You just missed out on buying a Rolls-Royce for the price of a BMW 5 Series

Liquor baron, Vijay Mallya’s extensive collection of old classic cars were auctioned off at an e-auction site (Quippo Auctions) on Wednesday. The complete collection which was once owned by Mallya, is now owned by United Spirits after it was speculated that Mallya absconded from the country after he was unable to clear his debt of over Rs 9000 crores.

If you were out in the market and were looking for a car, you should be kicking yourself right now. A number of his luxury cars and classic cars which held a very high value were sold at dirt cheap prices. To put things into a perspective, a new Porsche Boxster which is a 271bhp sports car with excellent handling characteristics, can cost around Rs 92 lakh when new, carried a reserve price of just Rs 8 lakh, and a Mercedes G-Wagon was sold off for a eye-watering price of just Rs 13.10 lakh. But the real steal was the Rolls-Royce Phantom, the pinnacle of luxury on wheels, that would cost close to Rs 5 crore when new (of course you can option it for a few crores worth of features). It had a reserve price of just Rs 12 lakh and was finally sold for Rs 52 lakh. Just for comparing how crazy that really is, a brand new Mercedes E-Class or even a BMW 5-series would cost close to Rs 54 lakh, so for Rs 2 lakh, someone has got hismself/herself a stately Rolls-Royce Phantom. Okay there is one thing that needs to be addressed, and that is all these cars weren’t in a really good shape, and it would cost the new owners quite a lot of money to get the cars to their road worthiness.

All this does show one thing that the whole point of the auction was just to recover the money that Vijay Mallya owed and that the original value of the cars wasn’t bothered for.