The world's most expensive car collections: who built them and what they are worth

On 5 May 2022 an auction was held at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, open by invitation only. There was a single lot: a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé. Bidding started at 50 million euros and ended at 135 million. No car has sold for more at auction, before or since.

That is the price of one car from the Mercedes collection, which holds more than 1,100 vehicles. What large collections are worth as a whole is rarely known: owners seldom disclose how many cars they have or what they paid. This article looks at the world's most expensive car collections — private ones, museum collections and those owned by companies — how they are valued, and what they fetched when they were sold.

How a car collection is valued

The value of a collection is the sum of the prices of its cars. Each car is compared with similar cars sold at auction in recent years. Two cars of the same model can still be worth very different amounts, because the buyer also pays for the history of the particular car: who drove it, which races it entered, whether it still has its original body and engine.

Take the Ferrari 250 GTO. Thirty-six were made, and between 2014 and 2026 they sold at auction for between 38.1 and 51.7 million dollars. The highest price was paid for the only 250 GTO raced by the works Scuderia Ferrari team. In a private deal in 2018, according to press reports, a buyer paid even more — 70 million dollars for the car that won the 1964 Tour de France Automobile.

Collectors almost never disclose totals. The only regular ranking of private collections is compiled by the American organisation The Classic Car Trust. Half of the points go for the value of the cars, half for their historical importance and concours awards, but the ranking does not publish the sums. In 2021 first place went to the Mexican collector Arturo Keller, a three-time Best of Show winner at Pebble Beach, second to the Louwman Museum in the Netherlands, and third to Ralph Lauren.

An exact figure is known only once a collection has been sold. Sometimes its contents come out in court papers — as happened with the cars of Prince Jefri.

Brunei: the cars a prince returned to the state

Prince Jefri Bolkiah is the younger brother of the Sultan of Brunei. In 1983 the sultan put him in charge of the Brunei Investment Agency, the state agency where the country's oil revenues are held and invested. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s Jefri was also finance minister. At the same time he owned his own company, Amedeo, which built roads, bridges, power stations and hotels in Brunei and abroad.

In 1998, during the Asian financial crisis, the sultan sent 200 forensic accountants to examine the agency. By their count, over 15 years 40 billion dollars had been drawn from its accounts as "special transfers". Of that, 14.8 billion had gone to or been spent by Jefri himself and 8 billion by the sultan; where another 13.5 billion went could not be established.

In February 2000 a lawsuit for misappropriation was filed in a Brunei court on behalf of the agency against Jefri and members of his family. Soldiers searched the prince's palace and his passport was taken away. He got it back only after he signed a settlement in May 2000 and undertook to return assets to the state.

…over 600 properties, over 2,000 cars, over 100 paintings, 5 boats and 9 aircraft.

the 2000 settlement, quoted by Vanity Fair

After the settlement some of the cars were put up for sale. In early 2002 a Brunei importer offered the classic Ferrari dealer Michael Sheehan 13 cars from the prince's collection. Sheehan agreed to buy four of them for clients, including two McLaren F1s, and in May he flew to Brunei. The cars were kept behind a high wall under guard, in eight two-storey buildings with about 120 cars on each floor. According to Sheehan, the mechanics had left in 1998, the air conditioning was off, and not a single car was in running order.

The lesser cars were beyond saving. None had been started in five years.

Michael Sheehan, Ferraris Online

The prince was in no hurry to carry out the settlement in full, and the agency's lawyers fought him in court for years to recover the rest of the assets. In 2005 Jefri's sons were ordered to vacate their palaces, and the prince sent his lawyers Thomas Derbyshire and Faith Zaman to Brunei to remove the belongings he still had there. By Vanity Fair's count there were about 2,300 cars. Many had barely been driven and had been kept in buildings where the air conditioning had been switched off.

All had been built individually, where you open the door and along the running board it says, BUILT BY ROLLS-ROYCE FOR HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS PRINCE JEFRI, and you look at the odometer and it would be four miles. The rubber around the windows had melted in the heat.

Thomas Derbyshire, Vanity Fair

In 2025 the photographer Larry Chen was making a film about the Brunei collection for Hagerty, an American company that insures collector cars. Chen met Prince Jefri and asked permission to see the collection. According to Chen, the prince joked that he himself had not seen his cars in many years and sent him to his secretary for permission. Chen was never let inside; he filmed only the entrance to the storage compound, which is guarded by the military.

What goes on inside, Chen describes in the film from sources he does not name, calling it "firsthand information". According to it, the buildings are now air-conditioned, a crew of 20 maintains the collection, and during the pandemic the cars were driven on the empty roads.

