What Does 'Blue Chip' Mean For Cars?

If you've ever played poker, or even just watched a movie about poker, you've probably noticed the chips come in different colors. In the classic set, you get white, red, and blue, and the blue chip is the most valuable one on the table. Back in the 1920s, a Dow Jones reporter named Oliver Gingold borrowed the idea to describe stocks trading at $200 a share or more. Over time, the term would become a standard means of describing companies that have been around for decades, pay out steadily, and are so established that investors trust it to hold up when the market dips.

The term has since travelled well beyond Wall Street. Today, "blue chip" refers to the best of the best in any category, whether that's art, watches, real estate, or cars. These are items that hold their value so well that they rarely lose money over the long run, and the best of them keep climbing. So when you hear that a car is a blue chip car, you're looking at the very top of the collector market. Prices usually start in the millions and can run into the tens of millions. In 2022, a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé sold for about $143 million, making it the most expensive car ever sold.

Many of these cars spend their lives in museums, climate-controlled garages, and auction houses. Just like blue chip stocks, which high-net-worth individuals covet for how well they hold their value, blue chip cars are bought as assets.

There are no official criteria, but one can't help but notice that the cars that make the cut often share a few things in common. The first is rarity. Remember that Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé that sold for over $140 million? Mercedes built just two. The Ferrari 250 GTO, one of the most valuable cars of all time, is one of 36 units. Some cars are literally one of one. Another important deciding factor is provenance. A car that won Le Mans or belonged to Steve McQueen, as you can imagine, is worth far more than an identical unit that didn't.

Pop culture also has some sway here. Give a car a starring role in a major film franchise, and it can very well go from cool to iconic. For instance, one of the Aston Martin DB5s built for the James Bond films sold for $6.4 million in 2019. There's also the integrity of the car. Collectors will pay a premium for cars with their original engine, body panels, and paint. Any heavy restoration can actually reduce the value, because the sentiment is that every replaced part erases a little of the car's history. Take the 1937 Bugatti Type 57S Atalante that sat untouched in a garage in Gosforth, England, for 48 years. It still fetched $4.4 million at a Bonhams auction in Paris in 2009.

By now, you can see a pattern emerging, and it's that all blue chip cars are extraordinary in some way. Most are vintage, and each one stands out, whether in terms of design, engineering, or racing history.