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Record price for ’96 Mercedes-Benz SL500 after owner loses the key

12 April, 2017

Picture this: it’s 1996, you’ve just received your brand-new Mercedes-Benz SL500 and taken it for a brisk drive around a few blocks. 80-miles now adorns the odometer and you park it up to go about your business, returning to find the key has gone walkabouts. Would you then call it a day and never drive it again?

That’s exactly what the owner of this particular example did, and it recently sold for a record price 21 years later— £56,640 to be exact — by Coys at their Spring Classics auction at the Royal Horticultural Halls in London.  

Chris Routledge, CEO of Coys, said, “This is a fantastic price bearing in mind that a normal version of this car, with reasonable mileage, would probably be worth 20% of what this SL500 made today. An exciting sale and a new world record!”

The Mercedes-Benz SL500 R129 roadsters were produced from 1989 through 2002, featuring many innovative details for the time, such as electronically controlled damping and a hidden, automatically extending roll-over bar, electric windows and mirrors.

This is one of the more powerful and sought after M119 engined cars and also boasts a number of optional factory extras, including heated front seats, 6 CD multi-changer, upgraded radio and wood-leather steering wheel.

It’s far too nice to call a barn find … perhaps a time capsule, if you will? Either way, £56,640 is a staggering win for the owner.

Racing Mazdas

12 June, 2026

Both Rod Millen and Ron Kendall were rotary racing kings, emanating from the North Shore of Auckland, where I grew up. And the ultimate rotary techno guru was Bill Shiells, who developed the engine into a rocket ship while working out of Gulf Mazda in Takapuna from 1969, and later in his own business, Rotorsport. He began to extract some phenomenal horsepower from the enigmatic rotary engine. Bill was one of the first to race the Mazda RX-2 Coupe in 1971 and achieved immediate success, causing others to sit up and take notice, particularly the North Shore’s racing elite. They included Robbie Francevic, Rod Millen, Ron Kendall, John Woolf, John Le Feuvre, and Rex Findlay.

Range Rover CSK — the original SUV

5 June, 2026

The Range Rover, thanks to Charles Spencer King, went into production in 1970 boasting an iconic shape that would last until 1996. The vehicle that would create the SUV moniker came about because Rover decided it was time to add a bigger four-wheel-drive vehicle, one with a 100-inch wheelbase, to the model range. Land Rover made a 109-inch wheelbase model but the standard vehicle had a 88-inch wheelbase.
The new model would be more suitable for road use than the existing Land Rover, which was considered to be predominantly for rural use. To make sure it could cope on any road it came standard with the Rover 3.5-litre V8 engine. The body design was originally sketched by King and went into production with only a few minor touch-ups by the Rover styling team.
According to King, “The idea was to combine the comfort and on-road ability of a Rover saloon with the off-road ability of a Land Rover. Nobody was doing it.”