Friday, November 14, 2014
The top 200 most expensive cars of all time
The numbers are in. Rare automobile collecting, once considered a pastime for only the eccentric rich, is now a legitimate wealth creation strategy. It's difficult to pinpoint the exact moment that an industry matures, but the regular publication of the Historic Automobile Group International (HAGI) index in London's Financial Times is a strong indication that the rare automobile industry is now well beyond that point.
index measures the performance of rare cars as an alternative asset class and uses the type of rigorous financial methodology usually associated with more traditional investments. The breadth of HAGI's research enables it to publish market indices on rare Porsche, Ferrari and Mercedes-Benz cars and it now tracks the entire rare car market globally. HAGI is an independent investment research house which began when a group of car enthusiasts from the financial sector decided the rare car market needed some statistical rigor, and it set out to create benchmarks which accurately tracked collectable automobile prices for the first time. HAGI publishes a monthly index for investing in rare classic motorcars, and the index is tracking much better than the S&P 500 over the last few decades. Indeed, now that other wealth creation reports have the data, it's suddenly become clear that investing in rare cars offers a better return than just about any other form of investment.
The result of the ground-breaking work done by HAGI in tracking the appreciation in value of rare cars, is that cars are now a legitimate alternative asset class which consistently provides better returns than coins, wine, stamps, art, equine bloodstock ... and most importantly shares.
Art, watches and jewellery have traditionally been where high net worth individuals indulge what the World Wealth Report terms, “investments of passion.” With the planet's population of high net worth individuals growing 9.1 percent last year, the influx of new money has not just rebounded art auction prices to pre-GFC levels, but is now pushing prices skyward for cars, coins, stamps and celebrity memorabilia as these new "commodities" have been providing better returns than the stockmarket.
What's more, collectable automobiles are now offering far better returns than almost all other asset categories, traditional or otherwise, and auction prices seemed destined to continue to rise relentlessly.
Examine the above chart and you'll see that "investments of passion" are suddenly very much in vogue for very good reason. With the rise of collectibles and legitimate indexes in each of the key areas, wealth creation is now entering new realms, and increasingly "investments of passion" are offering not just an object that appreciates in value, but one that can be appreciated every day in a more meaningful, relevant and personal way.
The HAGI Top Index is published monthly on the Financial Times website, but if you're interested in tracking the marketplace of valuable and rare cars, the company's monthly newsletter is free and it contains the most detailed information you'll get on movements in the marketplace.
Nearly all new cars markedly decrease in value for the first few years of their life. Most continue to depreciate until they are scrapped. A very small percentage of models eventually begin to appreciate in value again, and a much smaller number eventually surpass their original sale price.
Many cars disappear while they are in this depressed value state. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, a car's value is at least partially perception – many of the cars on this top 100 list have been rescued from a state of neglect that only comes from being considered worthless.
One of the top three cars on this list was discovered not in a barn, as legend says such cars are, but in a field in rural America, and it had been there so long that a tree had grown through the engine bay. Another had been abandoned on the side of the Hollywood freeway.
To get HAGI's attention, and qualify for tracking, a car has to achieve its original sale price, plus inflation. From there onwards, HAGI offers enough data for automotive investors to make informed decisions about purchases of those vehicles.
Auction results are just one of the data streams used in creating the HAGI indices. The company estimates that only 30 percent of the rare automobile market sells through auction, and it collects data on sales through private, marque specialist and dealer sales through its network to ensure a complete overview of sale price behavior.
The HAGI group runs a proprietary database encompassing in excess of 100,000 actual transactions. Entries start from the date of the cars' manufacture and are updated on a daily basis. The data is collected from four major sources: private contacts, marque specialists, dealers and auction results.
Sadly, we only have the auction data to work with because that's all that's available in the public domain. Most rare cars are sold not at auction, but very much by private sale from one cognoscenti to another, the buyer sometimes courting the seller to that end for years, sometimes decades.
HAGI principal Dietrich Hatlapa has produced a book entitled Better than Gold, which is highly recommended reading for those considering allocating a proportion of their portfolio to rare automobiles.
Gizmag has been reporting on the major happenings in the rare car and motorcycle marketplaces for more than a decade and a few months back we began compiling this list of the most valuable automobiles ever to sell at auction.
