerset, England, before it was imported to the United States in 2015. It is the “South Beach” build, with aluminum body panels refinished in blue, a white painted roof and a white-and-blue scheme that looks like nothing else in a parking lot full of gray crossovers.

The exterior equipment reads like a well-considered expedition list. The Bring a Trailer description notes a Front Runner roof rack, an NAS-style rear step, a KBX grille, folding side steps, a front skid plate, LED lighting, fog lights, Alpine windows and a backup camera. The doors and bumpers were repainted in 2018, and the roof is finished in white to set off the blue.

Underneath, the truck rides on white-finished 16-inch steel wheels wearing 265/75 General Grabber AT2 tires, with a spare mounted on the swing-out rear door. The listing also points to Bilstein shocks, Rovers North coil springs installed in 2018, power steering, and front disc and rear drum brakes. It is a sensible, durable setup for a truck meant to be used rather than admired from a rope line.

Inside, the Arkonik treatment continues with heated Exmoor Trim front bucket seats trimmed in cream leather. Cascio Motors lists a suede headliner, a Lokar shifter, LED interior lighting, air conditioning and a Kenwood stereo with Bluetooth, along with a leather-wrapped steering wheel and aftermarket gauges. The cream, white and blue palette carries the South Beach theme from the paint straight into the cabin.

Practicality is part of the pitch. The cabin has matching cream three-across second-row seating, and the rear cargo area adds inward-facing jump seats, as the auction page describes. For a 110, that is the difference between a handsome weekend truck and one that can move the whole family, or a group of friends, to the trailhead.

The big story is under the hood. Per the listing, Virginia RodShop of Moseley, Virginia, installed a 6.2-liter LS3 E-ROD V8 in 2018, along with MSD ignition, a Race Pro stainless-steel exhaust, Magnaflow catalytic converters and a Fluidyne aluminum radiator with Spal electric fans. The seller says in the comments that the engine was a brand-new Chevrolet Performance crate package, and that the conversion invoice rates it at 430 horsepower and 424 lb-ft of torque.

Power reaches all four wheels through a remanufactured 4L65E four-speed automatic, an NP208HD dual-range transfer case and a locking center differential. The ad shows about 6,000 miles on the digital odometer since the build was completed, a CARFAX report with no accidents or damage, service records, the owner’s manual and a clean Arizona title. Prospective bidders should note that the title lists 1985 while the seller’s VIN decode points to 1986, and that the seller advises confirming California registration eligibility before bidding. Inspections are welcome in Scottsdale, and the full Bring a Trailer listing includes more than 300 photos and the supporting paperwork.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Rolls-Royce is marking 120 years of the 40/50 H.P., introduced at London's Olympia Motor Show in November 1906, with chassis 1701 on display at the Home of Rolls-Royce at Goodwood. It is a fine choice. It is also a revealing one, because the car that gave the model its name, chassis 60551, registered AX 201, is not the car on the floor. It was released to a private collector in England in 2019.

That is the real story. A marque can own its name, its trademarks and its mythology without owning the object at the center of them. Heritage is not what a company says about itself. It is what the company can put in front of an audience.

The car that was a nickname first

Chassis 60551 was the twelfth 40/50 chassis built. Rolls-Royce's own account says Claude Johnson had it painted silver, with silver-plated fittings, and named it the Silver Ghost for its quietness and smooth running. The name stuck so completely that it was later applied to every 40/50, some 8,000 of them by the time production ended in 1925, 6,173 in Britain and 1,703 at Springfield, Massachusetts.

The car earned the name in 1907. It covered roughly 2,000 miles of the Scottish Reliability Trial with a single one-minute stop, to reopen a closed fuel tap, and then went straight into a day-and-night endurance run under Royal Automobile Club observation. Rolls-Royce rounds that run to 15,000 miles. The Concours of Elegance, which later exhibited the car, puts it at 14,371, about double the contemporary record. The discrepancy is small. The significance is not: this is the car that made "the best car in the world" a claim the company could document.

How a founding car leaves the family

AX 201's later history is the kind of provenance collectors should study, because it was never a straight line. After a long period in private ownership it returned to the factory for repairs between 1948 and 1951 and was then used for publicity. A full restoration followed in 1989, ahead of the 1990 Silver Ghost Charity Tour from John O'Groats to Land's End.

Then came 1998. When Vickers sold Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, the name and the cars were separated: the Rolls-Royce marque went one way and the Bentley business, with the Crewe factory, went another. AX 201 came under Bentley ownership. For two decades the car that defined Rolls-Royce sat on the other side of that divide. In 2019 it was released to a private collector in England. The buyer has not been named and the price was not disclosed.

The sequence afterward is instructive. When the Concours of Elegance announced the car for its 2021 show at Hampton Court Palace, it described the appearance as the car's first public showing in more than 20 years. Whatever one thinks of the sale, a car that had not been seen publicly in more than 20 years was in front of an audience at Hampton Court within two years of leaving corporate hands.

Why 1701 is the right stand-in

If AX 201 is the myth of silence and reliability, chassis 1701 is the engineering behind it. Built at Derby for the 1911 London to Edinburgh Trial, it was nicknamed the "Sluggard" by Claude Johnson and driven by Ernest Hives, then an experimental test driver. It completed the trial with its gearbox locked in top gear, averaging 19.59 mph and returning better than 24 mpg, a figure that beat the numbers Napier had set. In a half-mile speed test it reached 78.2 mph. Later that year, fitted with streamlined coachwork, it reached 101.8 mph at Brooklands and became the first Rolls-Royce to exceed 100 mph.

There is a case that 1701 is the better artifact for a company that sells engineering credibility. It is a working document. It retraced the 1913 Alpine Trial route in 2013 among 47 Silver Ghosts, and in 2021 repeated the London to Edinburgh run in top gear, 110 years after the original. Its provenance is refreshed every time it is driven. AX 201's, by contrast, now depends on the goodwill and calendar of a private owner.

That distinction matters to anyone who follows the brass-era market. It is the thread running through our coverage of the world's oldest Rolls-Royce, which won Pebble Beach and now faces the run to Brighton, and of the Somerset hoard, where the paperwork matters as much as the cars. Even at the later end of the marque's pre-war story, from a long-held 25/30 Sedanca de Ville to a pair of 1937 Phantom III models offered at no reserve, the same principle holds: collectors pay for what a car can prove.

What collectors should take from it

The lesson is not that corporate collections are bad custodians. It is that corporate heritage is not provenance. A manufacturer's archive can tell a car's story, but it does not guarantee that the car will stay in its orbit, and a trademark can change hands in a boardroom in a way a chassis plate cannot. Serious buyers should look at who holds the object, who holds the records, and whether the two remain connected.

Rarity is not what makes AX 201 remarkable either. Roughly 8,000 Silver Ghosts were built, and plenty survive. What is unique is that it is the car from which the name itself derives, and no amount of production history can duplicate a moment of naming. Collectors rarely pay a premium for the model. They pay for the moment the model became a legend.

Rolls-Royce gets to keep the anniversary, the name and a deeply credible car in 1701. The silver one belongs to someone else. A marque can inherit a name in a boardroom, but it cannot inherit the object.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

The result was £871,250, above the £800,000 top estimate, and at most auctions that would close the story. For Lot 155 at RM Sotheby’s London sale on 31 October, it does not. The 1991 Honda NSX that Ayrton Senna kept for personal use in Portugal crossed the block with a line in the addendum that matters almost as much as the Honda fax behind the price: the car has entered the United Kingdom on a temporary import bond.

That is the real story of this sale. Provenance set the price. Paperwork will settle the bill.

A Bond Is a Liability Held in Suspense

A temporary import bond defers duty and VAT; it does not forgive them. RM’s own wording is plain: the bond must be cancelled either by exporting the car on an approved Bill of Lading with customs documents, or by “paying the applicable VAT and import duties” to keep it in the country. (RM Sotheby’s lot page) The buyer of a headline Senna car therefore inherits a binary decision with a very large number attached to one side of it.

The car’s own history explains why the question exists. According to the lot essay, the NSX was brought to the UK in 2013 and registered for road use in May 2016. The consigning owner then acquired it in Nagoya, Japan, in 2024, and it has since returned to Britain for this sale. A car that has left and come back is, in customs terms, a new arrival, which appears to be why a bond is in play. We covered the earlier chapter of that journey when the car surfaced on the market in 2024: Ayrton Senna’s Prized Red Honda NSX Hits the Market for Half a Million.

What the Difference Could Be Worth

For scale only: 20 percent standard VAT on the published result would be £174,250. At the 5 percent reduced rate, which the UK Trade Tariff lists as an alternative for collectors’ pieces, the figure falls to roughly £43,560. The gap is about £130,700. Import VAT is assessed on customs value, which includes duty and freight, not on the sale price as such, so the real numbers will differ. But a six-figure swing belongs in a bidder’s budget before the paddle goes up, not after the invoice arrives.

The Test Is Originality, Not Fame

The relevant definition sits in the chapter note to heading 9705 of the UK Trade Tariff. A collectors’ motor vehicle must be in its original state, with repairs and restoration permitted but no substantial changes; at least 30 years old; and of a model no longer in production. A car meeting all three is presumed to qualify. Accountants who advise on classic imports describe the benefit as nil duty and 5 percent VAT.

A 1991 NSX is 35 years old and the first generation ended production in 2005, so age and model are not the issue. (Our first-generation NSX spec sheet sets out how that production run is divided.) Original state is the live question, and the published material does not answer it. RM’s lot page gives no mileage and no restoration history, and the essay is silent on mechanical condition. Nobody outside the buyer’s customs adviser and HMRC can say how this car would fare.

Two Kinds of Documentation

Here is the distinction collectors tend to blur. The Honda fax, reaffirmed by Honda Motor Europe, proves who the car was for. It is a provenance document, and it is the reason the estimate ran from £500,000 to £800,000 on a car that would otherwise trade as an ordinary early NSX. Customs asks a different question: what the car is, and whether it has been changed. Those answers live in service records, restoration invoices and a clean chain of identification, the same kind of evidence we described in On an Integra Type R, the VIN Trail Matters More Than the Plaque.

A fax from Honda cannot tell HMRC whether the paint, interior or running gear are original. A buyer who pays for the first kind of paper and assumes it covers the second has bought half a file.

The 2025 Title

The addendum also states that the car is titled as 2025. We do not know the cause, and it may be a purely administrative consequence of the car’s re-entry from Japan. But for a vehicle whose tax treatment can turn on being at least 30 years old, a record that dates it to 2025 is a discrepancy to resolve in writing, with the registering authority and with customs, before any declaration is made. It is the kind of detail that costs nothing to fix early and a great deal to explain later.

What Serious Buyers Should Take From It

The top of the collector market is now thoroughly international. Cars cross borders for auctions, for private sales and for the shelves of collectors who own in several countries, and each crossing adds a regulatory layer that belongs in the provenance file alongside the ownership chain. Exporting the NSX under bond is a legitimate route, but it only moves the same question to the destination country, whose own rules for a 35-year-old car may differ.

The sale told us what Senna’s name is worth to a room of well-funded bidders; our earlier analysis of the result and our pre-sale look at the estimate cover that ground, and the wider sale is in RM’s record £36.55 million London total. The bond asks a quieter and more consequential question: how much of what the buyer paid for can the buyer lawfully keep at the price they expected? Honda’s heritage parts program and the broader market for correct first-generation cars make an unaltered NSX easier to maintain than ever. Whether this particular one qualifies as unaltered is the sentence the file needs to finish.

This article is market commentary, not tax or legal advice. Buyers should take customs and tax advice specific to the car and the jurisdiction before cancelling or discharging a bond.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

On Nov. 6, 1880, Yoshisuke Aikawa was born in what is now Yamaguchi City, Japan. He never designed a car, and he died in 1967, two years before the Datsun 240Z reached American showrooms. Yet without his foundry, his holding company and his bet on small cars, the Z-car that Japanese-car collectors now chase might never have carried the Datsun badge.

What happened on Nov. 6, 1880

Aikawa was born on Nov. 6, 1880, in Yamaguchi Prefecture, according to Nissan’s own heritage biography. He graduated from the machinery section of Tokyo Imperial University’s engineering department in 1903 and worked as a mechanic at Shibaura Seisakusho, a forerunner of Toshiba. He then went to the United States, where, by Nissan’s account, he worked in a factory and developed his casting skills.

Back in Japan, he founded Tobata Casting (Tobata Imono) in 1910 with backing from the statesman Kaoru Inoue. The company made malleable cast iron and was reportedly the first in its industry to produce it in an electric furnace. Tobata is the forerunner of today’s Hitachi Metals. In 1928 he took over and restructured the Kuhara mining group, renaming it Nihon Sangyo. The name “Nissan” is a contraction of that company name.

The people and cars behind the story

The car side of the story begins before Aikawa. DAT, an acronym drawn from the surnames of its early investors, built its first car in 1914 in Tokyo. In 1930 and 1931 the firm developed a small car called the Datson, meaning “son of DAT,” as Wikipedia’s Datsun history and Nissan both describe it. In August 1931, Aikawa’s Tobata Casting bought DAT Jidosha Seizo. Around 1932 the name changed from Datson to Datsun, because “son” sounded like a Japanese word meaning loss, according to Nissan’s heritage timeline.

Aikawa then scaled up. Tobata set up an automobile division in March 1933 and bought land in Shinkoyasu, Yokohama, that October, the site of Nissan’s Yokohama Plant today. On Dec. 26, 1933, Nihon Sangyo and Tobata Casting established Jidosha Seizo Co., Ltd. in Yokohama, with Aikawa as president. It was renamed Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. in 1934 after Nihon Sangyo became its sole owner. The Automotive Hall of Fame’s history page records his goal of building 15,000 vehicles a year, an ambitious target for Japan at the time.

The historical context

Aikawa’s time in the United States shaped his view of the business. Nissan says his knowledge of the American market convinced him that cars would become popular in Japan. In 1937, the Datsun Type 15 arrived and Nissan describes it as the first mass-produced Japanese vehicle.

His legacy is also complicated. In 1937 he moved Nissan’s group headquarters to Manchukuo, and after Japan’s surrender, occupation authorities arrested him as a Class A war crimes suspect, according to Wikipedia. He was held in Sugamo Prison for 20 months and released without trial, and the Nissan zaibatsu was dissolved. He later led Teikoku Oil and was elected to the House of Councillors in 1953. He died on Feb. 13, 1967, at age 86.

Why it mattered at the time

Aikawa combined a casting business, a holding company, a small-car product and a purpose-built Yokohama plant into a single automotive venture. The Datsun name that survived from his era later carried the 240Z to American buyers.

Why Aikawa still matters to collectors

Prewar Datsuns are largely museum pieces, and we found no reliable public auction data for them, so the collector market is built on the postwar cars. The key one is the Z. Nissan Motor Corporation U.S.A. president Yutaka Katayama is credited with conceiving the S30 and introducing the 240Z to the American market, and it went on sale in October 1969. Our 240Z collector spec sheet cites widely repeated output of about 148,000 cars, with the caveat that the figure is approximate. At the top of the family sits the Fairlady Z432, built in roughly 420 examples with the twin-cam S20 engine, as Wikipedia’s S30 entry notes. We recently covered a Z432 offered for sale.

