Eat your heart out!
It is not an everyday occurrance, but it sure keeps the dreams of collectors percolating! In a remote location in France, not too far from Paris, observant people in the business found a total of 60 antique luxury cars just rusting away, many of them totally exposed to the elements, others in warehouses, but also not protected in any special manner from decay. The story is three generations long, but the short version is that the granddaughter of the original owner contacted an expert about the purchase of one vehicle in particular. During the conversation, she mentioned that there were more cars scattered around the castle and the village! One thing led to another and a total of 60 vehicles were discovered in various stages of decay.
Here’s the video. “Friday” as refered to in the video was last Friday, the 6th of February. Too late to join the auction, even if you had time to get to Paris and had the money! The sellers were hoping to achieve above €20 million for the total collection, and the buyers topped that at $28.5 million! Sorry that I cannot embed the video, you will have to click the link to watch the “news” and click on your browser’s “back” button to return to David’s Birthday dot com when you have finished watching …
If you are interested in the actual sale results, you can find them here: 2015 Artcurial Paris Retromobile Auction Results and read or download here 2015 Artcurial Paris Retromobile Auction Report in pdf format. 59 of the 60 vehicles found were sold – the one vehicle that was omitted from the sale was a 1936 Panhard-Levassor Dynamic X76 coupé junior that was preempted by a French museum, the Musée de l’automobile de Compiègne for historical reasons. The lead vehicle, a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT SWB California Spider, sold at US$ 18.5 million, a world record for the vehicle and also a record sale for the auction company.
1 If this link no longer works, click here, when the video is finished, click the “back” button on your browser to return to David’s Birthday dot com.
