As the seasons come and go, so do the listings for super-clean, highly coveted fourth-generation Toyota Supras on Bring a Trailer—each a startling reminder of just how expensive our dream cars have become. Meet the latest installment in that series: this manual, twin-turbocharged, one-owner 1997 Toyota Supra.
Right now is about the time when a tired joke about how beautiful things cost a pretty penny would flow well, but we’ll save you the clichés.
This 1997 Supra, shared on Sunday by Carscoops, has a few days left on Bring a Trailer and is already at a bid of $60,000. In addition to its famous twin-turbo, 2JZ inline-six engine rated at 320 horsepower when new and six-speed manual transmission, the listing says the car comes with 17-inch wheels, “nearly new” tires, special-edition 15th-anniversary badges and a clean Carfax.
The listing says the car was purchased new by the seller in Oregon, for a listed MSRP of $40,320 on the window sticker included in the sale. Since then, the owner has put 62,500 miles on the garage-kept car, but reported to Bring a Trailer that it hasn’t been used on track.
There are three days left in the auction for this Supra, and its price is sure to skyrocket as it gets closer to expiration. How far it will skyrocket, though, is the real question.
Somehow, before we all aged 15 years over the course of two, there was a time when a clean, roughly 60,000-mile 1997 Supra would fetch $58,000 on Bring a Trailer and be done with it. Now, it’s hard to tell what anything with “fourth-generation” and “Supra” in its name will sell for—auction results on Bring a Trailer show Supra prices creeping upward, with some auctioning for more a modest tens of thousands, and others far surpassing the six-figure threshold.
The five highest Supra sales on Bring a Trailer are all fourth-gen models that sold within the past year or so, even, ranging from $77,000 to $128,000. That doesn’t even include the RM Sotheby’s auction of a 1994 Supra for $173,600.
It’s hard to know exactly what this Supra will sell for, given the massive range the market currently has. But perhaps that’s a good thing, because if fourth-gen Supra listings are no longer in a practical price range—something that can give normal folks hope that they could have one, if only they spent their next vehicle budget on a fun car instead of a new, fancy family SUV—they might as well be an enjoyable thing to bet on as the auctions wind down.
Let’s fire up that game of over-under already, shall we?