Analysis of the top one hundred most valuable cars ever sold at auction is highly illustrative of the marques which populate the stratosphere of automotive collectables, the auction houses which handle them, and the growing robustness of the automotive collectibles marketplace.
Fifty-three of the top one hundred cars ever sold at auction are Ferraris – that's 51.96 percent (there are currently 102 cars in the top 100 because numbers #100, #101 and #102 sold for the same price) – an astonishing result for a relatively small Italian company amongst thousands of other manufacturers which have produced automobiles across the last century and a quarter.
At the very top of the list, Ferrari is even more dominant, with nine (90 percent) of the top ten, 14 (70 percent) of the top 20, and 30 (60 percent) of the top 50.
Ferrari also holds the record for the most expensive car ever sold at auction: on August 14, 2014 a 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO sold at Bonham's Quail Auction for US$34,650,000 (US$38,115,000 including buyers premium).
The sale of the GTO returned the automotive auction record to Ferrari on the 26th anniversary of the death of "Il Commendatore" (Enzo Ferrari), a figure whose cars now dominate the rare car market more than they have dominated motorsport over the last eight decades.
In addition to dominating every other aspect of this top 100 analysis, Ferrari has also produced the most prominent individual model within our listing with no less than 13 California Spiders appearing in the top 100, with another just outside:
Only 106 Ferrari 250 GT California Spiders (56 of them on the short wheelbase chassis and 50 on the longer wheel base) were ever made, meaning that better than ten percent of the total production of the model have now forced themselves into the top 100. Quite some feat.
Scuderia Ferrari was founded by Enzo Ferrari in 1929, manufacturing race cars and acting as the Alfa Romeo factory racing arm prior to moving into the production of performance road cars in 1947.
From the point of view of the collector, Ferrari's low-volume production of a series of high-performance, hand-made, technically-excellent models has almost by coincidence, created a series of perfect collector cars.
In years to come the world's most expensive auction car will almost certainly be a car of extreme rarity – one of which just one or two vehicles were made or will ever appear outside a museum. Ferrari's production of just 36 Ferrari GTOs, 106 Ferrari 250 GT California Spiders, 40 Series I 250 GT Pininfarina Cabriolets and 41 Series II Cabriolets, plus a host of other landmark models in low volume make a perfect balance of desirability and scarcity. Ferrari will almost certainly dominate this list for the next century too.
Perhaps the only record Ferrari may not hold onto is the world's most valuable car at auction record, as there are many cars out there with the potential to claim that record – this list only contains those which sold at auction. For the record, Ferrari holds the first three spots on the highest price paid for a car at private sale too, with the outright most expensive car ever sold being the private sale of another GTO for US$52 million in 2013.
Mercedes-Benz is a clear second with ten cars (10 percent) in the top 100 and if the world's most desirable automobiles could be ascribed a value, Mercedes-Benz would have a lot more cars than ten in the top 100 of such a listing. That's mainly because the company has either kept or procured the actual cars which performed the prodigious feats which helped sculpt its global reputation and are hence manifestations of its illustrious heritage.
Two companies merged to form Mercedes-Benz in 1926: Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft (DMG) and Benz & Cie. Both have roots back to the very beginning of motoring and motorsport. DMG was formed by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach and even in the very beginning, it aimed high – the company's first automobile was sold in August, 1892, to the Sultan of Morocco. Similarly, Benz and Cie traces its history to Karl Benz's 1886 Benz Patent Motorwagen.
Between the two constituent companies which amalgamated, there are few points in automotive history in which one or both companies did not play a significant role, from the first internal combustion engines and the invention of the carburetor, through to success in the very first motor races in history.
One hundred years ago this year, DMG won the 1914 Grand Prix with a landmark 1-2-3 finish against a field of 39 starters from 13 different manufacturers. Though the DOHC, four-valve engine of the future was on display that day by many marques, and four wheel brakes were on many of the racing cars for the first time, the Mercedes cars which beat the all-conquering Peugeot team that day had neither – at a later date when the technologies were viable, they were introduced and used to great effect. Mercedes-Benz has a 125-year-old record of maturing bleeding-edge technologies and doing just that. Indeed, whenever Mercedes-Benz has gone racing, it has achieved absolute domination. Those who forecast that the current Formula One effort would not achieve such results were not students of history.