The figure most often quoted for the Brunei collection is "7,000 cars worth more than 5 billion dollars". The Wikipedia article gives the car blog HotCars as the source, and the Brunei authorities have never published an inventory. In 2023, on the YouTube channel VINwiki, the blogger Ed Bolian and two collector-car dealers valued the cars that can be seen in photographs of the collection. One of the dealers arrived at a sum six times lower than the one repeated online.

When I added all the numbers up, I got to about $800 million for the entire collection… Some of the estimates go well into the billions. You know, who knows — if the cars are really rotting in a rainforest, that's probably a lot softer than that.

VINwiki, 2023

Mercedes-Benz sold a car from its own collection

The Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé was built in 1955 in two examples by the company's racing department. It is named after chief engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut, who used one of them as his company car. Both spent decades in the Mercedes collection.

The Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé at the company museum in Stuttgart. Photo: Alexander Migl, Wikimedia Commons

Until May 2022 the most expensive car sold at auction was a Ferrari 250 GTO, which fetched 48.4 million dollars in 2018. The 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé sold for almost three times as much. The sale was run by RM Sotheby's, and the buyer's name was not disclosed.

The company decided to sell the car in order to set up the Mercedes-Benz Fund with the proceeds. The fund pays scholarships to university and school students working on research in environmental science and emissions reduction.

The decision to sell one of these two unique sports cars was taken with very sound reasoning – to benefit a good cause. The proceeds from the auction will fund a global scholarship program.

Ola Källenius, CEO of Mercedes-Benz Group

The car sold at auction can still be seen: under the terms of the sale, the buyer must put it on public display from time to time. The second 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé stayed with Mercedes and is still on show at the company museum in Stuttgart.

The sale at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway in the United States is best known for the Indianapolis 500, a race held since 1911. The speedway has a museum, and over the decades its collection acquired cars that have nothing to do with the race. One of them, the streamlined Mercedes-Benz W 196 R raced by Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss, was given to the museum by Mercedes on 30 May 1965.

In August 2024, ahead of a renovation of the building, the museum's management announced that it would sell 11 such cars. Besides the Mercedes they included a 1964 Ferrari 250 LM, a 1966 Ford GT40 Mk II, a 1928 Bugatti Type 35B and Spirit of America, a car used to set land speed records. The museum's president, Joe Hale, explained the decision:

They have no connection to the 500, they never ran here. There's just no connection to our mission.

Joe Hale, president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, WRTV

The management decided to put the proceeds in the bank and spend only the interest.

If we can have that kind of funding in the bank, the interest income alone is going to allow us to buy new things for our collection, take care of our restoration staff, and take care of our cars.

Joe Hale, WRTV

The 11 cars raised 123.6 million dollars in 2025. The Mercedes-Benz W 196 R was sold in February 2025 in Stuttgart, in the same hall where the 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé had been sold three years earlier, for 51.155 million euros. At that point only the 300 SLR had sold for more at auction. In April 2025 the museum's collection gained 14 cars from the Chip Ganassi Racing team, including five Indianapolis 500 winners.

The Schlumpf brothers: how a private collection became France's national museum

In 1935 Hans and Fritz Schlumpf founded a wool trading company in Alsace, and over time they bought up several textile mills in eastern France. Fritz bought his first Bugatti that same year, and from the late 1950s the brothers began collecting cars in earnest. One of their mills in Mulhouse was shut down, and the collection was installed in its workshops. The cars were bought with company money and shown to no one.

In the 1970s a crisis hit the French textile industry, and the brothers' company went under. In 1976 they sold the mills for a symbolic franc, the company filed for bankruptcy, and the workers were laid off. In February 1977 a French court issued a warrant for the brothers' arrest, but they had already left for Switzerland, of which they were citizens.

On 7 March 1977 former workers broke into the Mulhouse mill and found more than 560 cars there, 123 of them Bugattis. The workers occupied the building and for two years showed the cars to visitors themselves.

A hall of the Cité de l'Automobile in Mulhouse. Photo: questa_ta, Wikimedia Commons

To keep the collection from being sold off piecemeal, in 1978 the French authorities listed more than 400 of the cars as historic monuments. In 1981 a court authorised the sale of the collection, together with the land and buildings, to an association made up of the city of Mulhouse, the département, the region and the chamber of commerce. The association paid 69 million francs, and the collection became France's National Automobile Museum. Today it is called the Cité de l'Automobile, and it holds two of the six Bugatti Royales ever made, including Ettore Bugatti's personal car, plus a replica of a third built to the brothers' order.

In 1983 the brothers were sentenced in absentia to two and four years in prison for fraudulent bankruptcy and embezzlement. Swiss law does not allow the country's citizens to be extradited, and the brothers lived out their lives in Basel: Hans died in 1989, Fritz in 1992.