Datsun market context: what recent results show

Hagerty’s valuation tool lists a 1970 240Z in #3 (Good) condition at about $24,100, though the data shown ran through April 2025, so check current figures before you buy. Our own spec sheet puts good driver-quality cars at roughly $25,000 to $40,000 and top Series I examples at $60,000 to $90,000 or more.

Auction records show how far the extremes can go. A 21,750-mile 1971 Series I 240Z sold for $310,000 on Bring a Trailer on Jan. 29, 2020, roughly five times Hagerty’s #1 value for a 1971 car at that time, Hagerty reported. Earlier that month, a race-prepared 1970 Fairlady Z432R brought $803,857 at a BH Auction sale in Tokyo, per Motor Authority. The Z432R was a rare racing variant, one of roughly 30 built. Condition and originality drive these prices, as we showed with a 240Z owned since 1975, whose odometer reading told only part of the story.

What collectors should take from Aikawa’s birthday

Every Datsun badge on a Z traces back to a decision made by a casting-company president in 1931. For buyers, that history is a reminder to check what the car is and what the paperwork proves. Our guide on how to verify a Series I 240Z covers the details that matter most to the market, including number plates and hatch vents.

Sources: Nissan Global (Legend 01: Yoshisuke Aikawa; company history), Nissan USA heritage 1930–1939, Automotive Hall of Fame (This Day in Automotive History), Wikipedia (Yoshisuke Aikawa, Datsun, Nissan Fairlady Z S30), Hagerty, Motor Authority.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

The Ferrari Daytona SP3 that Broad Arrow sold at Wynn Las Vegas on Oct. 31 brought $18,540,000 with premium, a world record for a non-charity example. It had covered 81 miles. The car that held the record until then, sold by RM Sotheby’s at Monterey in August for $17,825,000, had covered 227. Cut the mileage by nearly two-thirds, put the original owner back in the catalog, and the price rose 4 percent.

That ratio is the real result. The headline invites a conclusion about mileage, and the numbers refuse it. Collectors are not paying for the miles an SP3 has not done. They are paying for who ordered it, how it was specified, and whether its history is clean enough to survive scrutiny at the top of the market.

What the Las Vegas car actually is

Broad Arrow offered Lot 186 from its original owner, whom the house describes as a private collection curator. The car is finished in Tailor Made Verde Francesca over a two-tone Nero Alcantara interior, one of 600 SP3s built: the 599-car series plus the one-off charity car. According to Broad Arrow, it sold after a lengthy contest between the room and the telephones, above its high estimate.

Tailor Made matters here because it is Ferrari’s bespoke program, and a color-and-trim commission on a limited-series car is a decision the first owner made once. It cannot be repeated by anyone who buys the car later. A Verde Francesca SP3 is not interchangeable with a Giallo Triplo Strato one, and a bidder who wants that specific car has only one place to find it.

Three SP3 results, three different questions

Set the recent public results side by side and the SP3 market begins to look less like a single price and more like a ladder. We examined the Monterey sale when it happened: a 2023 car in Giallo Triplo Strato, 227 miles, two owners, estimated at $10 million to $12 million and sold at $17.825 million. Las Vegas has now moved the benchmark by $715,000.

Then there is London. RM’s sale there produced a record £36.55 million total, and its Daytona SP3, a left-hand-drive 2022 car with a Vettura di Sviluppo plaque and a history as a factory press car, sold for £8,161,250, inside its estimate and in a different price tier altogether. Documented, one private owner, and driven hard by journalists: provenance supported the price, but it did not lift the car out of its category.

Read together, the three results make a point that is easy to miss: the market is discounting use in steps, not by the mile. A delivery-mile, first-owner, bespoke car sits at the top. A barely driven two-owner car sits just beneath it. A used press car, however well documented, sits somewhere else. The gap between 81 and 227 miles is worth a few percent. The gap between never used and used is worth far more.

How much of this is the car, and how much is the room

Caution is warranted before turning one sale into a law. The cars differ in color, specification and ownership. The venues differ, and so do the houses’ buyer’s premium schedules, enough that a 4 percent gap sits close to the noise. Broad Arrow also ran an unusually hot room: registered bidders were up 63 percent on 2025, and 35 percent were bidding with the house for the first time. Fresh buyers with fresh capital will chase the car they want, and the SP3 was the one that was always going to draw them.

It was not a deep sale at the top so much as a concentrated one. The SP3 and the $18.705 million F50 together accounted for $37.245 million of the $92.8 million total, about 40 percent. Add the LaFerrari at $8.805 million and the Enzo at $6.55 million and four Ferraris made $52.6 million, nearly 57 percent of the sale. Only 64 of 84 lots sold. That is consistent with what we described in the modern exotic market’s sorting, not rising together: the room paid extravagantly for the cars it considered finished articles and was selective about the rest.

What serious buyers should take from it

For anyone holding or pursuing an SP3, the practical lesson is that the first owner’s decisions are now part of the asset. Specification, commissioning history and the documentation that proves both deserve as much attention as the odometer, and arguably more once a car is past delivery mileage. An SP3 with a few hundred miles and a strong file is not obviously a lesser car than one with 81. The market has not yet shown that it believes otherwise.

The ceiling question is open. The $26 million paid for the charity SP3 at Monterey in 2025 reflected a one-off car and a cause, and the commercial record now stands at $18.54 million, roughly 71 percent of it. Ferrari built the Daytona SP3 as a tribute to its 1-2-3 finish at the 1967 24 Hours of Daytona, and its 6.5-liter naturally aspirated V12 makes 829 horsepower. Whether that is enough to carry prices much past this level depends less on the car than on how many buyers have already acquired the one they wanted. We traced the longer arc in our look at the SP3’s price movement.

Collectors rarely pay a premium for the last 146 miles. They pay for the car that was ordered, specified and kept exactly the way its owner meant it to be. Results for the sale are published by Broad Arrow Auctions.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

The Mitsubishi Starion has spent four decades as the Japanese turbo coupe that enthusiasts admire and the market mostly ignores. That is changing slowly, and unevenly. A 38,300-mile 1988 ESI-R, bought new by one New Jersey owner and sold through a Hagerty Marketplace listing in January 2026, shows both the opportunity and the limit: the car was unmodified and documented from new, yet it was an automatic and the result stopped at $15,500. Our thesis is that the Starion is an established cult car with a narrow, unproven collector market, and that the price premium belongs to originality, a manual gearbox and paperwork, not to the badge.

Two names, one car: Starion ESI-R and Conquest TSi

Mitsubishi began selling the Starion in the United States for the 1983 model year, and the same car was sold through Chrysler dealers as the Plymouth and Dodge Conquest, later simply the Chrysler Conquest. Hagerty Media notes that the Chrysler-badged cars are mechanically identical to the Starion, differing in trim and badging. The change that matters to collectors came for 1986: the top ESI-R and Conquest TSi trims gained box fender flares, 16-inch wheels and an intercooler, according to Grassroots Motorsports. Cars through the 1985.5 model year were narrow-bodied; the widebody is the version most buyers now want.

The Starion earned real credentials. Hagerty Media reports that a 1987 ESI-R won the SCCA Escort Endurance Series and the 24 Hour race at Nelson Ledges, and Grassroots Motorsports says the car dominated SCCA Solo G Stock from 1989 to 1993. It also had a Hollywood turn: Jackie Chan drove one in Cannonball Run II. It is a more interesting history than its price suggests, and it sits in the same Mitsubishi lineage as the 3000GT VR-4, which replaced it in the showroom after 1989.

Production and rarity: the numbers are softer than collectors assume

There is no authoritative public split of ESI-R and TSi production, and readers should be wary of any source that claims one. Two figures can be verified. Wikipedia, citing Mitsubishi, lists total Starion-line output across all markets and both body styles at 19,438 in 1986, 17,605 in 1987, 10,655 in 1988 and 1,961 in 1989. GoodCarBadCar lists U.S. sales of the Mitsubishi-badged car at 5,792 in 1986, 5,084 in 1987, 3,016 in 1988 and just 686 in 1989, which sums to 14,578 for the widebody years. Those U.S. figures exclude the Conquest and are sales, not production, so they are a ceiling on the Starion-badged count, not a census of surviving cars.

The useful takeaway is the shape of the curve. Volume fell sharply after 1987, and 1989 was a tiny final year. That points collectors toward 1988 and 1989 cars, which also carry the strongest engine tune.

Engine, drivetrain and what is mechanically distinctive

The mechanical story is a big-displacement, low-revving turbo four with a character closer to a muscle car than to a Japanese twin-cam. Hagerty notes that Mitsubishi’s balance-shaft technology was licensed to Porsche for the 944 and 968, though many owners delete the shafts during rebuilds. Grassroots Motorsports adds that 1988–89 cars can run far more boost on the stock computer than earlier cars, which cut out at around 10 psi.

Factory options and how to identify the right car

The most important option is the 1988–89 Sport Handling Package, which Hagerty Media describes as eight-way adjustable shocks and wheels one inch wider. Leather upholstery, power equipment, cruise control and a premium stereo were common on well-equipped cars, and the January 2026 listing shows a typical full-option 1988 ESI-R. Sampled sales records show Starion VINs beginning JA3 and Conquest TSi VINs beginning JJ3; the tenth character is the model-year code (H for 1987, J for 1988, K for 1989). Verify those against the car in front of you, and confirm the box flares and 16-inch wheels that identify the 1986-on cars.

Market values and comparable sales

Values are real but modest, and the spread is wide. Hagerty’s valuation page for a 1987 ESI-R showed $20,700 as of April 2024, though the page did not state which condition grade that figure represents. Back in 2021 Hagerty Media quoted #2 (Excellent) values of $18,600 for the Starion and $21,700 for the Conquest, with the Conquest carrying a premium. Recorded sales follow.

One outlier does not make a market. The $40,700 result and the $33,365 Conquest are real, but they sit next to an $8,500 five-speed with 62,000 miles. The honest reading is a floor in the low-to-mid teens for sound cars, with a small premium band for exceptional, low-mile and documented ones.

What the Hagerty listing tells us

The Hagerty Marketplace listing described a Rio Red 1988 ESI-R with black interior, 38,300 miles, a clean New Jersey title in the original owner’s name, a hand-written maintenance log from new and a clean CARFAX. The seller, executor of the original owner’s estate, reported an oil change at 38,082 miles in June 2024 and the only blemish as turn-signal stalk wear. It ended January 14, 2026 with 29 bids; the page shows a high bid of $13,600 and the car listed as sold after for $15,500.

Why does that matter? Everything that collectors say they want was present, and the price was still under the $19,850 paid for an 83,000-mile manual in 2025. The likely explanation is the four-speed automatic, which gives up the car’s enthusiast appeal. It is an interpretation, not a proven cause, but it is consistent with the fact that every recorded sale in the Classic.com table above was a manual.

Known weaknesses and ownership costs

Grassroots Motorsports is blunt: the car needs a hands-on owner. The common faults are fuel-injection related, including worn injectors, failing injector connectors and mass-airflow sensors, and new injectors are available only for 1987–89 cars. Electrical faults can be prohibitively expensive. Heads can fail when power is pushed beyond what the internals support, so modified cars deserve extra scrutiny. Parts support is limited, with very few specialist suppliers left. Hagerty Media adds that owners often raise boost and fit lighter flywheels, and one owner reverted to factory parts after aftermarket ones failed. Rust is a factor in project-car pricing. Ownership costs are therefore driven by specialist labor and part scarcity, not by purchase price, and we could not find a credible published running-cost benchmark.

Originality: what separates exceptional examples from average ones

The exceptional car is unmodified, has a five-speed, the original computer, the Sport Handling Package if a 1988–89, original paint and interior, and service records from new. Grassroots Motorsports warns that 1988–89 computers are nearly impossible to find, which makes a car still wearing its original unit unusually valuable. The average car has been boosted, re-tuned with standalone management and fitted with aftermarket wheels and exhaust; many sensible owners did so, and the market prices it that way.

Before buying, verify the VIN and model-year code, check that the flares and wheels match the specification, inspect the injectors and wiring harness, confirm the headlights and electronics work, and ask for documentation of any engine work.

Competing vehicles

In period the Starion competed with turbocharged Japanese coupes such as the Mazda RX-7 Turbo, the Nissan 300ZX Turbo and the Toyota Supra Turbo, and today it also sits under newer Japanese turbo cars covered in our RX-7, 300ZX and MR2 comparison and the Supra Mk IV spec sheet. Its closest American cousin in spirit is the Mustang SVO, another turbocharged four with a thin production run and a market still deciding. For the Chrysler connection, see the 1,100-mile Shelby Lancer and Chrysler’s first minivan; for a wagon-shaped Japanese turbo that raises the same collectability question, see the Nissan Stagea 260RS Autech.

Established value versus speculative potential

The established part is modest: a cult following, a competition record, a distinctive design, and a floor for clean manual cars. The speculative part is a broader repricing like the one Hagerty reported for the Eclipse GSX, where the gains concentrated in low-mile cars. The Starion could follow if clean, unmodified examples become scarce enough to anchor a premium. Three things would strengthen demand: more documented low-mile cars crossing the block, a visible price band for manuals, and renewed brand attention for Mitsubishi’s turbo history. Three would weaken it: the thin parts supply, hard-to-fix electrical problems, and the sheer number of modified cars diluting the pool of original ones.

Bottom line

Buy a Starion ESI-R or Conquest TSi because you want a rare-feeling, characterful ’80s turbo coupe, and pay up only for originality, a manual and documents. Treat appreciation as a possibility, not a plan. Prices are not a guarantee and nothing here is investment advice.

Sources: Hagerty Marketplace listing; Hagerty Media, “Reach for the Star(rion)s”; Hagerty Media, “Why Are Mitsubishi Starions Still So Cheap?”; Grassroots Motorsports buyer’s guide; Wikipedia; GoodCarBadCar; Classic.com; Hagerty valuation tool.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

A black 1975 BMW 2002 wearing Turbo-style flares, a deep front valance and spoilers sold on Bring a Trailer on September 9, 2026 for $34,500. Its listing was labeled “Turbo-Look,” and it said plainly that the body parts were added and the 2.0-liter M10 runs a Weber carburetor. That honesty is the point. On a BMW 2002 Turbo, the visible parts are the easiest things to copy, and they prove nothing.

BMW built 1,672 genuine 2002 Turbos. RM Sotheby’s sold one for $168,000 in Arizona in 2021 and another for €126,500 in Munich in 2025. The gap between those results and a $34,500 look-alike is a gap in originality, and it is measured in chassis numbers, engine numbers and factory paperwork rather than in fiberglass.

