A one-of-a-kind 1932 Chrysler CH Imperial Speedster just became the most valuable Chrysler on record, selling for $3,305,000 at RM Sotheby’s Monterey auction, more than doubling the previous mark of $1.6 million set by another Imperial that was sold in 2023.
The car was designed by Chrysler’s Art Department for company founder Walter P. Chrysler himself, based loosely on a sketch that ran in a Fortune magazine article about him in 1929. The factory’s Custom Body Shop constructed the car, which features a stretched hood and pontoon fenders with built-in tool lockers, plus a full-size spare stored in a slide-out tray hidden in the tail.
Chrysler’s engineers dropped in an experimental high-compression aluminum cylinder head good for around 160 horsepower, along with a vacuum-operated automatic clutch and free-wheeling unit years ahead of anything else on the road. It was a concept car before anyone used that term.
The car stayed in the Chrysler family for decades after Walter P.’s death in 1940, eventually getting abandoned in the dunes behind a Provincetown, Massachusetts body shop when storage bills went unpaid. His son, Walter P. Chrysler Jr., traded it to impressionist Angelo Ippolito for $5,000 worth of his art in 1965. Noted car collector Al Nippert purchased it from Ippolito not long after and kept it for 25 years before selling it to Sam and Emily Mann in 1989 for an undisclosed amount.
They restored it and drove it straight to a Best of Show win at the 1991 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. It’s been in the Mann Collection ever since and has been driven regularly over the years. RM Sotheby’s offered it this year as part of the Mann Collection sale, where the nearly century-old car was one of the highlights alongside two other Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance winners and Clark Gable’s 1935 Duesenberg JN Convertible Coupe, which sold for $9,080,000.
