Jerry Seinfeld’s Green Lotus Is for Sale in Texas

(Bloomberg) -- Jerry Seinfeld likes more than just Porsches.

He likes Lotus, too.

A 2009 Lotus Exige S260 formerly owned by the comic will go on sale May 27 at an auction in Midland, Texas.

The 4-cylinder, 257-horsepower sports coupe is primed to stand out from the crowd: It has a carbon-fiber split bumper, a high-angled real spoiler, spindly 12-spoke alloy wheels, black gaping side air-intake ducts, and a “Kawasaki Green” body formed like a beetle. With a six-speed manual transmission and rear-wheel-drive, the Exige was the first Lotus made to be able to handle both street and track driving. (That figures—it barely weighs more than 2,000 pounds.) It has long been adored by the guys who love to whip it around racetracks and then drive it home.  

Lotus is a niche British car brand that has been around since 1952; its biggest moment in pop culture was when Richard Gere drove a Lotus Esprit in Pretty Woman. Lotus made only 583 of its Exige in the first year of production from 2000 to 2001, and only a fraction of those made it to the U.S. Since then, the company has created a handful of variants with far fewer production numbers. When the modern Exige S was launched in 2006, it was the quickest street-legal car that Lotus had ever built, with a zero-to-60 mph sprint time of 4.1 seconds. 

When the car made its debut in 2009, the base price was $75,000. Today you can buy a used one with a classier paint job on EBay for $60,000. A V6 version also on EBay costs closer to $85,000. Hemmings lists an all-black example for $45,000.

Seinfeld’s will surely take more than that—the auction house estimates it’ll go for $65,000 to $75,000. Celebrity ownership in general can push a car’s value even higher. But when Seinfeld sold 18 of his Porsches last year, the sum total was quite a bit less than the $28 million-to-$32 million estimate (they went for $22.2 million in total), and he sold this one to its current owner in 2012, so his celebrity shine may not be worth too much.  

To contact the author of this story: Hannah Elliott in New York at helliott8@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chris Rovzar at crovzar@bloomberg.net.