Why This 1937 Talbot-Lago Teardrop Coupe Is Still the Most Expensive French Car Ever Sold at Auction

A handful of cars are famous for their price tag alone. The 1937 Talbot-Lago T150-C-SS Teardrop Coupe is famous for the opposite reason — the $13.425 million it sold for is really just the price the market eventually put on a shape that was already considered one of the most beautiful ever built for a road car, decades before anyone was bidding on it.

The Sale, and Where the Record Stands Today

Gooding & Company sold this exact car — chassis No. 90107 — at its live auction at the Omni Amelia Island Resort in Florida on March 4, 2022. The pre-sale estimate was around $10 million; it closed at $13.425 million, a result that surprised even seasoned auction watchers. That set a new record for the most expensive French car ever sold at public auction, edging out a 1934 Bugatti Type 59 Sports that Gooding had itself sold for $12.68 million in 2020. As of the most recent major classic car auction results tracked through 2025, no French car — Bugatti included — has topped it. Records like this can move quickly in the classic car world, but this one has held for several auction seasons now, which is itself notable.

Why This Specific Body Style Commands That Kind of Money

The "Teardrop" nickname comes from the car's French name, Goutte d'Eau — literally "water drop." The shape wasn't a factory design; it came from a partnership between Talbot-Lago founder Anthony Lago and coachbuilder Joseph Figoni, of the Paris firm Figoni et Falaschi, starting in 1937. Over two years, the partnership produced just 16 of these coupes total, split across two related series, each one hand-built with steeply raked windscreens, sculpted fenders, and oval window openings that made every car in the run subtly different from the next. Figoni's craftsmen reportedly spent around 2,100 hours completing a single body — this was coachbuilding in the truest sense, not assembly-line manufacturing.

What makes the Teardrop coupe unusual in automotive history is that it wasn't just a styling exercise. One of the 16 cars finished third overall at the 1938 24 Hours of Le Mans, behind two Delahayes — meaning this design was both a design landmark of the Art Deco era and a genuine competitive race car, a combination that's rare even among the most celebrated classics.

What the Car Actually Is

Under that bodywork sits a 3,996cc overhead-valve inline-six engine producing 140 horsepower at 4,100 rpm, fed by three Zenith-Stromberg carburetors and paired with a four-speed Wilson pre-selector gearbox — a semi-automatic transmission design that was genuinely advanced for a 1937 road car. It rides on four-wheel mechanical drum brakes, front independent suspension, and a rear live axle with leaf springs. By modern standards the mechanical specs are modest; by 1937 standards, this was a serious performance chassis wrapped in what's still considered one of the most sculptural automotive shapes ever put into limited production.

The car sold in 2022 went through an extensive restoration in 2000, which is why photos from the sale show a finish that looks close to how it would have appeared leaving the factory rather than a nearly 90-year-old vehicle.

Why It's Worth Knowing About Even If You'll Never Bid on One

With only 16 built and a design lineage that predates almost every "iconic" postwar car people associate with automotive art, Talbot-Lago Teardrops rarely change hands publicly at all — most of the surviving examples are in museum or long-term private collections. That scarcity is exactly why a single sale was enough to reset an entire national auction record: there simply isn't a deep enough market of comparable cars to keep a record like this from standing for years at a time.