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In mid-August during Pebble Beach, the world’s most
prestigious car show, a vehicle that RM Sotheby’s is calling
the Porsche Type 64 is expected to sell for about $20 mil-
lion. It promises to be the most controversial sale of the year.
Price isn’t the issue. The auction estimate from RM
Sotheby’s is far shy of the record $48.4 million paid for a 1962
Ferrari 250 GTO. The Type 64’s price would still be rarefied,
more like that of the 1963 Aston Martin DP215, which sold for
$21.45 million last year.
It isn’t the car’s design, either, that’s prompted public
debate on Instagram and in discreet discussions between auto
brokers and their clients—though it does look like a UFO.
Even the fact that the Type 64 was commissioned by
the Nazis is unsurprising, grim as that may sound. Many
well-known vehicles were developed for Nazi purposes, COURTESY RM SOTHEBY’S (2)CARS Bloomberg Pursuits August 55including the Volkswagen Beetle and Mercedes-Benz 770.
The conflict that has wealthy collectors whispering is that
the Type 64 may not actually be a Porsche. “It’s not,” says
Andy Prill, a mechanical engineer and owner of Prill Porsche
Classics in England. “This is one thing I’ve been at pains to
point out to people.” Prill conducted the presale inspection
for RM Sotheby’s, compiling a 53-page dossier on the car. His
take: While the Type 64 is a direct ancestor of the Porsches
that came later, its mixing-bowl heritage disqualifies it from
the same distinction.
In 1939, Ferdinand Porsche was a designer for Mercedes-
Daimler (founded in 1926) and Volkswagen (1937), among oth-
ers. He built the Type 64 as a commission from the National
Socialist Motor Corps. NSKK chief Adolf Hühnlein had hoped
the Type 64 would win a Berlin-to-Rome race planned toA car built for the Nazi Party in 1939 has become the most polarizing
vehicle to go to auction in years. By Hannah ElliottThe $20 Million Porsche
That May Not Be a Porsche
From left: the Type
64; at a road race in
Korneuburg, Austria,
on April 6, 1952