It’s not enough money. The car is listed as “Still for Sale” on the RM Sotheby’s online auction catalog.
The Type 64 was far from the only rough sale during a weekend where gross totals through Friday were down about 25%, or about $50 million, from 2018, according to Hagerty. Across the board, while there were 16 more cars offered for the first two days of auctions in 2019, almost 30 fewer cars were sold. The average sale price was $75,000 less than last year. Insiders at RM Sotheby’s described the current market as “a bloodbath.”
The top seller on Friday, a McLaren F1 expected to sell for as much as $23 million, took just over $19 million during the RM Sotheby’s auction that night.
But the Type 64 was the most white-hot of the lot, with noted collectors and Porsche bigwigs discussing its veracity in hushed tones for weeks before the sale. Rather than its UFO looks or its astronomical asking price, it was the name of the car that caused all the hubbub.
Some observers, led by the terminology in RM Sotheby’s own auction catalog, called the silver coupe a true Porsche. After all, it was made by Ferdinand Porsche himself; he even added his name to the front of it about a decade after he made it. And with its round headlights and small rounded hood and roofline, it clearly bears signs of early design philosophies that trickled down to the car that is widely accepted to be the first Porsche, the 1948 356 Gmünd Coupe, and later Porsches like the 911 and Cayman.
Others, including the man who inspected the car for RM Sotheby’s before it went to sale, were careful to note that the Type 64 is not technically a “Porsche.” Its engine and most of its parts were supplied by Volkswagen, with components from Fiat and other niche suppliers of the time. Ferdinand Porsche was building cars for just about everyone in Germany at the time anyway, including Daimler and Auto Union. Porsche AG wasn’t even founded until 1948—10 years after this car was built—so it surely isn’t accurate to call it a true Porsche, the line of thinking goes.
Porsche AG and the Porsche Museum were careful to distance themselves from the sale, declining for weeks to comment to Bloomberg on its nomenclature and relative significance to the Porsche company story. What remains to be seen is what happens to the car next—and how RM Sotheby’s will recover from the debacle.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.