Collectors who drive their cars

Jay Leno

Jay Leno is an American TV host who presented The Tonight Show for more than twenty years. In 2018 he told Money magazine that he had "about 181 cars, and about 160 motorcycles".

Jay Leno in his garage during filming of Jay Leno's Garage. Photo: U.S. Army Materiel Command, Wikimedia Commons

The best-known car in the collection is a 1994 McLaren F1. Leno bought it second-hand for 800,000 dollars. In 2015 he was offered 12 million for it, in 2024 — 20 million.

I never bought a car as an investment in my life… If I have to sell the car, that means I already lost our home.

Jay Leno, CNBC

The VINwiki appraisers drew up a list of 185 of Leno's cars, and the three hosts named three totals: 83, 90 and 100 million dollars. By their reckoning, Leno paid 10–15 million for those cars.

Ralph Lauren

Ralph Lauren is an American fashion designer and the founder of the Ralph Lauren company. Lauren does not say how many cars he owns. In 2022 the VINwiki appraisers counted 55 cars that are publicly known, added up their prices and arrived at 610 to 700 million dollars. In their view it is the most valuable private collection in the United States.

The centrepiece of the collection is a 1938 Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic, one of two surviving in original form. In 1990 Lauren won Best of Show at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance with it. Jay Leno, who owns a replica of the model, calls Lauren's car the best in the world.

Ralph Lauren's Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic at the Concorso d'Eleganza Villa d'Este in Italy, 2013. Photo: Classic Virus, Wikimedia Commons

Lauren does not regard his cars as museum pieces. In April 2024, presenting Modern Driver, a furniture collection inspired by his cars, he told WWD:

I'm driving, it's not dead. In art, they're dead off the wall. You can drive, you can hear the sound, you look at the beauty of it.

Ralph Lauren, WWD, April 2024

Nick Mason

Nick Mason is the drummer of Pink Floyd. In the late 1970s he bought a Ferrari 250 GTO, one of the 36 made, and paid 35,000 pounds for it.

Nick Mason's Ferrari 250 GTO at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, 2021. Photo: Andrew Basterfield, Wikimedia Commons

People who pay a lot of money for a car have one thing in common — they all feel complete idiots, no matter how rich they are. When I paid £35,000 for the 250 GTO in 1977, I felt naggingly stupid to be spending so much — I certainly didn't buy it because I thought it would be worth £30m in 2016.

Nick Mason, The Sunday Times

At auction in 2018 another 250 GTO sold for 48.4 million dollars, and in a private deal the same year, according to press reports, one more sold for 70 million. Mason has not sold his car, and in an interview with Octane he called it part of the family.

Collections sold in their entirety

The table shows the largest sales of single-owner collections. Totals include the auction house premium.

The Bachman collection was sold in January 2026 with no reserve: every car went to the last bid, whatever it was. A yellow 2003 Ferrari Enzo sold for 17.8 million dollars.

The cars of the French businessman Roger Baillon stood for almost forty years under corrugated iron shelters and in sheds in western France until specialists from the auction house Artcurial found them. A Ferrari 250 GT California Spider from the collection, once driven by the actor Alain Delon, sold in 2015 for 16.3 million euros.

Celebrity collections do not always rise in value either. In 2016 the comedian Jerry Seinfeld put 18 cars — 16 Porsches and two Volkswagens — up for auction at Gooding. Seventeen of them sold for 22.2 million dollars, although before the sale Forbes had reported an expected 28–32 million.

I've never bought a car as an investment. I don't really even think of myself as a collector. I just love cars.

Jerry Seinfeld, Gooding & Company

Records of 2026 and prices for everything else

In August 2026 the auctions in Monterey, California, sold cars worth 755.6 million dollars. By Hagerty's count that is 60% more than the previous record, set in 2022. A 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe, which Carroll Shelby himself drove from 1975 to 1998, sold for 42.9 million dollars, making it the most expensive American car ever sold at auction. The first example of the new electric Ferrari Luce sold for 40 million dollars, but it was a charity lot: all the money went to the Ferrari Foundation.

The table shows the most expensive cars sold at auction.

A Ferrari 250 GTO at the RM Sotheby's auction in Monterey in 2018. This car sold for 48.4 million dollars. Photo: Prova MO, Wikimedia Commons

Other collector cars, meanwhile, are getting cheaper. Hagerty calculates an index of the collector car market on a scale of 0 to 100. In January 2026 its value was 58.28 — the lowest in almost 15 years — and before that it had fallen in 37 of 43 months. Only 35.2% of cars sold privately went for more than the amount they were insured for.

The real estate consultancy Knight Frank publishes an annual index of luxury goods as investments. In it, classic cars rose 25% in 2022, fell 6% in 2023 and gained 1.2% in 2024. The report describes 2025 as "a subdued year for classic cars".

