The Most Expensive BMWs Ever Made (and the Six You Can Drive This Weekend)

BMW has three different most-expensive cars, and which one you mean depends entirely on which room you are standing in. The showroom, the auction room and a fifty-car hand-build that never reached America each give a different answer, and none of the three is wrong.

The showroom answer is checkable to the dollar and moves every model year. The auction answer has a receipt behind it and has stood since 2018. The third answer is a car BMW built fifty of, priced in euros, sold by private arrangement rather than through a dealer, and never certified for the United States — so it has no American window sticker at all, and every dollar figure attached to it is somebody's conversion of somebody else's estimate.

Put those three in one column, sort by size, and you get the list that ranks first for this question on most days. It is not wrong so much as unusable: you cannot quote a row out of it, because you cannot tell what kind of number the row contains.

So the categories stay apart here. Every figure says which kind it is, every auction figure names the house and the date, and where a number is an inference we say who inferred it and from what. Six BMW model lines sit in our own BMW fleet in Los Angeles; not one of the cars in the first three sections is among them, which is said where each one appears rather than saved for the end.

How this list is counted

Three columns, three standards of evidence, and nothing moves between them.

Column 1: the most expensive BMW you can order new

This is the question most people are actually asking, and the answer surprises people who have not looked at a price list since the M8 arrived. It is not the SUV with the split headlights and the hybrid V8. It is the electric limousine.

Model	Body	MSRP band	Year	Column
i7	Electric saloon	$107,250 – $170,050	2026	Sticker
XM Label	Plug-in hybrid SUV	$161,150	2026	Sticker
M8	Coupe	$141,350 – $152,550	2025	Sticker, final year
7 Series	Saloon	$100,850 – $126,250	2026	Sticker
8 Series	Coupe, convertible, Gran Coupe	$95,875 – $121,850	2026	Sticker

The top of the i7 band is the M70 xDrive, and $170,050 is the highest figure BMW attaches to anything in an American showroom this year — the number comes from Car and Driver's published MSRP range for the 2026 i7, which is the source used for every band in that table. It clears the XM Label by about nine thousand dollars, and the XM is worth a second look for a different reason: for 2026 the range collapsed to the Label alone, at 738 horsepower, so the "cheap" XM no longer exists and the model's band is a single number rather than a range.

Two consequences follow, and both answer questions people type separately. The most expensive BMW model is the i7. The most expensive BMW sedan is also the i7, because it is a sedan — which is why those two searches should return the same car and usually do not.

Column 2: what a BMW actually fetches at auction

Here the answer has stood for years and is not close. In July 2018 the 1957 BMW 507 that had belonged to John Surtees — one owner from new, with factory upgrades, and the only man to win world championships on two wheels and four — sold at Bonhams' Goodwood auction for $5,012,432. That is the record for the 507, and Hagerty's market desk records it as such in its analysis of how the model's commercial failure became its collector value. We stop at the model line on purpose. “Record for the 507” is what the source says; “most expensive BMW ever sold” is a larger claim that needs a second receipt, and every list that prints it is borrowing this one.

The supporting numbers are the interesting part. BMW built 254 of them, two of which were prototypes. Only thirteen have crossed an auction block anywhere in the world in five years, which is 5.1 per cent of everything ever made. The Hagerty Price Guide put an average condition-one 507 at $2,812,500 in April 2023 — roughly what the Surtees car made, halved, which tells you how much of that five million was provenance rather than metal.

The 507 is also the answer to a different question, and this is the one nobody prints

The 507 was supposed to cost $5,000. That was the target Max Hoffman, the importer who talked BMW into building it, had in mind for the American market. What came out of Munich was a mostly hand-built aluminium roadster that landed nearer $9,000 in 1957 — about $100,000 in today's money, on Hagerty's arithmetic — against the 300 SL's $7,000. Mercedes sold 1,858 roadsters. BMW sold 254 cars and nearly went under.

So the 507 holds both ends of this article at once. It is the most expensive BMW anybody has paid for in public, and it is the most expensive BMW relative to its own market that the company has ever put on sale. The second fact is why the first one exists.

Column 3: the 3.0 CSL, and the number everybody reprints

In November 2022 BMW M turned fifty and marked it with fifty cars. The 3.0 CSL is a hand-built two-door on the M4 structure, carrying the most powerful straight-six the company has put in a road car, assembled over roughly three months at Dingolfing. The figure attached to it everywhere is €750,000. BMW never published a US list price for it, because the car was never certified for sale here.

