History was made at Monterey Car Week a few days ago when a brand new Ferrari Luce ‘Tailor Made’ sold for a whopping $40m, yes, forty MEELLEEEEYON dollars. This makes it the highest price paid for a new car, ever. At the same event a McLaren F1 GTR once owned by rocker Nick Mason sold for a record-breaking $34,65m, so it was, seemingly, a good day to sell a car. However, those figures pale in comparison to the most expensive car ever sold.
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Exceeding expectations
Ferrari bosses said that they were expecting the customised Luce to sell for about $5m. But the new owner had different ideas. The first example of Ferrari’s first-ever EV was bought by Herbert ‘Herbie’ Wertheim. It should go without saying that the 87-year-old American is a billionaire. He made his name as a pioneer in Ophthalmology, ramping up his wealth by being an early investor in Apple and Microsoft. The entire purchase price of the car will go to Ferrari’s educational fund.
Crunching numbers
$40m is a serious chunk of change regardless of where you are reading this in the world. Just out of interest, that is about R640m by the current exchange rate, and we rounded that figure down. We got to thinking: what else can one get for that kind of money. There are plenty of things really: houses in exotic locales, helicopters and the like. But since this is a motoring website, we’ll stick to cars.
We looked online at some car dealerships that specialise in exotics as well the price of some new hyper- and supercars. You can get ALL the cars listed below and still have about a million dollars left over. We chose the most expensive car (on sale) from different manufacturers.
| 2006 Carrera GT | $3 000 000 |
| 2025 Bugatti Mistral | $9 300 000 |
| 2023 Jesko Attack | $5 718 000 |
| 2026 Rolls Royce Cullinan Black Badge | $700 000 |
| 2023 AMG One | $3 675 000 |
| 2024 Pininfarina Battista | $2 995 000 |
| 2020 Ford GT | $1 075 000 |
| 2024 Lamborghini Reveulto | $667 000 |
| 2026 Aston Martin Valhalla | $1 565 000 |
| 2026 McLaren W1 | $2 100 000 |
| 2026 Ferrari F80 | $3 100 000 |
| 2026 Pagani Utopia | $2 200 000 |
More local
That list is pretty darn impressive. But even those cars are pretty esoteric to most people. So we went one further and decided to find out how many examples of the most expensive models available in South Africa you can get for the same money. These numbers are quite ridiculous. Imagine having a different Ferrari Purosangue for every week in the year. Or starting a race series of just Lamborghini Revueltos? The numbers are just crazy.
| Bentley Continental Cabriolet | 110 |
| BMW XM | 174 |
| Ferrari Purosangue | 54 |
| Lamborghini Revuelto | 50 |
| Mercedes-AMG G-Wagen | 142 |
| Porsche 911 Turbo S Cabriolet | 108 |
| VW Polo GTI | 1 094 |
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