Steve Job's BMW Z8 Expected to Fetch $400,000 at Auction
An upscale BMW Z8 owned and driven by Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, will be up for auction next month at Sotheby's in New York. The two-seat roadster comes in silver and will be sold with the bundled Motorola flip phone that originally came with the purchase.
The BMW Z8 series, as a limited-edition release by the carmaker, is already expensive in its own right. Launched in 1999, BMW has rolled out just a little over 5,700 of these cars, each of which could sell for anywhere between $165,000 and $200,000 today, as Mac Rumors noted.
This particular unit is special, however, in that Steve Jobs himself has bought, owned and driven the car back in 2000. Story has it that the late Apple founder bought the car with encouragement from Larry Ellison of Oracle, another disruptive figure in the technology industry.
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"According to legend, Jobs was convinced to buy the Z8 by Larry Ellison the iconoclastic CEO of Oracle, who enthused to Jobs that the car was a paragon of modern automotive engineering and ergonomics," Sotheby's recalled in the listing description.
The BMW Z8 will go on auction starting from $300,000 on Dec. 6 in New York, during Sotheby's "Icons" event featuring luxury and performance cars from the likes of Lamborghini, Ferrari, and Jaguar. Given Jobs' leagues of admirers, bids for the so-called "Steve Jobs Z8" are expected to go up to the $400,000 range.
As a piece of quality German engineering, the Titanium over the black leather interior of the car is not that far-off from the design sensibilities of Jobs and Apple itself. The car has a production date of Apr. 1, 2000, and it was delivered to the iPhone designer on Oct. 6 of the same year.
Jobs would eventually sell the car to a Los Angeles resident in 2003. The car has just 15,200 miles in it, including the ones that several new owners put in after they bought the car used.
