The 10 most expensive cars ever sold at auction

These are the highest prices ever paid for a car at public auction, with fees included where the auction house reported them. Two of the ten were sold in euros, so every heading leads with the dollar figure and the list can be read straight down; the sum actually paid follows in brackets. Nine of the ten were built between 1954 and 1967, most of them to go racing, and most of them by one of two factories. The top of this market is very narrow.

Private sales are excluded. So is anything sold behind a closed door, which rules out several cars that are widely believed to have changed hands for more than the ones below.

1. 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé — $142 million (€135,000,000)

RM Sotheby's, at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, May 2022. Mercedes sold one of the two it owns, from its own collection, and put the proceeds into a fund giving scholarships in environmental science and decarbonisation. The private buyer agreed that the car would still be shown in public on occasion. It is named after Rudolf Uhlenhaut, the engineer behind it, and the second car stayed in the museum.

2. 1954 Mercedes-Benz W 196 R Stromlinienwagen — $53.9 million (€51,155,000)

RM Sotheby's, Stuttgart, February 2025, and the most valuable Grand Prix car ever sold. Fangio won the 1955 Buenos Aires Grand Prix in it and Stirling Moss set the fastest lap at Monza in it later that season. One of only four streamlined W 196s built. It had been sitting in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum since Daimler-Benz gave it to them in 1965.

3. 1962 Ferrari 330 LM / 250 GTO — $51,705,000

RM Sotheby's, New York, November 2023, slotted into the middle of the art auction season rather than a motoring sale. Chassis 3765 is the only GTO-bodied car raced by the factory Scuderia Ferrari team itself, and it won its class at the Nürburgring 1000km in 1962. It carried a $60 million estimate and did not reach it, which is worth remembering the next time a reserve is discussed.

4. 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO — $48,405,000

RM Sotheby's, Monterey, August 2018. Bidding opened at $35 million and three collectors fought it out by telephone. Ferrari built thirty-six 250 GTOs and almost every one of them has a documented history, which is a large part of why they cost what they do.

5. 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO "Bianco Speciale" — $38.5 million

Mecum, Kissimmee, January 2026. Chassis 3729 is the only 250 GTO the factory delivered in white, and it went to the California collector David Lee. It was the biggest sale in Mecum's history, at an auction week that turned over $441 million in total.

6. 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO — $38,115,000

Bonhams, Quail Lodge, Carmel, August 2014. At the time this was the most expensive car ever sold at public auction, and it was the sale that made the wider world start paying attention to old Ferraris. Two years later it had already been overtaken.

7. 1957 Ferrari 335 S — $35,763,848 (€32,075,200)

Artcurial, at the Rétromobile show in Paris, February 2016, for €32,075,200. Chassis 0674 came out of Pierre Bardinon's collection at Mas du Clos, where it had sat for more than forty years alongside some fifty other factory Ferraris. Depending on which currency you convert from, it briefly held the world record.

8. 1967 Ferrari 412P Berlinetta — $30,255,000

Bonhams, Quail Lodge, August 2023. The 412P was the customer version of Ferrari's works prototype, built in tiny numbers for privateer teams to race against the Ford GT40s. Cars like this almost never come up, because the people who own them tend to have owned them for decades.

9. 1954 Mercedes-Benz W196 — $29,650,095

Bonhams, at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, July 2013. Fangio drove it to victory in the German and Swiss Grands Prix in 1954. Selling it in the middle of a motoring festival, in front of people who had come to watch cars run up a hill, was a deliberate choice and it worked.

10. 1956 Ferrari 290 MM — $28,050,000

RM Sotheby's, New York, December 2015. Built for Fangio to drive in the 1956 Mille Miglia, the thousand-mile road race across Italy. A second 290 MM came up three years later and made $22 million, which is a useful reminder that two nearly identical cars can be ten million dollars apart on paperwork alone.

What a hall with twenty lots can take from this

Strip away the money and these are ordinary auctions. Somebody set a starting price, somebody else decided not to stop, and a clock ran out. The same three things decide what a donated weekend cottage does on a Friday night in a school hall.

Start with the story, because that is what is actually being sold. Two 290 MMs, ten million dollars apart. The difference is a name in the logbook. Your version of that is the sentence nobody thinks to write down: who donated it, why, how long they have been doing the thing, what happened the last time. A lot described as "a meal out" and a lot described as "dinner for eight cooked by Marjan, who has run the bakery for nineteen years and has never taught anyone outside the family" are not the same lot. Clubs and associations usually have a room full of that material and no habit of using it.

Then open low. That 250 GTO opened at $35 million and closed at $48.4 million. Auction houses do not open near the expected price, because a high opening bid ends the contest before anyone has warmed up. Volunteers do the opposite: they know the hamper is worth eighty, so they start it at eighty, and nothing happens. Start it at fifteen. Let the room do the work.

Then let it run, and let everyone watch it run. In a saleroom the auctioneer calls every increment aloud so bidders know exactly what it takes to stay in, and that visibility is most of the reason the price climbs. A hall gets the same effect from a code beside each lot and one screen at the front showing the current bid and the seconds left; how an evening actually runs covers what goes on that screen and what happens when a bid lands with four seconds to go.

One last thing, from the top of the list. Mercedes sold the Uhlenhaut Coupé to fund scholarships, and said so before the sale. Everybody in that room knew what the money was for. That is the one advantage you have over every professional saleroom in the world, and the running total on the screen is where it lives. If you want to see what your own twenty lots look like on a phone, you can build the whole evening and rehearse it for nothing, and the organiser's guide has the running order.

Prices as reported at the time of sale; figures include buyer's premium where stated.