The Most Expensive Volkswagen Ever Sold

Car	Figure	What kind of number that is
Type 2 Samba, 21-window	about $302,500	Reported world record. Other figures compete with it.
Type 2 Samba, 23-window	$231,000–$235,000	Also reported as records, within days of each other.
Volkswagen Atlas	$114/day	What our largest Volkswagen costs.
Volkswagen Tiguan	$102/day	The cheapest car in the fleet.

The one you can actually have Volkswagen Atlas White, three rows, and the least expensive way to move a family around this city for a week. Dates and rate →

The badge tops out at a van, and the group owns Bugatti

Volkswagen Group owns Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche and Bentley. The most valuable thing wearing a plain VW badge is a 1950s camper van, and it is worth roughly a sixtieth of La Voiture Noire.

That gap is the most interesting thing about this question and almost nobody frames it. Under one corporate roof sit the marque with the highest new-car price ever recorded and a marque whose ceiling is a converted bus. The badge on the bonnet, not the ownership structure, is what the market prices.

The Samba was the top of the Type 2 range — a full-length fabric sunroof, two-tone paint, bi-parting doors, and up to twenty-three windows including eight in the roof. For 1964 the wider rear door removed the corner windows and made it a twenty-one-window car. Production began in 1951 under the name Kleinbus Sonderausführung, which translates about as romantically as it reads.

Why the van and not the Beetle

The Beetle is the most-produced car of a single design in history, and that is precisely the problem. Scarcity cannot exist in those numbers, so Beetle values are set by condition and by early production dates rather than by rarity, and they sit an order of magnitude below the Samba.

The Samba escapes it for a reason this series keeps finding in unexpected places: attrition. It was the expensive version of a working vehicle, so most were bought as vans, used as vans and worn out as vans. The survivors are scarce not because few were made but because few lasted, which is the same mechanism that put a 1986 Grand Wagoneer at the top of the Jeep list.

What Volkswagen actually is, commercially

It is the company that made cars ordinary, and the collector market has no mechanism for rewarding that. Every marque near the top of this series built something in tiny numbers for a rulebook or a race. Volkswagen's defining achievement is the opposite: enormous numbers, for everybody, reliably.

Which is worth saying without irony. The badge with the lowest ceiling in this series is attached to the most consequential car company in it, and those two facts sit together perfectly comfortably.

The most expensive Volkswagen in Los Angeles

Four of them, and they are the cheapest cars we rent: an Atlas at $114/day, an Atlas Cross Sport at $102/day and two Tiguans at $102/day.

That price is the whole argument. A week in an Atlas costs less than a single day in most of the fleet, it seats seven, and for a family whose trip is about Los Angeles rather than about the car, it removes the vehicle from the list of things to think about. We rent Lamborghinis and we will still tell you that this is the right booking more often than people expect.

What it costs, and how it reaches you

All four carry a $350 refundable deposit, back 5–7 business days after the car returns. These are the cars where weekly and monthly blocks change the arithmetic most, so the figure on the car’s own page matters more here than anywhere else in the fleet.

Collection from our lot on Robertson Boulevard is free and delivery to the partner hotels in Beverly Hills is complimentary. Airport delivery is priced per direction: $75 standard, where the car waits in the airport parking structure and you take the shuttle out to it, and $150 VIP, where it is at the terminal when you walk out. Anything past the mileage allowance is charged per mile at the rate written into your agreement. The rest is in the terms.