The subsequent domination of Grand Prix racing by the Silver Arrows on at least three occasions (just pre-WWII, the early fifties and now) means there are quite a few Mercedes Benz cars out there which can fit into the top 20 should they ever escape captivity. A case in point is Fangio's W196 Silver Arrow which slipped the Mercedes-Benz net and it auctioned for a world record price less than two years ago.
Fortunately, Mercedes-Benz has a museum which houses nearly all such historically-significant artifacts bearing the three-pointed-star and the cars are regularly displayed and demonstrated at global gatherings.
Not surprisingly for a company that has relentlessly innovated and invented many of the features which the rest of the automotive world has copied, it has produced some of the most desirable automobiles in history.
Foremost amongst this lineage is the Mercedes-Benz 540K Speziale Roadster, introduced in 1936 and produced for just a few short years until the demands of WWII required its production capacity.
The 540K Spezial Roadster has all the same hallmarks as the raft of Ferrari's limited-edition models. Only 29 were ever made, far fewer have survived to this day, and the massive, handcrafted art deco sculpture was the absolute pinnacle of automotive desirability from the moment it was introduced.
index measures the performance of rare cars as an alternative asset class and uses the type of rigorous financial methodology usually associated with more traditional investments. The breadth of HAGI's research enables it to publish market indices on rare Porsche, Ferrari and Mercedes-Benz cars and it now tracks the entire rare car market globally. HAGI is an independent investment research house which began when a group of car enthusiasts from the financial sector decided the rare car market needed some statistical rigor, and it set out to create benchmarks which accurately tracked collectable automobile prices for the first time. HAGI publishes a monthly index for investing in rare classic motorcars, and the index is tracking much better than the S&P 500 over the last few decades. Indeed, now that other wealth creation reports have the data, it's suddenly become clear that investing in rare cars offers a better return than just about any other form of investment.
The result of the ground-breaking work done by HAGI in tracking the appreciation in value of rare cars, is that cars are now a legitimate alternative asset class which consistently provides better returns than coins, wine, stamps, art, equine bloodstock ... and most importantly shares.
Art, watches and jewellery have traditionally been where high net worth individuals indulge what the World Wealth Report terms, “investments of passion.” With the planet's population of high net worth individuals growing 9.1 percent last year, the influx of new money has not just rebounded art auction prices to pre-GFC levels, but is now pushing prices skyward for cars, coins, stamps and celebrity memorabilia as these new "commodities" have been providing better returns than the stockmarket.
What's more, collectable automobiles are now offering far better returns than almost all other asset categories, traditional or otherwise, and auction prices seemed destined to continue to rise relentlessly.
Knight Frank's annual Wealth Report has now introduced the Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index (KFLII) which combines the performance of nine luxury assets including art, classic cars, watches and stamps, into one composite index. The KFLII showed growth of 8% in the last 12 months and 179% over a 10-year period, outperforming many more mainstream investments such as the FTSE 100. Overall, the classic car category (as tracked by HAGI) has shown the strongest one-year, five-year and 10-year performance. That's the cars second from right.
Examine the above chart and you'll see that "investments of passion" are suddenly very much in vogue for very good reason. With the rise of collectibles and legitimate indexes in each of the key areas, wealth creation is now entering new realms, and increasingly "investments of passion" are offering not just an object that appreciates in value, but one that can be appreciated every day in a more meaningful, relevant and personal way.
The HAGI Top Index is published monthly on the Financial Times website, but if you're interested in tracking the marketplace of valuable and rare cars, the company's monthly newsletter is free and it contains the most detailed information you'll get on movements in the marketplace.
The collectible car lifecycle
Nearly all new cars markedly decrease in value for the first few years of their life. Most continue to depreciate until they are scrapped. A very small percentage of models eventually begin to appreciate in value again, and a much smaller number eventually surpass their original sale price.
This 1929 'Blower' Bentley took the Brooklands outer circuit lap record in 1931, was owned by the famous horseracing and motorsport identity Dorothy Paget, and was campaigned by the diminutive Bentley-driving Baronet, Sir Henry 'Tim' Birkin. It nonetheless fell on hard times before its true worth was recognised when it sold for GBP 5,041,500 (US$7,906,745) at Goodwood in 2011.
Many cars disappear while they are in this depressed value state. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, a car's value is at least partially perception – many of the cars on this top 100 list have been rescued from a state of neglect that only comes from being considered worthless.
