Sale of Seinfeld’s 911 Has Us Asking: What’s the Deal With this Porsche?

A 1996 Porsche 911 sold for $169,000 this week. Big money, especially when you consider the model’s condition #1 (“concours,” or “best-in-the-world”) value of $138K. At first glance, the car doesn’t seem that special, either. It’s a 993-generation Targa, which in the hierarchy of P-car prices falls below a coupe, but above a cabriolet. It’s a regular two-wheel drive Carrera model with a 6-speed, a desirable combo but not an exceptional one. Polar Silver over Midnight Blue are a similarly nice color combo but certainly not unique. The car also boasts just 26K miles plus tons of documentation and service history, but so what? Low-mileage, pampered 911s are a dime a dozen. Even the “one owner” isn’t anything to write home about. Not on a 28-year-old car, anyway.

In this case, it’s who that one owner is that really counts. Celebrity ownership doesn’t always add value to a car, but in some instances it does. Famous Porschephile Jerry Seinfeld has proven to be one of them, and he owned, then sold, this one. Oddly, though, nowhere in the listing nor in the piles of documentation in the photo gallery is there a single reference to the New York funnyman. The online bidders found out anyway, so why leave out a detail like that?

OK, first let’s get the show references out of the way…No, Jon Voight never owned the car. No, there isn’t a pencil in the glove box. Yes, there’s enough room for George Costanza’s wallet. No, it doesn’t smell like BO. Yes, the seller only accepted USD. No “interesting trades” considered, not even Anthony Quinn’s undershirt. No, the license plate isn’t “ASSMAN.” It is “TRG FLRO,” though, which is pretty cool.

Now, back to the car, which again is a solid, very well-cared-for example but has nothing exceptional or unique about it except the name on the title. The 993, the version of the 911 built from 1994-98, is arguably the prettiest generation of Germany’s sports car. The changes from previous 911s were numerous and extensive, and one particularly relevant to Seinfeld’s car is the layout of the popular Targa model. Whereas previous 911 Targas had a removable, stowable center roof section, the 993 Targa introduced a power-retractable glass roof. It’s more convenient, but also a pricy repair when it breaks. The 993 was the last air-cooled 911, and Seinfeld also bought the very last production air-cooled Porsche—a 993 Carrera 4S in Mexico Blue—in 1998.

As for his Polar Silver Targa seen here, it was listed on Bring a Trailer with an exhaustive (and exhausting) 400-plus photo gallery and equally exhaustive list of maintenance records, but bidding sat open for a full week before comments starting chiming in about the most appealing and attention grabbing part of the car—its owner. These followed Jerry Seinfeld’s guest appearance on the podcast Spike’s Car Radio, during which he casually mentioned “I just put a 1996 Polar Silver 993 Targa on Bring a Trailer…It’s not in the ad, but I’m gonna leak it out…that is the car that I would drive to work when I was doing the series in the ’90s.”

Seinfeld has publicly offloaded some of his Porsches before. Back in 2016, he sold 18 cars at Gooding & Co.’s Amelia Island auction. And he sold them well, with his dozen and a half P-cars earning an average 47 percent premium over their values in the Hagerty Price Guide (HPG). His Bring a Trailer Targa did even better, earning a 56 percent premium over its HPG value. The podcast leak was well-timed, then. One commenter even called it “marketing genius.”

Really, though? Was it? If you’re attaching a famous name to a car in order to help it sell, why not just put it in the listing to begin with? Why, instead of that, would you rely on people to listen to Spotify at just the right time, then put two and two together to bid on the right car with a matter of hours to spare? Maybe he left it out at first on purpose, then just changed his mind and spilled the beans for the heck of it. Jerry Seinfeld (est. net worth: $925M) hardly needs the money, after all.

Regardless, the price here shows that the Seinfeld premium is real, even if it was presented in an odd way and even if, as my colleague Rick Carey says of Steve McQueen’s cars when they inevitably sell for inexplicable sums, “they’re just paying for his butt print!”