Why the BMW 2002 Turbo matters to collectors

The 2002 Turbo, unveiled at the 1973 Frankfurt Motor Show, was BMW’s first turbocharged production car. It took the 2002 tii’s mechanically injected engine, added a KKK turbocharger, lowered the compression ratio and made about 170 PS. Wider arches, a front air dam, a rear spoiler, ventilated front discs and a boost gauge completed the package. It arrived just before the 1973 oil crisis, which is a large part of why so few were built.

Scarcity and a devoted following have made it one of the most valuable small BMWs. Hagerty reported in 2018 that average Turbo values had risen 201% over five years, when a 1974 car in #2 condition sold for $145,600. Because the money is real, so is the incentive to make a standard 2002 look like one.

What separates a real Turbo from a Turbo-look 2002

The two cars can look similar from ten feet away. The table below sets the factory Turbo against the Turbo-look car from the Bring a Trailer listing.

Auction catalogs also point to a matching-numbers check. The RM Sotheby’s lots for chassis 4290089, 4290162, 4290709 and 4291147 each list an engine number identical to the chassis number, and the Bonhams catalog title for the first car built pairs chassis and engine number 4290001. That pattern is a strong clue to look for, though it is not a guarantee, so treat it as a question to ask rather than an assumption.

How originality affects BMW 2002 Turbo values

Other 1975 BMW 2002s sold on Bring a Trailer in August and September 2026 for between $14,250 and $32,000, so the Turbo-look car’s $34,500 was a modest premium for modifications that the market could see and price. The real-car results are several times higher. Those results span different auctions, years and currencies, so they are not a like-for-like comparison, but the direction is clear.

Even among genuine cars, documentation moves the needle. The RM Sotheby’s catalog for the Munich car, chassis 4291147, says that after consulting BMW Classic the auction house believes earlier bodywork repairs removed the original chassis stamp, and that the car is identified by a new stamping on a replacement panel. It still sold for €126,500, but it shows why buyers should ask exactly how a Turbo is identified, not just what it looks like.

What to verify before buying a BMW 2002 Turbo

1. Read the chassis number on the car and on the title or registration, and confirm it falls in the Turbo series seen in catalogs (4290xxx or 4291xxx). A standard 2002 number, such as the 2361547 on the look-alike, cannot be converted into a Turbo.
2. Compare the engine’s own number with the chassis number. Matching numbers are the pattern in the RM Sotheby’s catalogs. One published listing pairs a Turbo chassis number with a different engine number, so ask for an explanation of any difference.
3. Request BMW Classic documentation tied to the chassis number. RM Sotheby’s lots for these cars cite BMW Classic certificates, and the paperwork is what ties the car to the factory record, much as it does on an E46 M3 CSL.
4. Ask whether the chassis stamp is original or has been re-stamped on a replacement panel, and get any bodywork repair history in writing.
5. Check the engine specification. A factory Turbo has a turbocharged, mechanically injected M10. A carburetor, as on the look-alike, is a clear red flag.
6. Check the color against the factory choices, Chamonix white or Polaris silver, and ask whether any other color is a repaint.
7. Look for the factory details RM Sotheby’s catalogs describe, including the boost gauge, the Turbo sport seats and the reversed lettering. Treat each as supporting evidence only, since parts and decals can be added to any 2002.

Common misrepresentations on BMW 2002 Turbo listings

• Listing a standard 2002 or 2002 tii as a “Turbo” because it wears the flares, spoilers and decals.
• Using vague phrases such as “Turbo-look,” “Turbo-style” or “tribute” in the description but a bare “Turbo” in the title or the search tags.
• Describing a replaced or re-stamped body as original without saying how the chassis number was carried over.
• Leaving out the engine and chassis numbers, as in one Barn Finds listing that lacked a VIN, documentation and engine photos.
• Presenting a car with a different engine or a non-factory conversion as matching-numbers.

Honest tributes are not the problem. The Bring a Trailer car was disclosed as modified, and it sold in line with that. The problem begins when a Turbo-look car is priced or described as a Turbo.

The bottom line

A real BMW 2002 Turbo is defined by its factory identity: a Turbo-series chassis number, the correct engine, factory colors and documentation that ties them together. Flares, spoilers and decals are only decoration. Before paying Turbo money, get the numbers, the BMW Classic paperwork and a clear account of any bodywork or engine replacement. For more on how a BMW engine can matter apart from its chassis, see our look at the collectible M10, and for another turbo icon where a chassis suffix alone does not settle the question, see our Renault 5 Turbo originality check.

Sources: Bring a Trailer listing, Turbo-Look 1975 BMW 2002; RM Sotheby’s lots for chassis 4290089, 4290709, 4290162 and 4291147; Wikipedia, BMW 02 Series; Hagerty Media, 2018.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Stocks sold off sharply Thursday as an AI and chip-stock rout wiped out the post-election rally. Intraday, the Nasdaq was down about 5%, the S&P 500 roughly 3% to 4%, and the Dow more than 1,100 points, with Nvidia down 6% to 8% and Tesla down more than 9%, according to Yahoo Finance and Bloomberg. For collectors, the question is whether the tech and AI wealth that has supported the top of the market starts to pull back.

Why the top of the market feels it first

Hagerty compared stock market performance from late July to the first day of Monterey sales against total Monterey auction sales over ten years and found a 0.77 correlation. The link to sell-through, the share of offered cars that actually sell, was only 0.27. In other words, equity wealth shows up more in how much gets spent than in whether cars sell. Our earlier look at that data is in Wall Street Wobbles After the Midterms.

What 2020 and 2022 suggest

Past drops did not hit every segment equally. In 2020, Hagerty's Ferrari Index fell about 8% between January and May, its largest drop ever, while its Affordable Classics index reached an all-time high by September. In the 2022 to 2023 cooldown, Hagerty's Market Rating fell six straight months through March 2023 and inflation-adjusted median prices returned to pre-pandemic-boom levels, yet its Blue Chip Index barely moved.

The pattern is that a falling market is not one market. Watch the segment you care about, not the headline index.

Where buyers may find openings

Softer bidding and sellers who need cash can create openings below $100,000, though not overnight. Hagerty's 2026 Bull Market List, published before this selloff, includes several modern cars in that range, at Hagerty's #2 condition values:

• 2006 to 2013 Chevrolet Corvette Z06: $55,900
• 2006 to 2010 BMW M5: $36,000
• 1995 to 1998 Nissan Skyline GT-R: $82,350
• 1995 to 1998 Volkswagen Golf GTI VR6: $20,000
• 1999 to 2005 Mazda MX-5 Miata: $16,600

These are Hagerty's values and picks, not forecasts that prices will fall. Treat them as a watch list.

What to watch next

The first sign of stress is likely to show up in sell-through rates and estimates at the next major auctions, not in a sudden price collapse. Compare median sale prices instead of headline averages, since records at the top can hide weakness in everyday collectibles. A drop in the Hagerty Market Rating below 50 would signal a more meaningful shift.

What not to do

Do not sell a car you love because of one red day. Do not stretch financing on a weekend car. And do not buy a car as a stand-in for stocks: condition, documentation and originality still set the price. Market figures above are intraday and may change by the close. This article is general information and not financial advice.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

GM told federal regulators on October 29 that a software defect in the brake system control module can cause a loss of braking in 67,380 electric vehicles, and for the Cadillac Lyriq it is the second brake-control software recall in just over two years.

The filing is NHTSA campaign 26V717 (GM's number is N262570900). It covers 2023–2027 Lyriq, 2025–2026 Celestiq, 2026–2027 Vistiq and 2024–2027 Chevrolet Blazer EV models. NHTSA's record lists the part as the antilock, traction control and electronic limited slip control module, and says a loss of braking raises the risk of a crash. GM will update the software free of charge, over the air or at a dealer, and owner letters are expected December 14, 2026. KARE 11 reported, from the recall notice, that the defect appears at low speeds, can let the vehicle roll forward, and that GM knows of 20 incidents, two with minor injuries. I could not retrieve the full Part 573 report to confirm those figures, so they stand as reported, not verified.

The Lyriq's brake module already had a file at NHTSA

On April 11, 2024, NHTSA opened preliminary evaluation PE24011 into the electronic brake module on 3,322 model-year 2023 Lyriqs. GM told the agency that an internal spindle in the module can fracture during an ABS event, which causes a loss of brake assist, a speed limit and a partial loss of ABS function. Owners described a hard brake pedal followed by a brake system failure message. GM wrote an over-the-air update that cycles the brake booster at every key cycle and lights a warning lamp if the spindle breaks. It did not file that update as a recall.

Four months later GM did file one. Recall 24V-589, submitted August 8, 2024, covered 21,469 all-wheel-drive 2023–2024 Lyriqs. On dry pavement below 25 mph, GM said, the ABS can activate falsely, and after a particular sequence of wheel movements it keeps releasing service-brake pressure. The root cause was software in the electronic brake control module. GM estimated that 1 percent of the vehicles had the defect and knew of two minor accidents.

On August 21, 2026, NHTSA moved the probe up to engineering analysis EA26006, and the population grew from 3,322 vehicles to an estimated 1,164,820. The 2023–2026 GM models named include the Lyriq, Blazer EV and Celestiq along with the Equinox EV, Traverse, Colorado, Canyon, Acadia, Enclave, Envision and Optiq, and Honda is listed as an affected manufacturer. The agency counts 745 field reports, 22 crashes or fires, five incidents with injuries, six injuries and no fatalities.

Software that stops braking does not need a broken part

In 24V-589, GM's own root cause was a controller that kept releasing brake pressure after a false ABS trigger. The hydraulics and the pads can be in perfect shape while the module declines to apply them. That is the mechanism GM described in 2024. The 26V717 record I could access says only that braking can be lost in certain driving conditions, so whether the new defect works the same way is not something the public record settles yet.

The investigation is about a different failure. NHTSA's summary describes the spindle fractures GM identified, which is a hardware problem, while both recalls are software fixes, and nothing I read ties them to a single cause. What they share is the same part of the car. A module that decides how much braking a driver gets has now produced two recalls and a probe that grew more than 350-fold in population, which is a lot of federal attention for one box.

A recall fix and an over-the-air patch are not the same thing for owners

Federal law requires a manufacturer to repair recalled vehicles first sold within the past 15 years at no charge, under 49 U.S.C. 30120, and the recall puts the VINs into NHTSA's searchable database and triggers owner letters. The 2024 spindle update, issued outside a recall, had none of those attachments. A warranty repair ends where the warranty ends; a recall remedy does not, which is why the label on a fix matters when it comes time to pay for it.

Owners can enter a VIN at NHTSA's recall page, where the 26V717 VINs became searchable on October 29, or call Cadillac at 1-800-333-4223 or Chevrolet at 1-800-222-1020.

What to watch next

GM's root-cause description in the Part 573 filing for 26V717 will show whether this is the same logic fault as 2024 or a new one. The Vistiq is in this recall but is not among the models named in the investigation, so the software exposure is wider than the hardware scrutiny. And the end of EA26006 will decide whether the spindle question gets a recall of its own, or stays an over-the-air patch.

If your Lyriq or Blazer EV has now needed two brake software fixes, would you trust another over-the-air patch, or would you want NHTSA to require a dealer inspection of the module?

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Hagerty’s third quarter contains what looks like a contradiction. Aggregate auction sales across Broad Arrow and Hagerty Marketplace rose 65.3% to $111.6 million. Private sales rose 88.1% to $99.9 million. Total revenue fell 9.5% to $354.2 million, and the company raised its full-year profit outlook anyway.

The contradiction is the story. The volume of the collector market is visible at the hammer. The money, increasingly, is made elsewhere: in the policy, in the loan, and in the introduction to the next owner. Read Hagerty’s results as a map of where the company closest to the collector market chooses to put its capital, and the sales totals become the least interesting part.

Why revenue fell while profit guidance rose

The revenue decline is largely mechanical. Effective January 1, Hagerty Re’s U.S. quota share rose from 80% to 100% under the restructured Markel fronting arrangement, which removed $138 million of Essentia-related commission revenue from the quarter by the company’s own accounting. Hagerty now keeps the premium rather than collecting a fee for placing it. Earned premium rose 41.7% to $265.1 million, the Hagerty Re combined ratio improved to 79.7% from 89.6%, and adjusted EBITDA climbed 63.5% to $97.1 million.

Net income, at $36.3 million, was below last year’s $46.2 million, which is worth stating plainly. Still, Hagerty lifted its 2026 net income range to $48–60 million from $18–30 million, and its adjusted EBITDA range to $305–315 million from $270–280 million. Policies in force reached 1,909,254, up 18.1%, and the company added 402,168 new members in nine months. The practical meaning is that Hagerty has become less a broker of collector-car risk and more a carrier of it, with a profit line tied to claims experience across nearly two million policies. An insurer carrying that exposure has every reason to track what these cars are really worth.

One quarter, and a private-sale number worth a second look

This is Hagerty’s own platform data for a single quarter. It does not describe the whole market. Within those limits, one figure deserves attention. Private sales are down 18.4% year to date, at $180.9 million, yet the third quarter alone produced $99.9 million. By simple subtraction, the first half yielded roughly $81 million, less than the third quarter delivered by itself. Auction sales tell a steadier story: $351.4 million year to date, up 82.8%.

The shareholder letter points to what drove the quarter: Broad Arrow’s Wynn Concours sale in Las Vegas, plus the Zoute and Zürich auctions in Europe. Zoute’s hammer total reached €36 million, up 35%, with a LaFerrari, a McLaren P1 and a Porsche 918 Spyder among the cars. The letter also credits Broad Arrow’s brokerage with winning a 918 Spyder whose original owner had never retitled it, which is precisely the kind of consignment that moves a quarterly private-sales figure. MCC covered the room as it happened, from a 92-kilometer LaFerrari in Zürich to the $18.7 million F50 in Las Vegas.

That concentration matters. Hagerty says supercars and hypercars made up nearly half of the record $756 million sold across all houses at Monterey Car Week. The quarter’s strength was carried by a narrow band of modern, well-documented cars sold into the most liquid buyer pool in the hobby. It should not be read as a verdict on every segment. MCC’s reporting has already shown how uneven the picture is, whether early Porsche 356 values rising in Hagerty’s index while Monterey’s auction room disagreed, or Hagerty’s supercar index running far ahead of the classics.

The number that doesn’t fit

Marketplace revenue fell 6.4% to $32.2 million in the same quarter that aggregate auction sales rose 65%. Year to date, Marketplace revenue is up 7.9% against auction sales up 82.8%. Sales volume is what changes hands; revenue is what Hagerty keeps, and the two are not moving together. Any explanation beyond that is inference, but the lesson holds: a record hammer total does not translate into a proportionate fee line, and collectors should be careful about treating platform volume as a measure of platform health.

Credit arrives at the top of the market

Broad Arrow’s loan portfolio ended September at $162.3 million, up 62.2%. Lending against collector cars is an old business, but a publicly traded company growing its book at that pace suggests financing is becoming part of how important cars change hands. That is constructive for liquidity, since it lets a buyer carry a six- or seven-figure car without selling other assets. It is also pro-cyclical. Credit is most available when values are highest, which is not the moment to read it as reassurance.