One of the top three cars on this list was discovered not in a barn, as legend says such cars are, but in a field in rural America, and it had been there so long that a tree had grown through the engine bay. Another had been abandoned on the side of the Hollywood freeway.
This 4.9-litre V12 Ferrari 375-Plus ran second in the Mille Miglia, yet subsequently fell into disuse and half-forgotten neglect, the engine and key parts were separated, before the chassis and body were stolen and became the focus of a decades-long international legal dispute. Mediation by Bonhams eventually reunited all the parts and enabled the car to be restored and sold in its original condition for GBP10,753,500 (US$16,380,895), claiming a place in the top 10 most valuable cars ever sold at auction.
To get HAGI's attention, and qualify for tracking, a car has to achieve its original sale price, plus inflation. From there onwards, HAGI offers enough data for automotive investors to make informed decisions about purchases of those vehicles.
Auction results are just one of the data streams used in creating the HAGI indices. The company estimates that only 30 percent of the rare automobile market sells through auction, and it collects data on sales through private, marque specialist and dealer sales through its network to ensure a complete overview of sale price behavior.
The HAGI group runs a proprietary database encompassing in excess of 100,000 actual transactions. Entries start from the date of the cars' manufacture and are updated on a daily basis. The data is collected from four major sources: private contacts, marque specialists, dealers and auction results.
Sadly, we only have the auction data to work with because that's all that's available in the public domain. Most rare cars are sold not at auction, but very much by private sale from one cognoscenti to another, the buyer sometimes courting the seller to that end for years, sometimes decades.
HAGI principal Dietrich Hatlapa has produced a book entitled Better than Gold, which is highly recommended reading for those considering allocating a proportion of their portfolio to rare automobiles.
Gizmag has been reporting on the major happenings in the rare car and motorcycle marketplaces for more than a decade and a few months back we began compiling this list of the most valuable automobiles ever to sell at auction.
Analysis of the top one hundred most valuable cars ever sold at auction is highly illustrative of the marques which populate the stratosphere of automotive collectables, the auction houses which handle them, and the growing robustness of the automotive collectibles marketplace.
The leading Marques – Ferrari dominates
Fifty-three of the top one hundred cars ever sold at auction are Ferraris – that's 51.96 percent (there are currently 102 cars in the top 100 because numbers #100, #101 and #102 sold for the same price) – an astonishing result for a relatively small Italian company amongst thousands of other manufacturers which have produced automobiles across the last century and a quarter.
At the very top of the list, Ferrari is even more dominant, with nine (90 percent) of the top ten, 14 (70 percent) of the top 20, and 30 (60 percent) of the top 50.
Ferrari also holds the record for the most expensive car ever sold at auction: on August 14, 2014 a 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO sold at Bonham's Quail Auction for US$34,650,000 (US$38,115,000 including buyers premium).
The sale of the GTO returned the automotive auction record to Ferrari on the 26th anniversary of the death of "Il Commendatore" (Enzo Ferrari), a figure whose cars now dominate the rare car market more than they have dominated motorsport over the last eight decades.
The most prominent model: 13 Ferrari 250 GT California Spiders in the top 100
In addition to dominating every other aspect of this top 100 analysis, Ferrari has also produced the most prominent individual model within our listing with no less than 13 California Spiders appearing in the top 100, with another just outside:
Only 106 Ferrari 250 GT California Spiders (56 of them on the short wheelbase chassis and 50 on the longer wheel base) were ever made, meaning that better than ten percent of the total production of the model have now forced themselves into the top 100. Quite some feat.
Scuderia Ferrari was founded by Enzo Ferrari in 1929, manufacturing race cars and acting as the Alfa Romeo factory racing arm prior to moving into the production of performance road cars in 1947.
From the point of view of the collector, Ferrari's low-volume production of a series of high-performance, hand-made, technically-excellent models has almost by coincidence, created a series of perfect collector cars.
In years to come the world's most expensive auction car will almost certainly be a car of extreme rarity – one of which just one or two vehicles were made or will ever appear outside a museum. Ferrari's production of just 36 Ferrari GTOs, 106 Ferrari 250 GT California Spiders, 40 Series I 250 GT Pininfarina Cabriolets and 41 Series II Cabriolets, plus a host of other landmark models in low volume make a perfect balance of desirability and scarcity. Ferrari will almost certainly dominate this list for the next century too.
