The Chiron That Was Never Meant to Exist Brought €9,792,500

€9,792,500 — auction total, buyer's premium included. RM Sotheby's Paris, Salles du Carrousel du Louvre, 1 February 2023. Lot: the 2022 Bugatti Chiron Profilée.

Hammer / premium split: contemporary auction-room reporting and the sale screen show a hammer of €8,700,000, which would make the premium €1,092,500 by arithmetic. The RM Sotheby's lot text retrieved for this pass does not itself print the split — the split is therefore presented as reported-plus-arithmetic, and it is on the checks list for confirmation against RM Sotheby's published results before publication.

The pre-sale estimate was €4,200,000–€5,500,000. The total is roughly 1.8 times the high estimate.

This total is not the buyer's final cost. The lot's own addendum states the lot is subject to VAT on the full purchase price — hammer and commission both. Whatever VAT applied was charged on top of the €9,792,500.

The charity element — only what the sources support: Bugatti and RM Sotheby's said before and after the sale that a percentage of the proceeds would go to benefit charitable causes. No percentage, no amount and no named beneficiary appears in the RM Sotheby's lot page or in the sale reporting checked for this pass. Some secondary coverage shortens this to "the proceeds went to charity," which the primary wording does not say. This story prints the percentage wording, attributes it, and puts no figure on the charitable share.

RM Sotheby's and Bugatti described the result, in February 2023, as the most valuable new car ever sold at auction. That is a dated claim from the sale, kept dated here — present-tense record language needs a fresh check at publication (see checks).

The exact object

Start with why there is only one. During Chiron production, customers asked Bugatti for a car slightly less radical than the Chiron Pur Sport — Pur Sport acceleration and handling, more of a touring character. Bugatti developed the Profilée to fill that gap: a bespoke sweeping tail with a hollow section for hot-air escape and rear downforce, wider front inlets and an enlarged horseshoe grille, a revised splitter and underbody, and the Pur Sport's mechanical attitude underneath — revised steering and suspension, shorter gear ratios in the seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox, and the 8.0-litre quad-turbo W16's rev limit raised 200 rpm to 6,900 rpm. RM Sotheby's lists 0–100 km/h in 2.3 seconds, 0–200 in 5.5, 0–300 in 12.4, and a top speed limited to 380 km/h — the fastest-accelerating Chiron variant on the lot page's account.

While the Profilée was still in development, the Chiron's 500-unit allocation sold out. The production Profilée was cancelled before it existed. Bugatti finished the single pre-series car anyway — with single-type approval for Europe, all parts intended for the series, and 396 kilometres of test mileage at cataloguing. RM Sotheby's calls it what it is: the very last brand-new Bugatti with a W16 engine to be sold by Bugatti Automobiles S.A.S.

Look for the right details in a photograph: the upper body in Argent Atlantique, a colour developed exclusively for this car, over a lower body in exposed Bleu Royal Carbon; horseshoe-form wheels in Le Patron with polished aluminium accents; and inside, the first woven leather finish in any Chiron — centre console, dashboard, door panels and rear wall, using exactly 2,665 metres of leather strips applied by hand — with Comfort seats in Gris Rafale and Deep Blue. If a picture shows a standard two-tone Chiron without the woven interior and the integrated tail, it is not this car.

The premium, explained concretely

The premium here is not materials and it is not performance — a Pur Sport buyer got most of the mechanical package for a list price (below). The premium is a count: one.

Concretely, what the room in Paris was bidding on: the sole completed example of a developed, type-approved Bugatti model that the factory cancelled for a reason unrelated to the car — the order book for its parent model filled first. It was brand new, sold by the factory itself through auction rather than allocation, with 396 test kilometres and a specification (the colour, the tail, the woven leather) that no other Chiron carries. The estimate said €4.2–5.5 million; an extended contest in the room, on the phones and online took it to €9,792,500 with premium. That gap between estimate and result is the one-of-one premium, measured rather than asserted.

What the premium does not include, on this record: a published charitable share (the percentage is undisclosed, so no part of the price can be assigned to charity), and any claim that the Profilée is mechanically superior to the run of Chirons — its own lot page frames its distinction as design, specification and singularity.

The ordinary counterpart

The counterpart is a confirmed transaction for a standard Chiron — not an asking price, and not another limited variant: a 2018 Bugatti Chiron, the base model, sold on Bring a Trailer in May 2025 for $2,850,000 (Atlantic Blue over French Blue; the ex–Saúl "Canelo" Álvarez car, per the sale reporting).

Compare in the currency the Profilée result was converted to at the time: RM Sotheby's result was published contemporaneously at $10,677,740.

• $10,677,740 ÷ $2,850,000 ≈ 3.7. The one-off pre-series car brought about three and three-quarter standard Chirons.

Label the comparison honestly: it crosses currencies (converted at the February 2023 result's published dollar figure), markets and years — a brand-new, factory-sold one-off in Paris in 2023 against a used standard car sold online in the US in 2025 — and the Bring a Trailer figure's fee basis needs confirming at build (see checks). It measures what singularity and factory provenance added over an ordinary Chiron changing hands; it is not a like-for-like condition comparison.

Kept separate, as context and not as the counterpart: Bugatti's original list prices were €2.4 million net for the base Chiron at its 2016 launch and €3.0 million net for the Pur Sport. The €9,792,500 auction total is about 4.1 times the base car's launch list — a useful scale line, but an auction total and a list price are different kinds of fact, and this story never merges them.

What the price includes — and what it does not

Included at €9,792,500:

• The single pre-series Chiron Profilée, with its sale handled by RM Sotheby's in Paris.
• Per the lot addendum: after the sale the car was to be taken to Bugatti in Molsheim, then delivered to the buyer free of charge within the EU.

Not included / not established:

• VAT, charged on the full purchase price (hammer plus commission) per the lot addendum — on top of the €9,792,500, at the applicable rate. The total above is therefore not the buyer's all-in cost.
• Registration, insurance and servicing: none is in the auction total; none is quantified in the sources checked.
• The charitable percentage, its amount and its beneficiary: stated by Bugatti / RM Sotheby's only as "a percentage of the proceeds" to charitable causes. Undisclosed beyond that wording — do not estimate it.