What Hagerty’s own caution says

The most useful passage in the shareholder letter is not about growth. Management notes that top-end prices surged in 2026 and says it “would not be surprised to see them take a breather.” The company behind the valuation tools much of the hobby relies on, and which sees values move through the cars it insures, is warning against reading the quarter as a straight line. It also acknowledges that members selling their cars is its largest source of attrition; retention was 88.2%, down from 88.6% a year earlier.

What serious buyers should take from it

Treat Hagerty’s sales totals as a read on the modern and hypercar segment, where its platforms are strongest, not on the market for prewar or postwar classics. Watch the spread between what the indexes report and what individual auctions clear, a gap MCC has tracked in its market briefs. And note who Hagerty believes the next buyers are: management expects Gen X, millennial and Gen Z collectors to favor modern, higher-value cars, including supercars and JDM models. That is a bet on the very segment that carried the quarter.

The auction totals will be quoted widely. The more durable signal is that the company closest to the data is building an insurance book, a loan portfolio and a brokerage around the top of the market while telling its members, in writing, that prices may pause. A market reveals what it believes by where its closest participants put their capital, and by what they are willing to say aloud about the risk.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

At RM Sotheby’s London Auction on 31 October, a 1991 Honda NSX with about 63,000 kilometres, a manual gearbox and an entirely ordinary specification sold for £871,250, roughly $1.17 million. That is about 10 percent above the $1.06 million paid for a 2003 NSX-R at Villa d’Este in 2025, the result that, as far as MCC’s records show, had marked the ceiling for the model.

The obvious reading is that Senna is Senna. The more useful one is narrower. Lot 155 did not sell as an NSX, and not quite as a Senna relic either. It sold as a car whose Senna connection can be demonstrated, and the evidence carrying that connection is not what most buyers would assume. The paper doing the heaviest lifting is a fax from Honda.

A very good ordinary NSX

On RM’s catalogue entry, the car was imported by Honda Automobil de Portugal and registered on 22 March 1991 as SX-25-59. RM’s accompanying editorial calls it the first NSX imported into Portugal and describes a manual car with around 63,000 kilometres, a sheltered life and few owners, with the brakes the only part that shows its age. RM lists no modifications. The mileage squares with the 39,100 miles quoted in 2024, when owner Robert McFagan listed the car privately for £500,000.

Those were precisely the details the lot page left unstated when we previewed the sale, and they sharpen the question. Hagerty’s auction data, as cited in that preview, puts the highest result for a 1991 NSX at $163,411 and a typical good example near $65,900, though the dataset appears to run only to early 2025. Lot 155 made more than seven times that record and roughly eighteen times the typical figure. Nothing in the engineering explains the gap. The first-generation NSX is still an aluminium monocoque with a 3.0-litre VTEC V6, and a 1991 example without a story remains a five- or low-six-figure car. Our collector spec sheet sets out what separates one NSX from another on its merits.

Where the proof actually sits

Senna’s association with the car is well documented, though not in the way a title search would show. Under an agreement between Honda Motor Company and the driver, Honda supplied him with NSXs for personal use; RM says three. The Honda fax in the sale file, which RM says Honda Motor Europe has reaffirmed, confirms this car as one of them. He drove it to the 1991 Portuguese Grand Prix at Estoril, where he qualified third and finished second. It appears in the 1992 documentary Ayrton Senna: Racing Is in My Blood, and it is the car in the hosepipe photograph.

What the ownership chain does not contain is Senna. On RM’s account the car was imported and registered by Honda’s Portuguese distributor, stored in Lisbon and delivered to him when he was in the country, and its editorial says it went back to Honda after the 1993 season. The first registry entry the catalogue cites after that is February 1995, when Laboa Etablissement registered it in Lisbon, within a year of Senna’s death at Imola. Senna was the user, not the titled owner. That is why the manufacturer’s statement carries so much weight, and why it matters what corroborates it.

One piece of corroboration is unusually good. According to RM’s editorial, McFagan, who bought this car in 2013, also acquired a second Senna NSX, in black, in 2014. Comparing the two cars’ service books, he found entries by the same mechanic on consecutive days before the 1991 Portuguese Grand Prix. That is the kind of evidence collectors should prize: contemporaneous, created for another purpose, and hard to manufacture afterwards.

It also answers a question the sale raises, which is why this car rather than a sibling. The red car is the one that photographs and a specific race weekend place with Senna, and RM places the third NSX with the family in Brazil. Provenance is a claim. Documentation is the asset.

What the result does not include

Two lines in RM’s addendum belong in any serious bidder’s arithmetic. The car is titled as a 2025 model, and it entered the UK on a temporary import bond, which must be cancelled either by exporting the car on an approved bill of lading with customs documents or by paying the applicable VAT and import duties. The registration field lists a Japanese Export Certificate, a reminder that this car travelled from Portugal to the UK, then to a consignor in Nagoya in 2024, and back to London for sale. RM does not explain the 2025 title, and MCC has not seen the underlying files.

RM publishes results inclusive of buyer’s premium, and £871,250 is not the cost of keeping the car in Britain. Import VAT and duty fall on a value in that neighbourhood, and the rate depends on the buyer’s status and how customs classify the car, which is a question for a customs adviser rather than a catalogue. A buyer who exports it avoids UK import tax but inherits shipping and the destination country’s own rules. A 1991 car titled as a 2025 model is also the kind of inconsistency that surfaces at registration, insurance or the next resale. Serious bidders should have asked how it will be reconciled.

The price history is the quiet part

MCC reported in May 2024 that McFagan had the car listed at £500,000. The Nagoya consignor acquired it that year, at a price that has not been disclosed. RM’s low estimate was £500,000, the same number as that asking price, and the result is about 74 percent above it, though estimates exclude premium and results include it. An asking price is not a transaction, so this is not a calculation of the consignor’s return. It does show how far the market’s view of a documented Senna car moved between a private listing and a public sale in a room that, as we reported from the record £36.55 million night, rewarded cars with a reason that could be checked.

What it means for collectors

This result is significant, but narrowly. It does not lift the NSX market. A standard 1991 car is still a standard 1991 car, and $1.17 million cannot be read across to an example without a story. Fame does not price itself either: the film-famous Avengers NSX we covered the same week was reported at $120,000. What moved Lot 155 was a specific association that could be proven by people with a stake in the outcome.

The practical lesson is to rank the evidence. Manufacturer records and contemporaneous workshop paperwork sit at the top, then period photographs and film, then registry history, then recollection. Lot 155 was strong on the first two and thinner on the third, which is why the original of that single Honda fax deserves more scrutiny than the chassis. Our look at why the VIN trail matters more than the plaque on an Integra Type R makes the same case from the other direction. Whoever owns the NSX will at least find running costs eased by Honda’s heritage parts programme for the first-generation car.

If the price disappeared from this story, the lesson would survive. Collectors will pay for a story. They pay most for a story that someone with a stake in it has signed.

Facts are drawn from RM Sotheby’s lot page, press release and editorial. The dollar figure is approximate. Market interpretation is MCC’s own analysis and is not investment or tax advice.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

On Nov. 5, 1950, a 23-year-old from Santa Monica named Phil Hill won the first Pebble Beach Road Race in his own Jaguar XK120, after a push start and a long chase from the back of the field. The first Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance took place the same day, and a small contingent of its collector cars paraded down the start-finish straight during the racing. The races are gone. The Concours is not, and that is the lesson of this anniversary: the event that now defines how collector cars are judged began as a sideshow to a road race.

What happened on Nov. 5, 1950

The Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance states the date plainly: the first Pebble Beach Road Race was run on Nov. 5, 1950, the same date the Concours began. The course used residential roads above what is now The Lodge at Pebble Beach, a tight loop through the Del Monte Forest that the Pebble Beach history puts at 1.8 miles at first and about 2.1 miles later. The prize was the Del Monte Trophy, and the Pebble Beach account estimates a crowd of roughly 10,000.

Hill’s race was not clean. His clutch had locked in the engaged position during an earlier event, so he needed a push start and began well behind the pack. He still came through to win after about 25 laps, with fog, dust and flying gravel filling the course by the finish. Hill later recalled that the circuit was lined with little more than snow fencing and hay bales, and said it was a real road race. He had never run one before.

The people and cars behind the first Pebble Beach Road Race

Hill went on to become the first American to win the Formula One World Drivers’ Championship, in 1961, and he is a recurring figure in collector-car provenance; he also drove the record-setting MG EX181 that reached 400 km/h on only 300 horsepower. His 1950 win mattered because it came in a car an enthusiast could buy. The XK120 took its name from its claimed 120 mph top speed, and amateur drivers across the country were quickly racing them. Our earlier look at Walt Hansgen, who began racing in 1951 in a restored XK120, shows how widely that pattern spread.

The winners that followed read like a short history of American sports car racing. Bill Pollack took 1951 and 1952 in an Allard J2, the British chassis fitted with an American V8. Hill returned to win in 1953 in a Ferrari 250 MM Vignale Spyder, and Sterling Edwards won in 1954 in a Ferrari 340 MM Vignale Spyder. Hill won again in 1955 and Carroll Shelby in 1956, both in Ferrari 750 Monza Scaglietti Spyders. The shift from a Jaguar to Allards to Ferraris in six years shows how quickly the machinery in this class escalated.

The road races ended after the 1956 event, when Ernie McAfee was killed after his Ferrari hit a tree. Organizers wanted a safer course, and in 1957 the racing moved to the new Laguna Seca circuit. Laguna Seca went on to host moments of its own, including the one we covered in Roger Penske’s win in the Zerex Special in 1962.

Why Hill’s XK120 still matters to collectors

Most race provenance is oral history. The Pebble Beach Road Races are different, because the winners are on a published list tied to a specific date, class and trophy. A car that can be tied to that list carries a claim an auction specialist can check, which is rarer than it sounds. The XK120 that Hill drove survives and is owned today by Mark Miller, who loaned it to Hill’s son Derek in 2020 so he could retrace the course on the 70th anniversary, exactly 70 years to the day.

One caution on Hill’s car itself. Pebble Beach describes it as his own XK120 but does not state its body material or chassis number, and we could not verify either from a primary source. One published account calls it an alloy-bodied roadster, so treat that as unconfirmed.

The alloy question matters because of what it does to value. According to RM Sotheby’s, Jaguar built 242 aluminum-bodied XK120 roadsters, 184 of them left-hand drive and 58 right-hand drive, before switching to steel bodies in 1950; about 12,000 XK120s were sold across all body types. Hill’s early racing in Southern California touches that small group. RM’s catalog for chassis 670124, delivered new in February 1950 to Charles Hornburg’s Los Angeles distributorship, says it was converted for racing and run at Riverside by Hornburg, Phil Hill and a third driver. That car sold for $291,500 at RM Sotheby’s Amelia Island in 2012. It is not Hill’s Pebble Beach car, but it shows how his name travels with the Hornburg alloy cars.

XK120 market context: what recent results show

Two recent auction results for alloy cars show a wide spread in a single year. Gooding Christie sold chassis 670132, a left-hand-drive alloy roadster with four owners from new, for $224,000 at Amelia Island in 2025, below its $250,000 to $350,000 estimate. RM Sotheby’s sold chassis 670082 for $89,600 in Miami in 2025. Its catalog describes a car that was repainted soon after delivery, re-dyed inside and later fitted with a louvered hood, and that received more than $25,000 of service before the sale. These are two data points, not a trend, and the cars differ in more ways than the catalogs summarize. Still, the gap fits the usual rule for early Jaguars: originality and documented history, not the model name, set the price. For a later, steel-bodied roadster coming to market, see our report on a 1952 XK120 offered at no reserve.

What collectors should take from the first Pebble Beach Road Race

Buyers chasing XK120s with racing history should ask for three things: the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust certificate confirming body, engine and delivery details; period documentation placing the car at a named event; and a clear account of what was changed afterward. A race entry in a program or a result in a published winners list is evidence. A family story is not. The same discipline applies across the era, including small-volume American specials such as the 1954 Kurtis 500S and the 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder, whose story runs through the California racing circle that included Phil Hill.

The memorable part of Nov. 5, 1950 is how little anyone could have known. A push-started XK120 won a race on a forest road with hay bales for protection, and a sideshow of parked old cars became the most influential concours in the world. The race is gone, but its paper trail is still one of the cleaner provenance stories in American sports car history.

Sources: Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance; RACER; RM Sotheby’s, Amelia Island 2012; RM Sotheby’s, Miami 2025; Gooding Christie, Amelia Island 2025; Pebble Beach Company history.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Three Bring a Trailer results closed on November 4 that have little in common on paper: a V12 farewell edition, a turbocharged rotary from Hiroshima, and an amphibious novelty from West Germany. Read together, they make one point. Buyers paid for a specific, documentable attribute in each case, whether delivery-level mileage, a rare factory color or a clean sales history, and the numbers only make sense once that attribute is named.

A 143-Mile Aventador Ultimae Sells for $920,000

A 2022 Lamborghini Aventador LP780-4 Ultimae coupe sold for $920,000 on a premium listing. The listing describes it as one of approximately 350 Ultimae coupes built to mark the end of Aventador production, finished in Grigio Acheso over black and green upholstery, with 143 miles on the odometer. It carries the 6.5-liter V12, a seven-speed ISR automated manual and all-wheel drive, and is optioned with carbon-ceramic brakes, a suspension lift system, a transparent engine cover and carbon-fiber trim.

The useful comparison is mileage. A 2022 Ultimae coupe showing 9,800 miles sold on Bring a Trailer on June 29, 2026, and The Classic Valuer lists it at £574,710. That figure is a pound conversion, so the original dollar price is not confirmed here, but at any recent exchange rate the $920,000 result sits well above it. The two sales are months apart and may differ in specification, so the gap is a signal rather than a measurement. It suggests the scarce part of a limited V12 is not the model, which exists in roughly 350 coupes, but the unused example of it.

The caveat for collectors is that an odometer reading is only as good as its paper trail. At this level, delivery documents, service history and storage records are what turn 143 miles into value. For context on how the final Aventador was positioned, see our earlier coverage of an Ultimae roadster.

A 1993 Mazda RX-7 R1 Reaches $112,000

A 1993 Mazda RX-7 R1 with 20,000 miles sold for $112,000 after 34 bids. The listing says it is one of 350 examples finished in Competition Yellow Mica, a color exclusive to the 1993 model year, with the R1 package that added a front air dam, rear spoiler, twin oil coolers, special suspension tuning and a front shock tower brace. The twin-turbocharged 1.3-liter rotary is factory rated at 255 horsepower and is paired with a five-speed manual and a Torsen limited-slip differential.