What it costs to keep a collection

The British journalist Harry Metcalfe, founder of evo magazine, added up the costs of his collection for the year in December 2025. His cars covered 12,994 miles over the year. Servicing, repairs and tyres cost 30,270 pounds, and insurance another 9,572. The 1970s cars were the cheapest to run, the modern McLaren and Jaguars the most expensive.

I cannot get over how cheap it is to insure 70s cars… It's the modern cars… they're the ones that really cost to insure.

Harry Metcalfe, Harry's Garage

In 2014 a Hagerty representative put the insurance on a Ferrari 250 GTO worth 38.1 million dollars at 40,000–80,000 dollars a year. The median annual household income in the United States at the time, according to Insurance Journal, was 53,000 dollars.

In the UK the owner of such a car has a tax advantage. Under the Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act 1992 a private passenger car is not a chargeable asset, so no tax is paid on the profit from selling it. For the same reason a loss on the sale cannot be deducted. Racing cars and single-seaters are not covered by the rule.

Collections in the former Soviet Union

Outside Moscow there is the private Vadim Zadorozhny Technical Museum, with more than a thousand exhibits, about 150 of them vintage cars. Forbes journalists asked Zadorozhny whether he had thought of selling the cars. "How can you sell what you collect? It's a simple question, and I'll answer it simply: no," he said. He bought Soviet cars for the museum, he says, in Georgia, Azerbaijan and Central Asia.

Покупал в Республике… в Грузии, Азербайджане, Таджикистане, Узбекистане, то есть в тех регионах, более тёплых, где жили более богатые люди. Они приобретали эти машины, особенно Грузия, Армения, в семидесятые-восьмидесятые годы.

I bought them in the republics… in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, the warmer regions, where wealthier people lived. They bought these cars, especially in Georgia and Armenia, in the seventies and eighties.

Vadim Zadorozhny, Forbes

Tbilisi has a private museum too: the collector Giorgi Mamulashvili opened it in 2014. It has about fifty cars, mostly Soviet, including a Chaika from Eduard Shevardnadze's official fleet. More about the museum in the article on classic cars in Georgia.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most expensive car in the world? The highest auction price is 135 million euros for a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé in May 2022. Among private deals, the figure most often cited is 70 million dollars for a Ferrari 250 GTO in 2018, but the parties have never officially confirmed it.

How many cars does the Sultan of Brunei have? There is no exact number; the Brunei authorities have never published an inventory of the collection. The figure of 7,000 cars is repeated by blogs. What is documented is that in 2000 the sultan's younger brother, Prince Jefri, undertook in a settlement to return more than 2,000 cars to the state.

Who has the most expensive car collection? No private collection has an official valuation. The highest estimate went to Ralph Lauren's collection: the appraisers on the VINwiki YouTube channel put it at 610 to 700 million dollars. Among companies, Mercedes-Benz stands out: its private collection holds more than 1,100 cars, and one of them sold for a record 135 million euros.

How much is Jay Leno's collection worth? Leno does not name a figure. The VINwiki appraisers counted 185 cars in his garage and valued them at 83–100 million dollars.

Is it worth investing in collector cars? It depends on the car and when it was bought. Unique cars fetched record sums in 2025–2026, while prices for other collector cars have been falling since the summer of 2022: in January 2026 the Hagerty index was at its lowest in almost 15 years. The collectors in this article — Leno, Lauren and Seinfeld — say they did not buy their cars for the money.

Where can you see large car collections? The Schlumpf collection is on display at the Cité de l'Automobile in Mulhouse, France, and the Mercedes collection at the company museum in Stuttgart. The Louwman Museum in The Hague has more than 275 cars, the Vault of the Petersen Museum in Los Angeles more than 300, and the Prince of Monaco's collection about a hundred.

Can you rent a supercar in Tbilisi? Yes, the AutoHub fleet includes a Ferrari 296 GTB, a Porsche 911 Turbo S and a Mercedes-Maybach S-Class. The cars from the collections described in this article are not available for rent.

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The Tbilisi fleet includes a Ferrari 296 GTB, a Porsche 911 Turbo S, a Mercedes-Maybach S-Class and a G-Class Brabus 800. The car is brought to you anywhere in Tbilisi in about half an hour; terms are on the delivery page. Where to take a sports car is covered in the article on routes in Batumi.

The concierge answers on WhatsApp and Telegram at +995 557 437 034 and by email at concierge@autohub.ge. Name the model and dates; documents and deposit are checked before delivery.

Cover photo: a hall of the Cité de l'Automobile in Mulhouse, home of the Schlumpf collection. Dontpanic, Wikimedia Commons