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    "headline": "Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé, one of two built in 1955, is still the most expensive car ever sold",
    "description": "The 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé sold for €135 million in May 2022, making it the most expensive car ever sold at auction or privately.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-14T07:12:00+00:00",
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    "keywords": "Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, Mercedes-Benz Museum, Rudolf Uhlenhaut, Stirling Moss",
    "articleBody": "The most expensive car ever sold is a 1955 Mercedes-Benz that its own designer used as a company car. The 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé went for €135 million, about $142 million, in May 2022, and nothing on four wheels has topped it since. Only two were ever built. One stays at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. The other is the one that sold, through RM Sotheby’s, to an unnamed private collector at that same museum on May 5, 2022. A race car with gull-wing doors The 300 SLR started as a pure racer for the 1955 World Sportscar Championship. Underneath it borrowed from Mercedes’ championship Formula One car, with a 3-liter straight-eight engine fed by direct fuel injection. SLR stood for Sport, Leicht, Rennen: sport, light, racing. It won almost everything it entered. Stirling Moss drove one to victory at the 1955 Mille Miglia, setting the event record at an average of nearly 98 mph over about 990 miles, with Juan Manuel Fangio second in a sister car. Moss later called the 300 SLR “The greatest sports racing car ever built – really an unbelievable machine.” Mercedes built nine chassis. Seven became open roadsters. Two were turned into closed coupés with gull-wing doors, meant for the Carrera Panamericana road race in Mexico. Why the coupé never raced That plan died in June 1955, when a 300 SLR was caught up in the crash at Le Mans that killed driver Pierre Levegh and 83 spectators, still the deadliest accident in motorsport history. The Carrera Panamericana was cancelled over safety concerns, and Mercedes, which had already planned to quit, left top-level racing at the end of the season for three decades. That left two finished racing coupés with nowhere to race. Rudolf Uhlenhaut, the engineer who designed the 300 SLR, took one as his personal car, adding a muffler roughly the size of a large suitcase to tame its nearly unsilenced exhaust. Hence the name. With a top speed near 180 mph, it was the fastest road car in the world in its day. A story still circulates that Uhlenhaut, late for a meeting, drove the roughly 137 miles from Munich to Stuttgart in just over an hour, a trip that takes about two and a half hours today. The price, put in perspective The 2022 sale nearly doubled the previous record, about $75 million paid for a Ferrari 250 GTO. At $142 million, the Uhlenhaut Coupé fetched about 1.9 times as much. The coupé weighs 1,117 kilograms. Divide €135 million by that, and every kilogram of the car sold for roughly €121,000. Mercedes put the proceeds into a new Mercedes-Benz Fund rather than keeping them. The car’s influence outlived it. The Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren grand tourer, built with McLaren from 2003 until early 2010, was styled as a tribute to the Uhlenhaut Coupé. Records with a long backstory are something of a theme for us, from the SS United States, the fastest liner ever to cross the Atlantic, to the Holland Tunnel’s 84 fans built to clear car exhaust in 1927. More are in our Offbeat section. The surviving sister car is still on display in Stuttgart, and Mercedes has given no sign it will ever be sold. Further reading Wikipedia: Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Wikipedia: Rudolf Uhlenhaut Image: Guywelch2000, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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