The result is not a record. The Autopian reported in October 2023 that a 1994 RX-7 R2 with about 6,743 miles had sold on Bring a Trailer for $148,000 that June, then the record, and that a black 1993 car with roughly 8,250 miles had hammered at $80,500. Against those, $112,000 for a 20,000-mile car shows that color and originality can carry a higher-mileage FD a long way up the range, even if the very best cars still sit higher. The same report noted FD prices had generally softened since mid-2022, so this sale is one data point from the top tier, not proof of a recovery.

Condition caveats matter. The car has modifications, including an Apexi intake, a Greddy intercooler, a cat-back exhaust and a tuning computer, and the Carfax summary notes at least one open recall. Rotary engines of this era reward specialist maintenance records. For how the FD sits among its rivals, see our comparison of the RX-7, 300ZX Twin Turbo and MR2 Turbo, and for the rotary story beyond the sports car, our deep dive on the Eunos Cosmo 20B.

The Same Amphicar Sold for $48,000 Less Than in 2022

A 1962 Amphicar Model 770 in Fjord Green sold for $100,000 after 34 bids. What makes the result unusual is that Bring a Trailer's history shows this same car selling on November 22, 2022 for $148,000. The selling dealer reacquired it in August 2026, so the drop of $48,000, about 32 percent, comes from one car on one platform through one dealer, a rare clean comparison in a thin market.

Two sales do not make a trend. The listing discloses a repaint under a prior owner, a new top and boot in 2024, a radiator replaced since the last auction, and 9,000 miles shown with total mileage unknown. The 2022 sale may also reflect the conditions and presentation of that moment. The Amphicar has a rear-mounted 1,147cc Triumph four-cylinder and a separate gearbox for its twin propellers, and the seller put total production at 3,878. That scarcity has not insulated this car from a lower price. For another look at the model at auction, see our earlier note on a 1966 Amphicar 770.

What the Three Results Have in Common

Mileage, a rare factory color and a verifiable sales history each did the work in these results. None of the three is evidence of a broad market move, and each rests on a single listing. What they show is where buyers were still willing to pay on November 4: for cars whose best attribute can be documented, and with less enthusiasm for novelty alone.

Sources: Bring a Trailer, Aventador Ultimae; Bring a Trailer, RX-7 R1; Bring a Trailer, Amphicar 770; The Autopian; The Classic Valuer.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Collectors have spent two years arguing about what the Ferrari F50 is worth. On October 31 at Wynn Las Vegas, a 1997 car with 106 miles on its odometer gave the clearest answer yet, and the answer came with a footnote. Chassis 107165 sold for $18,705,000 including buyer’s premium, more than $4 million above the previous public-auction record for the model. It also sold below its pre-sale estimate of “in excess of $20,000,000.”

That combination is the story. The record is real. So is the ceiling.

Not a better F50. A different object.

The previous benchmark was the $14.575 million paid for a Giallo Modena car at Mecum Monterey in August, a result we examined at the time. That car was rare for its color and had been driven, which is to say it had been used the way the factory intended. The Las Vegas car is a different category of asset. Its odometer reads 106 miles. It retains its original Rosso Corsa paint over Nero leather with Rosso inserts, and it still carries the factory removable hardtop and its flight case, the driving shoes, the Schedoni luggage set, the tool roll and the covers it left Maranello with.

Broad Arrow’s Alexander Weaver called it “certainly the lowest mileage example of an end-of-an-era supercar.” The qualifier that matters is “end-of-an-era.” The F50 was the last Ferrari flagship of its kind: a 4.7-liter V12 descended from the company’s 1990 Formula 1 engine, bolted directly to a carbon-fiber tub as a stressed member, with a six-speed gated manual and no driver aids to speak of. Ferrari built 349 of them. This one was the 334th, delivered through Maranello Sales Ltd in Egham, Surrey, one of roughly 25 cars that went new to the United Kingdom.

We made the argument before the sale that a car like this does not compete with other F50s. The result supports it. Roughly 28 percent separates this sale from the Monterey record, a gap that cannot be explained by chassis number, color or even condition in the ordinary sense. Collectors paid for something no amount of money can manufacture afterward: the fact that nobody drove it.

Why the miss on the estimate matters

Auction estimates are an opinion, and this one was ambitious. Falling short of $20 million on a record-setting lot is not a failure, but it is information. Preservation commands a premium, and the premium has a limit. Buyers in the room were willing to pay a multiple of what a well-kept F50 brought a few years ago. They were not willing to treat a number a consignor hoped for as a number the market owed.

That discipline is healthy. We have already examined how quickly F50 values have moved. One extraordinary car does not reprice a model. It does, however, establish how far the top of the range can stretch when originality, documentation and mileage all point the same direction.

The F50 and the SP3 landed in the same place

The sale’s second-highest result is the detail experienced buyers will remember. A 2025 Ferrari Daytona SP3, one of 599 Icona cars, sold for $18,540,000, a non-charity record for the model and only $165,000 below the F50. A 29-year-old car and a 1-year-old car cleared within one percent of each other.

They are not competing for the same reasons. The SP3 is priced on access: Ferrari decides who is invited to buy one, and a secondary-market premium reflects a buyer who would rather skip the line. The F50 is priced on finality: the car cannot be made again, and this specific example cannot be made again either. Two different scarcities arrived at nearly the same figure in the same sale, which suggests the top of the market is pricing the impossibility of acquiring a thing, not the thing itself.

What the rest of the room says

Broad Arrow reports $92.8 million in total sales, the highest-grossing collector car auction ever held in Las Vegas, with 64 of 84 lots sold, a 76 percent sell-through. Registered bidders rose 63 percent over last year, and 35 percent were new to the house. At least ten world records fell, including a Lanzante-built McLaren P1 GTR at $3.415 million.

Behind the two headline cars, the modern Ferrari halo ladder was orderly. A 2014 LaFerrari brought $8.805 million and a 2003 Enzo $6.55 million, with a 2023 Bugatti Chiron Super Sport, one of 80, at $4.57 million. That spacing is worth studying. It suggests buyers are separating cars by what is original and unrepeatable rather than lumping every halo car into one trade, a question we also raised around a low-mileage LaFerrari headed to Zürich.

For a wider read on the week, see our Collector Car Market Brief.

What serious buyers should take from it

Mileage is the one specification that can only ever move in one direction. Every other attribute of a collector car, from paint to documentation, can in theory be restored, corrected or reassembled. Zero-use cannot. That is why a handful of cars each cycle trade in a category of their own, and why the existence of a record does not tell you what a good, driven F50 is worth tomorrow.

The practical lesson is narrower and more useful. Verify the story behind the odometer: delivery documents, service history, and evidence that the car has been kept and, where necessary, maintained correctly while stored. Understand that a record sets the ceiling for the best example, not the floor for the rest. And treat the estimate, as the room did, as an opening position.

The headline price will be quoted for years. The better lesson is that in today’s market, the most valuable thing a collector can own is a car that no one else can ever replicate.

Figures are from Broad Arrow Auctions’ post-sale reporting for The Las Vegas Auction, October 31, 2026, and include buyer’s premium. The prior record references the Mecum Monterey 2026 result.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Most lists of soccer stars' car collections measure the wrong thing. They tally horsepower and price tags, as though a large invoice and a good collector car were the same. For serious buyers, the more revealing question is not what these players can afford. It is what the factories were willing to sell them.

That distinction is the real story inside the garages of the game's biggest names, and it explains why a handful of cars in them deserve a collector's attention while others are simply expensive.

Allocation is the real currency

Start with Cristiano Ronaldo, who told Piers Morgan he owns roughly 40 or 41 cars and has lost count, according to Khaleej Times. The number is less interesting than the names inside it. Bugatti features prominently, and the car most often cited is the Centodieci, reportedly among his acquisitions.

The Centodieci is the kind of car money alone cannot buy. Bugatti built exactly ten, each powered by an 8.0-liter W16 producing 1,600 PS, and the run sold out before the car was formally revealed. It is a modern tribute to the EB110, the 1990s Bugatti that collectors spent years undervaluing before the market caught up. A ten-car edition with that lineage is scarce for a reason that matters: the factory chose its buyers.

The same dynamic is now visible across the brand. Our own reporting shows new Bugatti buyers face years-long waits as production capacity fills, and Ronaldo has described his Tourbillon purchase as an investment. That is his framing, not a market verdict, but it points to the principle: wealth buys a car, while standing with the manufacturer buys the right to be offered one.

The cars that follow collector logic

Not every player buys for spectacle. Erling Haaland was filmed in Monaco in a blue Ferrari 812 GTS, a car that quietly checks the boxes seasoned collectors care about: a front-mounted, naturally aspirated 6.5-liter V12 making 789 horsepower, wrapped in an open body. The 812 GTS was the first V12 Ferrari spider since the 365 GTS/4 of the early 1970s, and it arrived in a market that is steadily moving toward electrification. Cars like this tend to be remembered for their engines, and engines of this type are not coming back in the same form.

David Beckham approaches the question differently. He worked with Maserati's Fuoriserie program to specify his own MC20, finished in black with pink trim and matching brake calipers, and he has a second car in gunmetal grey in London. The MC20 is the car that returned Maserati to the supercar conversation after the MC12, and a factory-built bespoke example with a documented, famous first owner is a cleaner proposition than most celebrity cars. Whether the market will ever pay extra for his taste is unproven. The paper trail, at least, will be impeccable.

Where personality becomes a liability

The cautionary side of the ledger is the heavily modified car. Ronaldo’s one-off Mansory G-Wagen, estimated at about $2.5 million with a marble-effect finish and CR7 insignia throughout, is a fascinating object and a difficult one to value. Collectors have long treated extensive aftermarket personalization as a cost to be reversed, not a feature to be preserved, and a car so tied to one owner’s branding narrows its buyer pool to almost nobody else. The same applies, on a smaller scale, to a spectacle like Ronaldinho’s pink Rolls-Royce Phantom at Niketown London. It was great theater. Theater and collectability are different things.

Provenance can also cut the other way. Ronaldo crashed a Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano in 2009, days before a match against Chelsea, and walked away unhurt. He is far from the only star to have damaged an exotic, a pattern we examined in our look at celebrity exotic-car crashes. A famous name raises the stakes of a car’s history in both directions.

Fandom as its own collecting category

Lionel Messi is reported to own a Pagani Zonda Tricolore, one of only three built, which is exactly the sort of low-volume, coachbuilt-in-spirit car the market tends to favor. His name has also inspired something stranger: a life-size Zonda tribute assembled from 100,000 Uruguayan coins by artist Joaquin Arbiza, commissioned by collector Jorge Gomez and unveiled at Art Week Cars & Coffee in Miami. It has no powertrain and moves only when pushed, but it shows how the cultural pull of a sports figure now extends into art-adjacent collecting.

What serious buyers should take from it

Strip away the names and the garages teach a consistent lesson. The cars worth a collector’s attention are the ones tied to genuine scarcity and engineering significance, such as a ten-car Bugatti, a V12 Ferrari spider, or a three-car Pagani run. The ones that lean on the owner’s fame alone should be priced with caution. Buyers should ask whether the car would still be desirable with the celebrity removed from the story, insist on factory documentation, and be skeptical of any premium attached purely to a famous first owner.

A footballer’s garage is a record of access as much as appetite. The cars that matter most are the ones that required an invitation.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Mecum has not put an estimate on Lot S101. For a 1970 Chevrolet Nova Yenko Deuce, one of 175 built, that silence says less about price than about the question the car raises. Finished in Cortez Silver with black Yenko graphics and a Muncie M21 four-speed, the Nova is described in the Mecum lot listing as “re-bodied to factory specifications.” It crosses the block in Las Vegas on Saturday, Nov. 14.

That phrase deserves more scrutiny than the paint. A Deuce is a small-block car whose value rests on its paper trail, and a replacement body tests how much of a COPO car lives in the steel and how much lives in the record. Our view: the record has to carry the whole argument.

What a Deuce actually is

Don Yenko built his reputation on big-block Camaros, a story we trace in our guide to the Yenko Camaro. The 1970 Nova was a different answer to a different market. Insurance surcharges and tightening emissions rules were strangling big-block muscle cars, so Yenko persuaded Chevrolet to build Novas around the 350-cubic-inch LT1, the 360-horsepower small-block shared with the Z/28 Camaro and the Corvette, as the Audrain Automobile Museum explains. The cars were ordered through the COPO system with a 12-bolt Positraction rear, power front discs, heavier springs and sway bars, then finished at Yenko’s Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, dealership with stripes, badges and a hood-mounted tachometer.

The foundation was deliberately plain: a base Nova coupe, not an SS. Of the 175 built, 122 carried the four-speed, the configuration Lot S101 is reported to have. That plainness is the point. A Deuce is a sleeper in factory form, which means its identity rests on build records rather than on obvious visual cues.

What “re-bodied” does and does not tell you

A rotisserie restoration refinishes the shell the car left the factory with. A re-body replaces it. Mecum’s description, as reported, says the car was rebuilt to factory specification and refinished in its original color; what it does not settle is where the original shell went, what moved across to the new one, and who verified the transfer. Reported documentation includes a COPO Connection record, a letter of authenticity and a Yenko Vehicle Verification Certificate. Those are the right papers, but the date and scope of each matter more than their titles. A certificate written before the body swap describes a different object than one written after it.

The instinct is the same one we applied to a 1963 Nova SS, where the body tag told the real story. Serious bidders will want to know whether the replacement is a genuine 1970 Nova coupe shell, how the car’s identifying numbers were handled, and whether the engine, transmission and rear axle are the units the car wore when it left Canonsburg. None of that is knowable from outside the file, and none of it is a reason to dismiss the car. It is the reason the file is the lot.

The comparison set

The nearest benchmark is the car we covered when it sold: the award-winning Cranberry Red Deuce from the Ron and Sarah Jury collection, a Turbo-Hydramatic car with Concours Gold and AACA Grand National credentials and a 2024 Certificate of Authenticity, which RM Sotheby’s sold for $126,500. A four-speed car with 42,000 miles that was listed as highly original sold at Mecum Kissimmee in January 2025 for $151,250, according to auction-record data. Aggregator records also show a yellow Deuce that failed to sell at Mecum Indianapolis in 2021 with a high bid of $105,000, a reminder that this is a market where reserves are tested.

Those cars bring original-body credentials to the table. Lot S101 brings a better transmission than the Jury car and a different kind of risk. Our read is that the four-speed buys it attention and the re-body decides the discount, and that the room on Nov. 14 will show how wide that discount is.

What serious buyers should watch

Watch the first bids more than the last. Collectors who understand COPO cars will test the file early, and the pace of bidding will tell you whether the paperwork convinced them. A late rush from a buyer who wants a driving four-speed Deuce is a different signal than a slow climb that stalls below the comps. Either outcome is informative about how the market treats replacement bodies on rare factory-built cars.

A Yenko is a sequence of records that happens to have a car attached. On a COPO Nova, the steel is replaceable. The record is not.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Ferrari reportedly spent about $1 million in 1987, roughly $3 million in today’s money, to turn a Mondial into a one-off pace car for the PPG Indy Car World Series. In 2004, a Mondial that Hagerty’s sales database lists as one of the PPG pace cars, VIN ZFFED32X9J0076390, sold at Christie’s in Le Mans for $85,330. It was a no-reserve lot. That is roughly 8.5 percent of the reported build cost, and the gap is the whole story.

