The collector car market, in your inbox
Classic car news, hand-picked vehicles, and auction coverage. Choose what lands in your inbox.
RM Sotheby's has confirmed the sale of the one-of-one Ferrari Luce "Tailor Made" — chassis number zero, the very first production example of Ferrari's first electric car — for $40 million at The Monterey Auction, with 100 percent of the proceeds going to charity through The Ferrari Foundation. The buyer's premium was waived. There was no published estimate. And by the time the bidding stopped, a brand-new EV had quietly rewritten three separate auction records in a single hammer drop.
That is a sentence almost nobody in Monterey expected to write this year, least of all the people who spent the spring arguing about whether the Luce should exist at all.
Chassis 0 Is Not Like Any Luce That Follows It
The car that crossed the block carries VIN ZFF21BUA8T0338000 — the "0" is the point of the whole exercise. It is the first chassis off the Luce production run, pulled out of the sequence before a single customer car was delivered and handed to Ferrari's Tailor Made program and the Ferrari Design Studio to build into something that can never be repeated.
The finish is a bespoke semi-gloss called Madreperla, developed specifically for this commission. It uses an iridescent pearlescent pigment that shifts from green to violet depending on how hard and from what angle the light hits it, which is a fitting trick for a car named after the Italian word for light. The wheels are dedicated to this car, the brake calipers are finished in white, and the Ferrari shield sits against an optical white background rather than the usual yellow.
Inside, Ferrari used an exclusive Tailor Made material called Le Mans metallic leather in Perla, drawn from Swiss hides, with Grigio Corvara replacing the black that would normally handle the secondary surfaces. The whole cabin was themed around luminosity rather than the darker, more aggressive palettes Ferrari usually reaches for in a halo build.
Built to US specification, the car heads back to Maranello after the sale, with delivery to its new owner scheduled for the first quarter of 2027.
Three Records in One Lot
The $40 million result makes the Luce the most expensive charity car ever sold at public auction, the most expensive new car ever sold at public auction, and the most expensive electric car ever sold at public auction. It also lands as roughly the sixth-most valuable automobile ever to sell publicly, and the third-most valuable Ferrari, sitting behind only the $51.7 million 250 GTO/330 LM from 2023 and the $48.4 million 250 GTO from 2018.
For context on the charity side: RM Sotheby's sold a Daytona SP3 "Tailor Made" for $26 million as a charity lot in 2025, which had been the high-water mark. The Luce cleared it by $14 million.
It is worth being precise about what that number means, because it is easy to misread. A €550,000 electric liftback did not suddenly become a $40 million car. A charity lot with a waived premium, a one-of-one build, chassis 0 status, and a room full of bidders who wanted the story is a fundamentally different object than the Luce a customer will take delivery of next year. This was philanthropy priced through an auction, not a valuation event.
The Car Underneath the Paint
Strip away the Madreperla and the Luce is still the most consequential thing Ferrari has done in decades. Internally designated Type F222, it uses four permanent-magnet motors — one per wheel — for a combined 1,035 horsepower, split 282 hp front and 831 hp rear to keep the balance rearward. Ferrari quotes 0–62 mph in 2.5 seconds and a top speed north of 193 mph.
The 122-kWh battery is a structural element of the chassis rather than a slab bolted underneath it. The architecture is 800 volts, DC fast charging peaks at 350 kW, and range is claimed at more than 310 miles. It rides on active suspension with four-wheel steering and torque vectoring, and it uses paddles for regenerative braking rather than shifts.
It is also a five-seat liftback with center-opening doors, styled in collaboration with LoveFrom, the studio founded by Jony Ive and Marc Newson. That combination is exactly why the reveal in May was so divisive — Ferrari shares dropped 8.4 percent the day it was shown before recovering within three days, and plenty of longtime Ferrari people said out loud what they were thinking. The Luce also skips fake engine noise entirely, instead amplifying the actual mechanical sound of its drivetrain.
Whatever you think of the shape, the market answered the "will collectors take an electric Ferrari seriously" question faster than anyone predicted.
Ferrari Owned the Rest of the Room, Too
The Luce did not carry the sale by itself. Across 199 lots on August 13–15, Ferrari accounted for seven of the top ten results and roughly $107 million in proceeds, with the top ten alone clearing $170 million.
Behind the Luce came Nick Mason's one-of-a-kind "Pop Art" McLaren F1 GTR at $34,655,000, a 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport at $18,705,000, a 2023 Ferrari Daytona SP3 at $17,825,000, and Mike Tyson's former Ferrari F50 at $12,105,000. A 288 GTO, an Enzo, a LaFerrari, and an F40 all followed, along with a 1935 Duesenberg Model JN Convertible Coupe at $9,080,000.
What the Ferrari Halo Cars Are Actually Worth
Results like these are the reason it pays to separate a headline from a market. Every one of the Ferraris in that top ten is a car you can look up, and the Hagerty Valuation Tools are the fastest way to do it — they break each model down by condition grade, from #1 Concours to #4 Fair, and track how those numbers have moved over time rather than just reporting the loudest sale of the weekend.
If you want to know whether the F40 is genuinely climbing or whether one exceptional car ran away with it, whether the 288 GTO has kept pace with its analog-era stablemates, or how the F50 and LaFerrari compare once you strip out celebrity provenance, that is where to start. Hagerty's guide values sit well below several of the Monterey results, and that gap is the story: mileage, documentation, delivery-spec originality, and a famous former owner can be worth more than the car's own baseline. Tyson's F50 did not sell for F50 money. It sold for Tyson-F50 money.
The same logic applies in reverse to the Luce. Ferrari's first EV will have a real market of its own eventually — production cars, real transactions, a Hagerty entry with condition grades attached. Chassis 0 will never be part of that data set, and it was never meant to be.
Where the $40 Million Goes
All proceeds flow through The Ferrari Foundation, a 501(c)(3), to M-TECH Alfredo Ferrari in Maranello — the technical institute named for Enzo's son — along with ongoing educational initiatives in the United States. The through-line is technical education: training the people who will build the next generation of these cars, electric or otherwise.
That is the part of this result worth holding onto. Collector cars generate an enormous amount of noise about numbers, records, and who overpaid for what. Once a year, at least, a room in Monterey turns that same energy into a fully funded classroom.
For the wider picture on how the week shaped up, see our Collector's Guide to Monterey Car Week 2026, and for more on the analog Ferraris that keep showing up near the top of these sales, take a look at this 1985 Ferrari 288 GTO with rare homologation status.