Perhaps the only record Ferrari may not hold onto is the world's most valuable car at auction record, as there are many cars out there with the potential to claim that record – this list only contains those which sold at auction. For the record, Ferrari holds the first three spots on the highest price paid for a car at private sale too, with the outright most expensive car ever sold being the private sale of another GTO for US$52 million in 2013.
Mercedes-Benz a clear second
Mercedes-Benz is a clear second with ten cars (10 percent) in the top 100 and if the world's most desirable automobiles could be ascribed a value, Mercedes-Benz would have a lot more cars than ten in the top 100 of such a listing. That's mainly because the company has either kept or procured the actual cars which performed the prodigious feats which helped sculpt its global reputation and are hence manifestations of its illustrious heritage.
Two companies merged to form Mercedes-Benz in 1926: Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft (DMG) and Benz & Cie. Both have roots back to the very beginning of motoring and motorsport. DMG was formed by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach and even in the very beginning, it aimed high – the company's first automobile was sold in August, 1892, to the Sultan of Morocco. Similarly, Benz and Cie traces its history to Karl Benz's 1886 Benz Patent Motorwagen.
Between the two constituent companies which amalgamated, there are few points in automotive history in which one or both companies did not play a significant role, from the first internal combustion engines and the invention of the carburetor, through to success in the very first motor races in history.
One hundred years ago this year, DMG won the 1914 Grand Prix with a landmark 1-2-3 finish against a field of 39 starters from 13 different manufacturers. Though the DOHC, four-valve engine of the future was on display that day by many marques, and four wheel brakes were on many of the racing cars for the first time, the Mercedes cars which beat the all-conquering Peugeot team that day had neither – at a later date when the technologies were viable, they were introduced and used to great effect. Mercedes-Benz has a 125-year-old record of maturing bleeding-edge technologies and doing just that. Indeed, whenever Mercedes-Benz has gone racing, it has achieved absolute domination. Those who forecast that the current Formula One effort would not achieve such results were not students of history.
The subsequent domination of Grand Prix racing by the Silver Arrows on at least three occasions (just pre-WWII, the early fifties and now) means there are quite a few Mercedes Benz cars out there which can fit into the top 20 should they ever escape captivity. A case in point is Fangio's W196 Silver Arrow which slipped the Mercedes-Benz net and it auctioned for a world record price less than two years ago.
Fortunately, Mercedes-Benz has a museum which houses nearly all such historically-significant artifacts bearing the three-pointed-star and the cars are regularly displayed and demonstrated at global gatherings.
Not surprisingly for a company that has relentlessly innovated and invented many of the features which the rest of the automotive world has copied, it has produced some of the most desirable automobiles in history.
Foremost amongst this lineage is the Mercedes-Benz 540K Speziale Roadster, introduced in 1936 and produced for just a few short years until the demands of WWII required its production capacity.
The 540K Spezial Roadster has all the same hallmarks as the raft of Ferrari's limited-edition models. Only 29 were ever made, far fewer have survived to this day, and the massive, handcrafted art deco sculpture was the absolute pinnacle of automotive desirability from the moment it was introduced.
20 Snowy Retreats You’ll Want To Spend The Holidays
With the holidays coming in hot, it’s not a bad idea to find a cool place to rent out on AirBnB for a few days while enjoying the Thanksgiving/Christmas/etc cheer with family and friends. Even those these places aren’t currently available, let them be your inspiration for something with similar style.
1.) First up, we have the unreal Chalet C7 cabin by Nicolás del Rio and Max Núñes.
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3.) The more traditional Chalet Pearl, which is a beautiful ski lodge…
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4.) This one in Washington designed by DeForest Architects nails the modern look
1.) First up, we have the unreal Chalet C7 cabin by Nicolás del Rio and Max Núñes.
3.) The more traditional Chalet Pearl, which is a beautiful ski lodge…
4.) This one in Washington designed by DeForest Architects nails the modern look
Trans-Allegheny Lunatic AsylumWeston, West Virginia
Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum
Weston, West Virginia
These Facts Will Get Your Brain Going (35 pics)
Facts are like coffee for your brain. Give your brain some coffee.
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