This is not an argument that a factory one-off must be worth its build cost. It rarely is. It is an argument that a one-off is only as valuable as the documentation that proves what it is, and that the market learns to read that documentation slowly.

What Ferrari actually built

According to Forza magazine’s feature on the car, the project was developed with I.DE.A of Turin. A full-size styling model was complete in April 1987, body and chassis were mated that September, and the car was presented at Laguna Seca on October 9, 1987. Ercole Spada’s proposal was chosen over those of Carlos Sánchez and Justyn Norek, and the result had a stretched wheelbase, large glass areas, an oval grille, a NACA duct and a rear window with three flaps that opened automatically as engine-bay temperatures climbed. Inside was a Kevlar dashboard wrapped in suede and leather.

The engineering matters more than the styling. Forza reports that CART required floor tie-down points, an engine that fired in five seconds or less, and the ability to idle indefinitely at 100°F without overheating. The car carried two high-capacity batteries for its lighting, water nozzles to cool the brakes above 35 mph, an integral roll bar and a Pirelli safety fuel tank, and its composite bodywork was made in-house without an autoclave, unusual outside Formula 1 at the time.

It was also a test bed. Forza says Ferrari used the project to try a Motronic 3.4-litre Tipo F119D V8 of about 300 horsepower, the engine destined for the 348 tb, along with a transverse ZF five-speed gearbox and an electronically adjustable suspension. Forza does not confirm which engine the finished car carried, so treat the powertrain details with care. The transverse layout, however, is the one the production Mondial t adopted when it reached customers in 1989. The pace car previewed Ferrari’s next generation of V8 cars while wearing a PPG livery.

The car served as a CART pace car from 1988 through 1991 and was delivered to PPG in the United States in late June 1988. Forza notes that it was displayed at the Galleria Ferrari in Maranello in 2013.

What the 2004 sale tells us

Two sources describe the 2004 sale. The PPG Pace Cars registry records it as sold for €70,500. Hagerty’s past-sales record lists Christie’s Le Mans on July 23–24, 2004, lot 76, a no-reserve sale at $85,330. The two figures are consistent once currency is accounted for, though neither source gives an estimate or a high bid, and the lot description is brief. It mentions black stripe graphics, a reinforced roll bar, an extended rear window and custom show paint, and describes a car that had been used on track and was not street legal.

That sparse description is instructive. A lot catalogued as a modified Mondial, with no estimate and no reserve, attracts Mondial money. The same chassis, presented with the build file, the I.DE.A drawings and the CART paperwork, is a different object. The 2004 price did not measure the car. It measured how little of the car’s story was on the page.

This is a pattern collectors should know. We saw the reverse in the case of the Ferrari 499P Modificata that never raced, where buyers pay explicitly for the program behind the car, and in the Daytona SP3 press car, which asks for a premium on its biography. Provenance is not an extra. It is the asset.

From a private collection to the Caretakers Collection

Forza places the car in a private collection in Seattle after the 2004 auction. It has since been reported as part of The Caretakers Collection, which is also reported to hold a Tucker sedan, said to be number 29 of 51 built, and one of the 12 GM Futurliners. No restoration work has been reported; what has changed is that the car has resurfaced, and it is reportedly not for sale.

The company it keeps is telling. A Tucker and a Futurliner are both industry what-ifs: machines built to show what a manufacturer believed the future might look like, produced in tiny numbers, and valued today largely because someone kept them intact. The Ferrari belongs in that group. It is a corporate statement in metal, made at a moment when Ferrari was deeply engaged with American open-wheel racing. This is the same logic that makes the Simeone collection valuable: preservation of the unglamorous, undocumented-by-the-market object, rather than polish.

What serious buyers should take from it

First, a one-off’s value rests on three things that can be verified: the build records, the chassis identity, and the continuity of the chain of ownership. Here the chassis number and the reported 2004 sale are recorded, but the lot description is thin, so any future transaction would depend on reconciling the car as it is today with Ferrari’s own file.

Second, originality for a car like this is not about matching numbers in the usual sense. It is about whether the pace-car equipment, the bodywork and the livery are what left Turin. The reported absence of restoration is therefore an asset to protect, not a gap to fill.

Third, the price history is not the valuation. A $1 million build cost and an $85,330 hammer are both true. Neither sets a market, because the car has not been tested by a well-documented, properly presented sale. Until it is, the sensible position is to admit that nobody knows.

Collectors rarely pay for the cost of making a car. They pay for the certainty that it is the car.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Most collector cars come with a title and a folder of paperwork. The Batman Returns hero Batmobile, Lot 13 in Julien’s Auctions’ Nov. 23 Ultimate Batmobile Auction, comes with something less common: a rulebook.

The $5 million to $7 million estimate will draw the attention. It is not the most consequential line in the listing. That distinction belongs to a single section of the lot description, which states that acquiring the car “includes a formal agreement” with Warner Bros. Consumer Products, the representative of DC Comics’ intellectual property rights. In our earlier look at what the sale says about the next generation of collectors, we argued that bidders are buying screen time rather than steel. The agreement adds a second point: they are also buying terms.

What the Agreement Says, According to Julien’s

Julien’s describes the agreement as providing “clarity and continuity” and a framework for preservation, exhibition and future ownership. The practical terms it lists are specific. The car may be exhibited as part of the owner’s permanent collection and at qualifying auto shows and similar public venues. With appropriate approvals, it may also appear at other venues, including museum exhibitions and charitable or nonprofit events.

The limits are just as specific. The car must remain stationary when exhibited to the public. It may not be leased to third parties. Display, operation, commercial use and future transfer are all governed by the agreement, and a later buyer can take ownership only in accordance with it, including by signing a similar agreement with Warner Bros. Consumer Products. Julien’s says a copy is available to registered bidders on request, which means the full text is not public. Everything here rests on the auction house’s summary.

Why It Matters: Ownership With a Licensor Attached

A conventional collector car is valuable partly because of what the owner is free to do with it: drive it, lend it, show it, sell it to anyone. This Batmobile is sold on different terms, and the difference shapes both ends of the transaction.

On the way in, the buyer pool is filtered. Julien’s says additional registration qualifications apply to this lot, that pre-sale bids are subject to approval and will be removed if the bidder is not approved, and that on sale day it will accept only pre-approved absentee, phone or room bids. On the way out, every future buyer must accept the same framework, which narrows the market for resale. Julien’s presents that as a benefit, and there is a fair argument for it: a documented arrangement with the rights holder removes a cloud that hangs over many pop-culture vehicles. Intellectual property claims can follow a car long after it leaves the set, as the court fight behind the Miami Vice Daytona Spyder illustrates. Both things can be true. Certainty has a price, and so does a smaller field of eventual buyers.

That is an interpretation, not a finding. What it suggests is that this car should be valued less like a Ferrari and more like a licensed object with an extraordinary physical authenticity attached. We saw the licensed end of the spectrum when Joe Burrow bought a Batmobile-inspired Tumbler. We saw how provenance alone can move a result when Michael Jordan’s Ferrari 550 Maranello sold for $2.7 million. This lot sits between them, and the contract is what places it there.

What the Live Bidding Does and Doesn’t Tell Us

As of Nov. 3, Julien’s showed three absentee bids: $1 million on Oct. 30, $2 million and then $2.25 million on Nov. 3. The starting bid is $1 million, and the reserve is listed as not met. Those figures are verified. Reading them as a trend would be a mistake. Early absentee bids on a marquee lot are often placeholders, and with the reserve undisclosed, the number that matters will be set by approved bidders in the final days and on Nov. 23, not by this ladder.

What Serious Bidders Should Ask Before Nov. 23

First, read the full agreement, ideally with counsel, and test it against the buyer’s real plans. The summary refers to guidelines on “operation” and “commercial use” without detailing either. Second, ask Julien’s to reconcile a discrepancy in its own listing. The lot description says the car is currently located in Tustin, California, while a separate notice says it will be available for pick-up from a storage facility in Burbank, with a $35-per-day storage fee at the winning bidder’s expense immediately after the auction. Third, request the condition report, which Julien’s provides only on written request by email. The house says the Chevrolet V8, transmission and mechanical parts have been tested a limited number of times since filming, and that the car is custom-made and not street legal. Fourth, confirm the title path. The lot lists a VIN, and the buyer is responsible for completing the transfer under state and federal regulations, along with the Warner Bros. contract.

The Real Story

Collectors usually pay for what they can do with a car. Here, a meaningful part of the bid is for what the owner has been permitted to do. If this Batmobile reaches its estimate with those terms attached, it will show that buyers value authenticated screen use enough to accept someone else’s rules. If it falls short, the contract is the first place worth looking.

Most collector cars come with a title. This one comes with a rulebook, and the rulebook is part of the price.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

U.S. stock futures fell sharply on Wednesday after Democrats won control of Congress in the midterm elections. Dow futures were down roughly 440 points and S&P 500 futures about 102 points in early trading, according to Invezz. For collectors, the question is whether a shaky stock market spills over into the car market.

Hagerty's data suggests it can, mainly at the top of the market and at the auction block. It also suggests one day of red screens is a reason to watch the numbers, not to panic.

What the Data Shows

Hagerty's valuation team compared stock market performance from late July to the first day of Monterey sales against total Monterey auction sales over ten years. The result was a 0.77 correlation, a strong relationship. The link to sell-through, the share of offered cars that actually sell, was only 0.27.

Dave Kinney, publisher of the Hagerty Price Guide, described a market drop as "a real double-edged sword." Some owners pull back, while investors who are doing well in stocks may move money into cars as an alternative. Hagerty also notes that the size of the effect varies from year to year, shaped by which cars are consigned and by broader trends such as inflation.

A Market Already Split in Two

The 2026 collector car market was divided before this week's selloff. Hagerty's August 2026 market report shows Monterey Car Week produced $755.6 million in sales across five auctions, and year-to-date auction sales through August reached $4.9 billion, up 42% from a year earlier. The average sale price rose 31% year over year, but the median sale price rose only 5%.

That gap points to strength concentrated in expensive, low-volume cars. The Hagerty Market Rating, which measures market activity, stood at 58.74 in August, inside the 50 to 60 band Hagerty considers a flat market.

Hagerty's insured-value data tells a similar story. As of its March 2026 analysis, requests to raise insured values on vehicles under $250,000 outnumbered requests to lower them in only one of the previous 15 months. For high-end vehicles, increases won out in eight of those 15 months.

Why Modern Collectors Should Pay Attention

Newer cars are taking a larger share of the auction market. Hagerty reports the median model year offered at auction moved from 1991 to 1994, and cars built since 1990 grew from 49% to 59% of auction value. That makes the modern end of the hobby more exposed to swings in sentiment among well-funded buyers.

What to Watch Next

The first sign of stock market stress reaching collector cars is likely to show up in sell-through rates and estimates at the next major auctions, not in a sudden collapse in prices. Collectors should also watch the median sale price instead of the headline average, because record sales at the top can hide weakness in everyday collectibles. A drop in the Hagerty Market Rating below 50 would signal a more meaningful change.

For owners with no plans to sell, a risk-off week is not a reason to rush a decision. This article is general information and not financial advice.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

The Ferrari Daytona SP3 sold for £8,161,250 at RM Sotheby’s London Auction, and by the arithmetic of a record sale it should be the headline. It isn’t. The SP3 finished inside its £7.5–9.5 million estimate, a strong result but not a surprising one. The surprise was everything around it.

RM reports a total of £36,550,950, the highest ever for a car auction in Britain, with 56 of 64 lots sold, or 87.5 per cent. One extraordinary car can inflate a gross. A record gross at that sell-through rate has to be earned by the room, and this one was earned well below the top lot.

What the SP3 Actually Proved

The car was a 2022 left-hand-drive Daytona SP3 in Giallo Triplo Strato over Rosso Ferrari leather, powered by the 6.5-litre V12 and its 829 horsepower. It carries a “Vettura di Sviluppo” plaque, was retained by Ferrari as a factory press car, appeared in Top Gear, and came from its first and only private owner. That is a real biography, and we asked before the sale whether collectors would pay for it.

They paid, within limits. A result inside the estimate says the market recognized the history without treating a development plaque as a multiplier. That is useful to know. It suggests that for the Icona cars, whose values we examined in our look at the SP3’s steep run-up, provenance supports a price but does not rewrite the pricing tier.

Where the Room Went Past the Estimates

The more telling results sat a few rows down. The 2023 Aston Martin Valkyrie Coupé, one of 150, made £2,761,250 and is reported as a new auction record for the model, finishing above the top of its published range.

The pattern repeated. By RM’s published results, a Ferrari 458 Speciale Aperta brought roughly £1.85 million against an estimate that topped out near £1.45 million. A 1993 Porsche 911 Carrera RS 3.8 and a 1964 Ferrari 250 GT Lusso both cleared the high end of their ranges. Ayrton Senna’s own 1991 Honda NSX made £871,250, and a 1965 Ferrari 275 GTB Alloy reached £2,041,250.

Look at what those cars share. The 275 GTB Alloy is one of roughly 80 aluminium-bodied long-nose, two-cam cars, with matching numbers, Ferrari Classiche certification and 22 years with a single consignor. The Aperta is a 499-car run in a model collectors already consider the last great naturally aspirated Ferrari V8. The Senna car is the only NSX in the sale with a single, famous, verifiable owner. None of them was asking buyers to take rarity on faith. Each came with a reason that could be checked, which is the same sorting we described in our analysis of the modern exotic market.

What Didn’t Sell

Eight lots failed to sell. Among those we can verify from the results are a 2004 Porsche Carrera GT, a 1994 Lamborghini Diablo SE30, a 2001 Ferrari 550 Barchetta, a 2004 Ferrari 360 Challenge Stradale, a 2007 Ferrari 575 Superamerica and a Japan-delivered Scuderia Spider 16M. These are good cars with devoted followings. In a room this strong, what they lacked was an argument beyond the badge. The pre-sale lots we flagged in our morning watch on RM London’s quieter lots are a useful test of that idea.

There is one caution. A 1963 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Roadster and a 1954 Bentley R-Type Continental both sold below their low estimates, as far as the published figures show. Two results do not make a trend, but fifties blue-chips selling softly in a record sale are worth watching.

What This Means for Collectors

If the sale price vanished from this story, the lesson would survive. Documentation, ownership and a specific reason to exist are what moved cars past their estimates in London; badge and rarity alone did not. A buyer evaluating a modern Ferrari or a hypercar should be asking what, exactly, can be proven about this car that cannot be said of its siblings.

The record total is the number that will be quoted. The more useful one is eight. A headline lot sets the ceiling of a sale, but the cars that fail to sell show you its character.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

At Artcurial’s Automobiles sur les Champs sale in Paris on October 25, a 2006 Porsche Carrera GT with 7,300 km on the odometer hammered at €2.25 million. With buyer’s premium, the published result was roughly €2.625 million, or about $2.9 million. In the same sale, a 1935 Bugatti Type 57 cabriolet by Henri Chapron, estimated at €400,000 to €600,000, failed to find a buyer.

