Very recognizable for everyone: when you finally receive your Bugatti Chiron, it is not quite what you expected. Unlike a Zalando shirt, you cannot stick a return label on the carbon fiber bottom of this car and send it in. And it’s not like you just keep it in the cupboard for when you ‘need something that can get dirty’. And so the most expensive car in the Netherlands was quickly sold and exported again. Two years later we hear the reason behind the rapid sales.
In the Quote 500-podcast My First Million tells entrepreneur Jasper van Rooij about, among other things, the purchase of his Bugatti Chiron. With a new price of 3.7 million euros, this car was the leader in our article of the most expensive car ever registered in the Netherlands in 2021. Remember this article for a moment. For example, the visible carbon fiber on the back was an option costing more than 223,000 euros and the skylight was more than 60,000 euros. You can recognize the Chiron Sport by the picture with ‘YOLO’ in the frunk.
Why he bought the Chiron
The entrepreneur came up with all kinds of theories as to why he needed to have a large fleet of vehicles, as he explains: ‘I had a garage and it couldn’t fit very many cars. Then you say: okay, I want to have a car in every category. So you need that super sports car, the Chiron. And every car collection includes a Ferrari. And yes, a Porsche 911 Turbo S Cabrio, that is also part of it.’
Then he said he needed a few Minis, a car for the dogs, a car for the driver and a van if he had to go to Schiphol. Oh, and then the kids want to do some driving every now and then. “You rationalize that to yourself, because that’s what the people around you do, so that’s what you’re going to do too,” he admits. A clever example of straight talking that is crooked, which everyone with a car hobby will recognize.
Why he sold the Chiron again very quickly
‘I came back to that Bugatti very quickly. Because I bought it, it was delivered, I drove it for an hour and during that week I was on all kinds of Instagram pages, social media and a week later the list of 10 most expensive cars ever registered in the Netherlands was published and there it was me number one. So I sold it, within a month, I drove it for an hour,” he says.
We told you to remember the article, right? The owner thought the car was too much of an attention magnet. The brand new Bugatti driver knocked on the door of Bernhards Exclusives in Woerden and he managed to find a buyer abroad. The dealer of the nicer stuff tells Top Gear Netherlands that there were less than 20 kilometers on the odometer when the Bugatti Chiron was exported.
The car is back in the Netherlands
“I think he just about broke even on the car,” Bernhard Exclusives tells us. For those who think that we are bullying Bugattis across the border with our lists, we have good news: the car is now back in the Netherlands. With approximately 3,500 kilometers on the odometer, it can now be yours for 4,399,950 euros – and again from the same dealer. Turns out we’ve been completely misunderstanding depreciation all these years.
A small warning from the first owner: ‘If you drive a car like that, that doesn’t make any sense at all, because you will be overtaken, people hang outside (the car), that is not my thing.’ When Jasper goes to municipalities for real estate matters, he still likes to take his wife’s Mini, because according to the entrepreneur ‘it doesn’t work’ if you drive up with a very big box.
There is now a new ‘most expensive car in the Netherlands’
The entrepreneur’s Bugatti Chiron Sport has now been overtaken by another Chiron. A Bugatti Chiron l’Ébé came to the Netherlands in 2022, of which the brand only builds three copies. This is the first car in the Netherlands whose license plate price is more than 4 million euros. This car probably doesn’t come out often, because as far as we know, the Bugatti with 24-carat gold-covered parts has never been spotted ‘in the wild’.