Rare Porsche sports car passed in after epic auction fail

An exceedingly rare sports car designed by Ferdinand Porsche in the late 1930s went to auction at RM Sotheby's in California last weekend, but the bidding for the car ended in recrimination and confusion due to a communications breakdown between the auctioneer and a video screen operator.

According to Bloomberg, bidding for the Type 64 sports car – a vehicle designed by Ferdinand Porsche prior to WWII – was supposed to kick off at $US13 million. It was not anticipated that the car would sell for a figure much higher than $US20 million.

But Dutch auctioneer Maarten ten Holder either mistakenly announced the opening bid to be "30 million" or was misheard by the audience – and the video screen operator. Subsequently, every new bid, in million-dollar increments, was announced on screen in increments of 10s of millions of dollars.

By around the 17 million/70 million mark, ten Holder realised that the video screen was displaying numbers that were at odds with reality. At 24 seconds into a brief video uploaded to Twitter.com by JRRBatchelor, the auctioneer clearly enunciates the bid of "17 million". Before that, the bids sounded like tens of millions.

At 30 seconds into the video, ten Holder says: "It says '70' guys; it's '17'."

The auctioneer is heard to admit on video at 32 seconds that "it might be my pronunciation". From 40 seconds, the audience sounds restive and begins booing. The video ends before the auctioneer admits defeat and the car is passed in without reaching its reserve.

According to the Bloomberg report, the auction house subsequently issued a statement, describing the root cause of the controversy as "a totally inadvertent and unintentional mistake".

Punters were not so kind, with one reportedly describing it as "a scam" and John Bothwell, the director of Pur Sang Bugattis, calling it "a massive f..k-up".

The Type 64 was a controversial subject, even before the auctioneer mixed up the numbers (or the video operator misunderstood the words spoken).

Developed from the first Volkswagen (Type 60) platform, it was one of three cars built – and the only one to survive the war unscathed.

Although the roofline looks Beetle-based, the rest of the car was designed for wind-cheating aerodynamics and is often said to be an exemplar of Ferdinand's sports car aspirations, later made concrete in the first sports car to bear his surname, the 1948 Porsche 356.

Both Porsche and the Porsche Museum have avoided embracing the Type 64 as a 'true' Porsche, according to Bloomberg, studiously refraining from discussing the car on the record, although the museum has an example of the Type 64 (pictured) in its possession.

You can watch video of the auction to judge for yourself who got it wrong -- the auctioneer or the video screen operator.