This 37-mile Honda S2000 is as close to new as you’ll ever find

Suppose you’re kicking yourself for failing to buy an all-new Honda S2000 when it was introduced for the year 2000. It is rare that a missed opportunity comes around twice, but in the case of this 37-mile S2000, your second chance may have arrived. To get any closer to a showroom-fresh car, you’d need to hop in a time machine and pick up it up from the Honda dealer.

The S2000 (1999–2009) is more than a Miata on steroids. With this small, sorted roadster, Honda took Mazda’s recipe and improved upon it, creating a car that was even more of a pleasure to drive than the featherweight Miata. In the AP1 series (2000–03), the 2.0-liter inline-four makes an ample 240 horsepower—100 more than a contemporary Miata—and pulls all the way to a screaming, 9000-rpm redline. To Honda purists, an AP1 S2000 is as good as it gets.

So how does a car that’s such a joy to drive emerge 21 years later looking this fresh? The listing doesn’t say but, judging from the fact that the car hasn’t even been titled, someone likely bought this AP1 as an investment piece and drove it just enough to keep the fluids moving.

Bring a Trailer has done a fantastic job of bringing low-mile cars like this one to market and this isn’t the first low-mile S2000 we’ve seen on the platform. Back in February, BaT offered a 985-mile S2000 CR which brought a record-setting $117,111. That sale, along with a number of standard S2000s which sold well in the beginning of the year, signaled a noticeable uptick in values for both AP1 and AP2 series S2000. For any indication of what this particular car might bring, we must look back to early 2019, when Bring a Trailer offered this 91-mile 2009 model. It ultimately sold for $73,500 (including buyer’s premium). The market has moved since that sale and, while that 2009 was an outlier at that time, a $73K sale today would be much harder to dismiss as an anomaly.

Does this car have record-smashing potential? It has a lot going for it, and the new buyer will technically be the first documented owner. That’s a major upside for a buyer looking for an essentially new S2000. The downside is that, compared to the 2008–09 CR, this isn’t a rare car; the track-oriented CR is at the absolute top of the S2000 pecking order. For this S2000 to surpass the standing record of $117,111, we’ll have to see a pair of very motivated buyers. This is Bring a Trailer, however, and anything is possible.