Read together, the two results say more than either does alone. Collectors are paying for cars whose stories can be read cleanly from the first page to the last. The Carrera GT had that story. The Bugatti, for all of its rarity, had a more complicated one.

A Carrera GT with little left to explain

Lot 55 was car number 440 of 1,270 built. According to the sale documentation, it was assembled in November 2004 and delivered new in late 2005 by the Porsche centre in Francorchamps, Belgium, with 59 km on the clock. It is finished in GT Silver Metallic over a Terracotta interior, with the XT bucket seats, a reinforced battery, headlight washers and the matching Ascot leather luggage set.

It also had a single owner: a business leader, collector and rally driver who has competed in the Dakar and won the 2008 Rallye de Tunisie. The car was registered in Luxembourg and then in France in 2011, and went to Porsche Stuttgart in April 2012 at 6,790 km. In May 2026 it received a major service at the Porsche centre in Vélizy that cost €71,852 and included new camshafts, shock absorbers, an alternator and a starter. The clutch was cleaned rather than replaced. An expert report, invoices and manuals came with the car.

None of that is exotic, and that is the point. A Carrera GT is a 5.7-liter V10 supercar with a carbon monocoque and a reputation for expensive upkeep, so buyers at this level are underwriting maintenance as much as mileage. At this price, a service file is part of the provenance.

What the price does, and does not, say

The hammer fell inside the €1.9 million to €2.5 million estimate. It was not a record, and it was not a disappointment. It is more useful as a measurement. In our analysis of Carrera GT values, standard-color, low-mileage cars were clearing roughly $3 million at four sale platforms by August. At about $2.9 million, a 7,300 km silver car in Paris landed just under that line. A gap that modest could owe as much to venue, currency, French registration and the auction calendar as to the car itself, so we would not read it as a verdict.

Artcurial offers a cleaner comparison against itself. In January, at its Automobile Legends sale, lot 61, a 2006 Basalt Black Carrera GT with about 21,500 km, sold for €1,647,800 against an estimate of €1.3 million to €1.5 million. That car also arrived with a service bill of nearly €60,000. On the published figures, the October car brought about 59 percent more, with roughly a third of the mileage, nine months later. Part of that is mileage and part is a market that moved. Taken together, they show that the Carrera GT repricing is not confined to American auction rooms.

The overlooked point is how the two cars were sold. Neither relied on a spectacular color or a celebrity. Each came with a long, documented, single-keeper story and a recent, expensive, well-explained service. That is what buyers are now paying for at this level: certainty.

The Bugatti’s problem was not rarity

Lot 68 carried a better story on paper. Chassis 57349 was delivered as a bare chassis on December 14, 1935 to Max Hicguet, a director of La Dolomie Française, and Chapron built a bespoke “Dandy” cabriolet body for it, with a dashboard of his own design. It is reportedly the only surviving Type 57 bodied by Chapron. After the war it was revived in 1946, then passed in 1949 to Marceau Convenant, a Peugeot dealer at La Baule, whose family kept it for roughly four decades. It was fully restored in the 1980s and shown at the Club Bugatti France rally in 1992. The current owners bought it from the Convenant family in 2016.

The catalogue is candid about what is not original. The body and engine are the car’s own, and the body number, 4929, matches. But the gearbox and rear axle come from other cars, the hydraulic brakes were probably fitted around 1938, and the shell-type headlamps are not period. The car was recently recommissioned after several years in storage.

None of that disqualifies a Type 57. Prewar Bugattis lived hard lives, and experienced buyers know it. But a unique body and a restoration that dates to the 1980s ask a buyer to make several judgments at once, and every one of them has a price attached. Rarity does not settle those questions. Documentation can, and here the documentation was good, but it also records the swaps. For a context on how seriously major collections treat the marque, see our look at the Prince of Monaco’s collection.

A no-sale is also not a statement of value. Cars that miss their reserve in a room often change hands afterward by private treaty, and a mixed room is not the same as a full market. What the result does show is where bidding stopped for a car that asks buyers to take its history on trust.

The sale around them

According to published results, the sale cleared roughly 80 percent of its lots for about €8.8 million. The second-highest price came from the collection of Guido Hommel: a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing, kept for 27 years and sold for €1,624,800. A 1972 Dino 246 GTS from the same collection, restored to factory specification, made €488,720. Long, named stewardship, again, was rewarded. It fits what we described last month, when we argued that the modern exotic market is sorting rather than rising.

What collectors should take from Paris

Mileage sets the price band, and paperwork decides where a car lands inside it. The Carrera GT is now priced like a blue-chip, and blue-chip cars are judged on their files before their odometers. Serious buyers should ask the same questions of any car at this level: who kept it, who serviced it, what was replaced and what was documented. The Bugatti shows the other side of the rule. Rarity attracts attention, but it is the answers that attract bids.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

The Jaguar XJ-S is priced like a used car and owned like a classic. In the Bring a Trailer results for Jaguar XJS listings, sales in September and October 2026 ran from $3,500 for a no-reserve 1996 2+2 convertible to $26,750 for a 20,000-mile 1995 V12 convertible. That spread is the whole buying story: the car on offer matters far less than the paper, the rust and the wiring behind it.

This guide is for buyers choosing between a V12 and a six, a coupe and a convertible, and a cheap project and a car that has already been fixed. It separates the versions, the failure points that decide the price of a bad purchase, and what recent sales say each type costs. It is not a forecast. Nothing here suggests the market will move in any direction.

Why the XJ-S matters to collectors

Jaguar introduced the XJ-S on September 10, 1975, as the grand-touring successor to the E-Type, and kept building it for 21 years. Wikipedia’s production summary puts the total at 115,413 cars between 1975 and 1996, so this is not a rare model in the Ferrari sense. Its collector case rests on the 5.3-litre V12, a touring-car competition record, and a run of special versions that were genuinely built in small numbers.

Tom Walkinshaw Racing took the car racing in the 1980s, including a 1984 European Touring Car Championship driver’s title for Walkinshaw, and that work fed directly into the JaguarSport XJR-S. Under Ford ownership the car got a 1991 facelift and lost its hyphen, so late cars are badged XJS rather than XJ-S. This guide uses XJ-S for the whole family and XJS where it names a late car.

The versions that matter

Production figures from the same summary split the car into three broad phases: about 14,800 original cars from 1975 to 1981, 73,207 H.E., 3.6 and XJ-SC cars from 1981 to 1991, and 27,406 facelifted XJS cars from 1991 to 1996. Within those, the variants below decide what you are actually buying.

Engines and transmissions: what actually fails

The V12 has a reputation for being fragile, but specialist advice is consistent: it is durable when serviced and costly when it is not. Autocar’s buying guide notes that the V12 needs its coolant replaced every two years, and Classics World says brown coolant is a reason to walk away. A start-up rattle can mean a timing-chain problem, and hesitation 20 to 30 seconds after a cold start can point to the auxiliary air valve. The Motorious guide adds that you should confirm the hard-to-reach rear spark plugs have actually been changed.

The fuel-injector wiring harness is the less obvious risk. An enthusiast technical write-up on the V12 harness describes PVC-insulated wire that hardens and cracks near the engine, leading to dropped cylinders and, in the worst case it describes, a short that melted insulation and an injector and raised a fire risk. The remedy it recommends is a rebuild in heat-resistant wire or relocating the harness away from the hottest areas. Ask whether this has been done, and look at the harness yourself.

The AJ6 six is simpler. Guides put oil pressure at 40 to 50 psi at operating temperature, warn about timing-chain rattle, and flag head-gasket failures from around 50,000 miles, so check for coolant in the oil and oil in the coolant. On manual 3.6 cars, crunching first and second gears or a slipping clutch are the faults to test for. On any automatic, a knock from underneath is often a worn gearbox mount rather than a gearbox.

Inspection priorities: start with the metal

Rust is the single biggest expense, and it is worse on earlier cars. Autocar points to pre-1991 cars as the ones without galvanised panels. Check the jacking points, sills and their closing plates, the bottoms of the front wings and doors, the wheelarches, the boot-lid edges and the subframes. On coupés, water can collect around the seatbelt reinforcement plate and rot the floor, and on late cars it can attack the windscreen scuttle. Fresh underseal or inconsistent filler is a warning, not a reassurance. The same walk-through applies to a Volvo 1800 or other cars of that era, where rust repairs often cost more than the mechanical ones.

Underneath, the upper inner front wishbone bushes tend to wear around 50,000 miles, which causes uneven tyre wear. Rock each rear wheel to test hub bearings and inspect the rear subframe mounts. Check the differential for whine and fluid leaks, because Autocar notes leaks can reach the brakes. Inboard rear brakes, fitted until May 1993, make that more than a cosmetic concern. Calipers and handbrakes can seize, so a car that pulls under braking needs a closer look.

Inside, test every window, gauge, mirror and warning light, plus the air-conditioning flaps and motors. The ABS light should come on at ignition and then go out. Look at the driver’s seat bolster, which wears quickly, and at the wood veneer, which can crack or flake and is expensive to repair. Damp carpets suggest a leaking screen, scuttle or, on a convertible, hood. The boot-mounted battery can leak acid and rot the boot floor. On open cars, inspect the hood mechanism and fabric for splits, and remember the full convertible’s strengthened shell was introduced in 1988.

Cost and parts

The clearest cost figures available are British. Classics World puts front wings at about £500 to £700 per side and door skins at £200 to £300, and Autocar describes one car’s recommissioning bill as exceeding £4,000. Those are British prices and exchange rates and local labour will change the US picture, but they show the scale: a cheap car with rusty sills and a long-parked V12 can cost more to fix than to buy.

Parts support is uneven. Autocar says rubber bumpers for early cars are no longer available new, and original alloy wheels are scarce but refurbishable. Classics World reports that manual gearbox parts can be hard to source and clutch work is expensive.

Originality, documentation and modifications

Service history carries more weight on an XJ-S than on most cars. Classics World calls missing service history a major warning sign. For a V12, look for dated coolant changes, evidence of plug and harness work, and any recommissioning invoices. Where Jaguar’s heritage archive can supply a factory build record, it helps confirm that a car sold as an XJR-S or a special edition is what it claims to be.

Modified cars are common and sell on their own terms. Recent BaT live listings and related stories include a 454-powered 1983 car with a Tremec six-speed, a Tremec TKX manual conversion kit for V12 cars, a Chevrolet small-block swap and a Viper V10 swap. A manual conversion can make a V12 car more usable, but every swap trades originality for preference, so price it as a custom car and insist on clean wiring and documentation.

What recent sales show

The Bring a Trailer results page for Jaguar XJS lists 686 results at the time of writing. The table below samples completed sales from September 2 to October 30, 2026, using the titles as listed, so engine type is stated only where the title gives it.

Two unsold results show where bidders stopped: a 22k-mile 1991 Classic Collection V12 convertible reached $20,777 and a 9k-mile 1995 2+2 convertible reached $17,250, and both failed to meet their reserves. Do not treat these as sale prices.

The pattern is worth reading carefully. Cars in the $15,000 to $27,000 range tend to combine low stated mileage with a long-ownership or late-model story. But mileage alone does not set the price: a 27k-mile 1991 V12 convertible sold for $6,600, and the 20,000-mile 1995 V12 convertible sold for four times that. The title cannot tell you why, which is exactly why you must read the full listing, history and inspection photos before using any single sale as a comp. At the other end, project cars changed hands at $8,900 and, for a no-reserve 1987 XJ-SC V12 in Canada, $5,500.

The JaguarSport cars sit in a different range. A 1992 XJR-S coupe with about 73,000 miles sold for $26,750 on Hagerty Marketplace in October 2023, and Classic.com records a 14,000-mile 1993 XJR-S at $54,500 in February 2020. Those are older results, not current ones, but they show that low-mileage, documented XJR-S cars were priced separately from ordinary XJ-S sales. One source says a 1994-or-later 6.0 V12 convertible can reach roughly £50,000 in the UK. That is an upper-bound claim from one guide, not a US norm.

Which XJ-S to buy, by type of buyer

For many buyers the cleanest answer is a late facelift car with a full history, because the later body is less exposed to the earliest rust and build-quality problems. Buyers who want the V12 should pay for the evidence of maintenance, not the odometer. If a documented JaguarSport car appeals, remember it is a separate market from the ordinary XJ-S. Anyone comparing it with rivals of the era can read how the XJ-S fared against the Cadillac Allanté and Mercedes 560 SL in our three-way comparison, and how a modern V12 conversion looks in TWR’s Supercat restomod. For another British V8 with its own risks, see the Esprit V8 and TVR Griffith 500 comparison, and for a German V8 sedan with a comparable maintenance profile, our Mercedes 500E buying guide.

The bottom line

An exceptional XJ-S has a solid, unmodified shell, a full record of coolant and electrical work, original or correct interior trim and a clear explanation for any gap in its history. An average one has cosmetic tidiness and a thin file, and a problem car has neither. The market sample above suggests buyers will pay several times more for the first than the last, even at similar mileage. For a car built for 21 years that still trades from single-digit to low-five-figure sums, that is the argument for buying carefully.

Sources and notes: sales data from Bring a Trailer’s Jaguar XJS results page (accessed November 3, 2026), Hagerty Marketplace and Classic.com. Production and specification figures from Wikipedia. Buying advice from Autocar, Classics World (the guide notes it is sponsored by a dealer), Motorious, PistonHeads and an enthusiast harness write-up. Hagerty’s value-guide figures could not be retrieved, so no Hagerty condition-grade values are quoted. This is a market sample, not a price guarantee.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Most British V8 stories end in a repair bill. The 1973 Triumph Stag now closing on Bring a Trailer is a useful place to start because its recent history shows how the market actually prices that reputation. Chassis LE23713U0 appears in Hagerty’s past-sales record as a $19,800 sale at Leake Auctions in Tulsa in June 2017. The same white, black-interior, four-speed car is bid at $7,800 as this is written, with the auction scheduled to end Tuesday afternoon. The final result was not known at the time of writing.

That is the thesis of this deep dive. The Stag is a car collectors price according to what has been proved about its engine, and the spread between a documented example and a mystery one is the story.

Why the Stag matters

Triumph launched the Stag in June 1970 as a four-seat, open-top grand tourer, styled by Giovanni Michelotti. It began life as a styling experiment cut from a Michelotti-designed 2000 saloon prototype, and Harry Webster developed it into a drophead. Sports Car Market notes that the factory saw it as a British rival to the Mercedes-Benz SL. The idea was sound: a V8, a proper T-bar roll-over structure, a removable hardtop and room for four.

Production ran from 1970 to June 1977 and totaled 25,939 cars according to Classic & Sports Car (Wikipedia’s infobox gives 25,939 and its body text 25,877). About 6,780 were exports, and 2,871 of those went to the United States. Bring a Trailer’s listing language puts 1971 production at 3,901 cars. The Mk1 covers chassis numbers below 20001, and the Mk2 begins at 20001 in early 1973.