What does exist is one concrete, published, market-specific number. Unit 41 of 50 was allocated to Spain, and BMW Ibérica sold it through a two-week private auction in February 2023 rather than through a dealer. Motor1 reported the Spanish starting price at €605,000 before tax, about $650,263 at the exchange rate of the day, rising to roughly €800,000 — about $860,000 — once Spanish VAT and registration tax were added.

Read that row carefully, because it is a good example of what this whole page is for. That is a starting bid, in one country, in one tax regime, converted on one particular Tuesday. It is not a list price, it is not a sale, and it is certainly not "the most expensive BMW ever made, $860,000". It is the most solid number available about a car that has no American price at all, and it should be quoted with all four of those qualifiers attached or not at all.

The one expensive BMW that is neither old nor new

The Z8 sits awkwardly between the columns and is worth a row of its own. It cost $128,000 when it was current, which in 2000 was Ferrari money, and BMW built 5,703 of them — 2,543 for North America, so this is not a car America was shut out of. Its aluminium spaceframe was made at Dingolfing and the body hand-finished in Munich, per the model's production record, which is the same combination of plants that produced the 3.0 CSL twenty-two years later.

Two things make it useful here. It is the only car on this page that America could buy in numbers and still had to find Ferrari money for, and it is the only one whose price today can be checked against a few hundred public listings rather than against four auction results. For a discontinued model the manufacturer is no longer the authority — BMW's own site has no Z8 page — so the archive is, and the archive is what is cited above.

Why every list of this disagrees with every other one

• Trim gets mistaken for model. "The most expensive BMW" nearly always means the most expensive trim of a nameplate. The i7 spans $62,800 between its cheapest and dearest versions, which is more than the entire price of a 3 Series.
• Destination and gas-guzzler tax move in and out. A manufacturer's announcement usually quotes the car; a magazine's MSRP band usually includes destination. That is a four-figure gap before anybody has argued.
• European prices include VAT and American ones do not. Nineteen per cent in Germany, twenty-one in Spain. Convert a German price to dollars without stripping the tax and you have inflated the car by a fifth.
• Two horsepower figures for one engine are usually two standards, not a disagreement. The 3.0 CSL is quoted at 552 and at 560 depending on whether the number is bhp or PS. Neither is wrong.

Which is why every figure above carries its column. If you take one row off this page, take the column with it.

Six BMWs you can drive this weekend, and not one of them is a 507

Here is the useful end of a page full of numbers you will never write a cheque for. Six BMW model lines sit in our garage in Los Angeles — ten cars, because four of the six come in a second colour — and the whole range is a rounding error against anything above.

The spread runs from the X1 at $102/day to the black 7 Series at $230/day. That last pair is worth pausing on, because it is this article's own rule demonstrated inside our own fleet: we hold two BMW 7 Series, one white and one black, and they are $105 apart on the day rate. Same nameplate, different cars, different specification, different price. Anyone who tells you what "a BMW 7 costs" without saying which one has just made the mistake this page has spent two thousand words on.

The roadster is the one to think about if the 507 is what brought you here. A Z4 is the descendant of that shape and that idea — front-engined, two seats, roof down, no back seat to apologise for — and at $171/day it is the closest a Saturday in Los Angeles gets to the car at the top of the auction column. If the day is about carrying four people to dinner in Beverly Hills instead, the answer is the black 7, and the sedan page lays out what sits either side of it.

What it costs to get one of them to you

Collection from our lot on Robertson Boulevard is free, and delivery to the partner hotels in Beverly Hills — the Beverly Wilshire, the Four Seasons at Doheny, L'Ermitage — is complimentary. Airport delivery is priced, in two tiers, per direction rather than per booking.

Tier	What happens at LAX	Each way
Standard	We leave the car in the airport parking structure and you ride the airport shuttle out to it. About half an hour end to end, and awkward with a lot of luggage.	$75
VIP terminal	We bring the car to the terminal. You collect your bags, walk out, and it is standing there.	$150

Because the tiers are priced each way they combine: $150 for standard both directions, $300 for VIP both, $225 for VIP in and standard out, which is the common case. The security deposit on every BMW here is $500 or $750 depending on the car, and it comes back 5–7 business days after the car does. Drivers under twenty-five pay $50/day on all six model lines, because none of these deposits reaches the $1,500 mark where that surcharge steps up. The rest is in the terms.

If the question underneath all this was what a marque's dearest cars have in common, the Rolls-Royce version of this ranking runs the same three columns over a company whose top cars have no list price at all.

Every BMW in the fleet → The Mercedes equivalent, model by model →