Specifications and what is mechanically unusual

The Stag’s engine is not a Rover or a Ford. It is a Triumph-designed 2,997 cc overhead-cam V8, an iron block topped with aluminum heads, developed from the company’s four-cylinder family. Sports Car Market lists the Mk1 at 145 bhp at 5,500 rpm and 170 lb-ft at 3,500 rpm, and the Mk2 at 146 bhp at 5,700 and 167 lb-ft. Those are UK-market numbers. The Bring a Trailer listing for this US-spec car lists 127 horsepower and 148 lb-ft when new, which reflects the lower-compression, emissions-tuned federal engine. US cars also carried two Zenith-Stromberg 175 CDSE carburetors, side-impact door beams and DOT lighting.

The engineering decisions that matter to a buyer are all in that engine. The water pump sits high in the block, so low coolant can stop circulation and low-grade aluminum heads corrode if year-round inhibited coolant is neglected. Head gaskets fail after overheating, long simplex timing chains can stretch and fail in under 25,000 miles, and a mix of vertical and angled head studs loads the block unevenly. Some factory engines left the line with casting sand and core wire in the coolant passages. Time magazine eventually placed the Stag on its list of the 50 worst cars ever made, a line that still appears in every ownership conversation.

None of that makes the V8 unfixable. Specialists describe a well-maintained engine as good for 150,000 miles or more. The usual cures are an uprated aluminum radiator, an electric water pump conversion, silicone hoses, annual coolant renewal and timing chain replacement roughly every 30,000 miles. Classic & Sports Car says the engine isn’t fundamentally flawed, only unforgiving of neglect.

Options, identifying details and originality

Factory choices were limited: four-speed manual (with Laycock overdrive, which became standard on manual cars in the early 1970s) or automatic, hardtop and soft top, and wire or alloy wheels depending on year. Most cars were sold with both tops. Magenta and Topaz are cited as harder colors to sell, while Mimosa Yellow, the factory color this car wore before its white repaint, is called period-appropriate by Classics World.

Originality is where this specific car becomes instructive. It was refinished from Mimosa Yellow to white, its twin carburetors were replaced by a single Holley four-barrel rebuilt in 2022, and it rides on Minilite-style 14-inch wheels rather than factory alloys. The seller says the car was bought at auction with few records and believes a previous owner restored it. The listing also notes a cracked wood panel on the dash and loose trim at the top of the windshield. Comment-thread buyers pressed for records on cooling, head and timing-chain work, and the seller said the car does not overheat and leaks no fluids. None of that is a defect. It is simply the difference between a car that has been proved and one that has been described.

For authenticity, Classics World says the original Triumph V8 delivers the highest value and that Rover V8 and Ford V6 swaps devalue the car. Wikipedia cites DVLA data showing that about 92% of surviving Stags known to the agency still have the 3.0-liter engine. Buyers should also ask for a British Motor Industry Heritage Trust certificate, which confirms original color and specification. The August 2026 Bring a Trailer sale of a 1973 Stag at $14,500 came with one.

What the market is paying

Hagerty’s valuation page shows roughly $16,000 for a 1973 Stag in good (#3) condition, with 11 auction sales over three years ranging from $10,053 to $28,612. Bring a Trailer’s results page lists 38 Stag results. The recent sold ones are a reasonable cross-section of how much the market separates cars.

Two things stand out. First, the 2023 high of $29,000 for a 1971 four-speed has not been repeated in 2026, when four BaT sales ranged from $7,500 to $20,000. Four sales do not make a trend, and the range says more about condition and documentation than about a direction. Second, swaps are not punished uniformly. A V6-powered car brought $20,000 in March, the highest of the 2026 results, while a Buick V6-powered car stalled at $7,200 in October. Without more evidence, that is a reminder that engine configuration is one input and the quality of the work is another.

UK data is similarly mixed. Classic.com’s record of 1973 Stag sales includes a right-hand-drive automatic at £11,250 in May 2026 and a 29,000-mile manual at £6,750 in October 2025. Those are two data points, not a market, but they point the same direction: documentation and condition matter more than the badge.

Ownership costs and known weaknesses

UK sources put an engine rebuild at £6,000 or more, timing chains at about £600 at a specialist, and inner and outer sill replacement at up to £1,000 per side. Rust is a bigger issue on post-1973 cars and ill-treated examples. Buyers should inspect sills, A-posts, scuttle, front panel, wings, floors and the rear trailing-arm mounts, where electrolytic corrosion can attack the mounting and axle casing. Check for overdrive faults, worn layshaft bearings, hardtop edge rust, a distorted soft-top frame and leaking dampers. Parts and specialist support are described as excellent despite low production.

Competitors and where the Stag sits

The factory aimed at the Mercedes-Benz SL, but collectors weigh the Stag against British cars. Our comparison of the Austin-Healey 3000, Sunbeam Tiger and Triumph TR6 shows how condition outranks badge in this segment. The Stag offers a V8, four seats and a hardtop none of them can match, but it also carries more engine risk. Its closest philosophical neighbors are the cars in our Lotus Esprit V8 and TVR Griffith 500 comparison, where risk and reward are traded openly. For another angle on how British V8 grand tourers are priced, see our Jensen Interceptor S4 coverage. For buyers who care about identification and paperwork, our Lotus Elan originality check makes the same point about chassis numbers and documentation.

What separates exceptional from average

An exceptional Stag has a documented engine history, a cooling system upgraded rather than merely flushed, a sound body with an unmolested hardtop, and either a BMIHT certificate or factory-correct specification. It has its original V8, or a swap done with evidence of quality. An average Stag has a cheap repaint, unknown head history and an engine that is either original but untested or replaced with something nobody can explain. This week’s car sits between those poles: original-type V8, tidy presentation and few records, which is consistent with where the bidding sits.

Established value versus speculative potential

The Stag’s established value is that of a good, usable British convertible: roughly the low-to-mid teens in the Hagerty and Bring a Trailer data when the car is sorted and documented. That is the market’s own judgment, not a forecast. The speculative case is that cooling upgrades and a shrinking pool of survivors push documented original-engine cars higher. Against that, the same engine reputation, rust, and the common swaps keep the ceiling in check. Nothing here supports an appreciation call. What the data supports is narrower: buy the evidence, not the badge.

Factors that could strengthen or weaken desirability

Strengthening factors include a sorted-engine culture among specialists, documented rebuilds, BMIHT certificates, and enthusiasm for four-seat open cars with proper V8 sound. Weakening factors include continued engine stories, rust in post-1973 cars, and the dwindling number of unmodified engines. For collectors, the central point stands: a Stag is a purchase decision about the engine, and the price follows the paperwork.

Sources: Bring a Trailer: 1973 Triumph Stag 4-Speed listing; Bring a Trailer Triumph Stag results; Hagerty past sale, chassis LE23713U0; Hagerty 1973 Triumph Stag valuation; Wikipedia: Triumph Stag; Classic & Sports Car buyer’s guide; Classics World buyer’s guide; Sports Car Market profile; Car & Classic specs; Classic.com 1973 Stag sales.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Hagerty’s October index update put the Toyota FJ60 Land Cruiser up 10% for the quarter while the older FJ40 slipped 5%. That is the headline. The more useful finding is in the Bring a Trailer results: the move shows up at the top of the 60-Series market, in running, lifted and refurbished trucks bringing $50,000 or more, while the middle of the market has only recovered to where it stood in early 2025. Whether that is a durable repricing or one strong quarter cannot be settled yet, and the first month of Q4 argues for patience. These Toyota FJ60 values deserve a careful read for exactly that reason.

What is verified: Hagerty’s index and Bring a Trailer’s sold results

Hagerty’s “Hagerty Indexes Underscore a Mixed Market” (Oct. 22, 2026, by Greg Ingold) reports the Truck and SUV Index up about 1%. Within it, the FJ60 Toyota Land Cruiser rose 10%, the Jeep Grand Wagoneer 8% and 1980s Toyota pickups 7%, while the FJ40 Land Cruiser fell 5%, the first-generation Ford Bronco 6% and the Chevrolet Series 3100 pickup 10%. Hagerty gives no dollar values for these vehicles in that section and offers no cause for any single move. It describes the broader pattern as buyers showing restraint toward historically expensive trucks and enthusiasm for newer, more drivable ones. MCC’s Oct. 23 market brief covered the index at the table level; this piece tests one line of it against sales.

To test it, we counted every sold result in Bring a Trailer’s Toyota Land Cruiser 60-Series category through Nov. 2, 2026. The category includes FJ60 and FJ62 wagons, diesel variants and modified builds, so treat the numbers as a read on the market, not an index. Quarterly medians are our own calculation from the posted sale prices.

Read against Hagerty, the Q3 median of $33,000 is 21% above the $27,159 of a year earlier and 38% above Q2’s $23,875, which lines up with a quarterly gain. It is not a record, though: Q1 2025 posted $34,750. Where Q3 does stand out is the count of $50,000-plus sales. Eight of 25 cleared that line, the most in any quarter since the start of 2024; the prior high was seven in Q1 2025. Two of the eight need flags: a TLC 4×4-modified 1990 FJ62 at $98,000 and an HJ61 turbodiesel five-speed at $80,000. Of the remaining six, four carried lift kits according to their listings.

Six comparable sales, and what each one tells you

1984 FJ60, 62k miles: $61,000 (Sept. 25, 2026)

The truck in our featured image is the cleanest high comp. The listing describes a white 1984 FJ60 with 62k miles shown, the 4.2-liter 2F inline-six, a four-speed manual, a 2-inch Old Man Emu lift and a New Mexico and Colorado history. It sold for $61,000. For context, Hagerty’s 2020 reporting on the FJ60 cited Bring a Trailer sales in 2019 of $55,000 for a 58,000-mile 1985 and $51,000 for a 59,000-mile 1984, so a comparable-mileage truck is roughly 11% higher in nominal terms seven years on, though the two are not a like-for-like pair.

1984 FJ60, 123k miles: $57,084 (Sept. 28, 2026)

Three days later, this repainted 1984 FJ60 sold for $57,084 with 123k miles, a 2-inch Old Man Emu lift, a carburetor rebuild and 42 years in California. Roughly 60,000 more miles cost the seller about $4,000 against the white truck. That is a thin mileage discount, and it suggests these trucks are being priced on presentation and sorted mechanicals more than on odometer readings.

1989 FJ62, about 92k miles: $58,326 (July 23, 2026)

The FJ62 shows 147k kilometers (about 92k miles), a 4.0-liter inline-six, an H55 five-speed manual, a two-speed transfer case and a lifted suspension. It brought $58,326, a price well above the 190k-mile automatic FJ62 that sold in October, though lift, mileage and condition differ as well.

1982 FJ60, TLC4x4 refurbishment: $85,000 (Oct. 16, 2026)

This is the highest FJ60 result of the fourth quarter so far, and it is not a clean comp. The listing shows 257k miles, about 650 miles on the build, Holley Sniper fuel injection in place of the carburetor, an H55F five-speed and a repaint in light blue metallic. The seller states TLC4x4 of Charlotte, North Carolina, completed a refurbishment in 2026 that cost more than $154,000. It sold for $85,000. A build budget is not a valuation: the market paid a strong price and still returned well under the money spent.

1990 FJ62, 190k miles: $39,750 (Oct. 31, 2026)

The most recent FJ62 result in our data is this refurbished 1990 truck with 190k miles, the 4.0-liter 3F-E, a four-speed automatic, re-arched factory leaf springs, KYB dampers and 32-inch tires. At $39,750 it sits about $18,600 below the lifted five-speed FJ62 from July and shows how much transmission, mileage and presentation separate trucks of the same generation.

1985 FJ60, one family since new: $13,000 (Oct. 18, 2026)

At the other end, this beige 1985 FJ60, purchased new by the seller’s grandparents and fitted with a Man-A-Fre performance kit on its 4.2-liter engine, sold for $13,000. The same quarter’s best trucks went for more than four times that. Any statement that “FJ60 values are up” has to survive a spread this wide.

Our interpretation: why the FJ60 and not the FJ40

Hagerty does not explain the FJ60 move, so what follows is MCC’s reading, not a finding. In its 2020 coverage Hagerty called the FJ60 the least expensive Land Cruiser in its guide, with #2 (excellent) values of $29,800 and #3 (good) of $20,400, and said Millennials and Gen X buyers accounted for about 90% of insurance quotes. A four-door wagon that, in the examples above, comes with air conditioning and front disc brakes, and that gained fuel injection in the U.S. in 1987, is an easier truck to live with than the two-door FJ40, which our own buying guide found can range from an $18,700 original to a $176,000 custom. If buyers are indeed favoring trucks they can drive, the FJ60 is the Land Cruiser that fits.

The Q3 pattern, with lifted, manual-transmission trucks leading, fits that reading. It also fits a market sorting winners from the rest, similar to the index-versus-auction gap we examined in the Mercedes 300GD and the split among 1970s 4×4s in our Scout II, K5 Blazer and Bronco comparison; Hagerty also has the first-generation Bronco down 6% this quarter.

Supply, demand and production context

Supply looks steady rather than tight: Bring a Trailer sold 28 trucks in Q2 and 25 in Q3, so the Q3 jump did not come from a thin field. The J60 series was built from 1980 through 1990 for most markets, and U.S. trucks kept the carbureted 2F engine until the fuel-injected 3F-E arrived in 1987, according to Wikipedia’s J60 entry. We did not find a reliable production total and are not citing one. Demand is the harder variable. Hagerty’s 2020 insurance-quote data points to a younger buyer base, but the October index does not publish current quote data, so we cannot say how much of the gain is new demand and how much is a few well-presented trucks.

Sustainable, temporary or inconclusive?

Inconclusive, with a lean toward real at the top end. The case for durability is that Hagerty’s index and the Bring a Trailer record point the same way, and that the top-end count exceeded every quarter since the start of 2024. The case for caution is that Q3’s median only returned to early-2025 levels, that several of the high prices went to lifted or refurbished trucks that may not generalize to stock examples, and that October’s ten sales produced a $29,125 median with a single $50,000-plus result, the TLC4x4 build. One quarter of an index and a handful of auction results do not make a trend. Hagerty’s next update will show whether the 10% holds, and it is worth watching whether unmodified, unlifted trucks begin to join the $50,000 group. We are not forecasting where prices go from here.

Method and sources

Sale prices, dates, mileage and equipment come from the Bring a Trailer listings linked above and were read on Nov. 3, 2026. Quarterly counts and medians are MCC calculations from sold results only (no-sale results excluded) and include modified trucks and diesel variants. Index figures come from Hagerty’s Oct. 22, 2026 report; 2020 values and 2019 sales come from Hagerty’s FJ60 values report (Jeff Peek). Interpretation is labeled as such.

⚡ Read the full article on Modern Car Collector

Sign up for the Collector Car Market Brief. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.