There ‘Auto' Be A Law For This Hot Rod

A Bugatti supercar just sold for $10.7 million more than the first super car I owned.

There are two types of people in the world: those who love everything about cars and those who go through life without ever using Lava bar soap to remove grease from their hands.

And while I love the name – a lot – I have never used a bar of Lava.

But even a non-car guy like me took notice recently when Bugatti, a French luxury hyper-sports car manufacturer, sold its last purely gas-powered supercar for $10.7 million at auction in Paris. That sounds like an excessive amount of money, but in all fairness, the car did come with a full tank of gas. So there’s that.

The one-of-a-kind Bugatti Chiron Profilée – great name! – went for about $5 million more than its pre-auction estimate at RM Sotheby’s Paris collector car auction, a record for the sale of a new car. The old record? A Ferrari LaFerrari Apertar sold for about $9 million in 2017.

Coincidentally, the last new car I bought was also in 2017, but for considerably less than $9 million. Even so, the sticker price of my purchase gave me pause. You see, I’ve been, for most of my life, a used-car kind of guy.

The impressively large front end of the Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale.

Derek Hudson/Getty Images

It all started on a fateful day in 1981, a million years ago, for sure, yet so near I can still smell the Simoniz wax the dealership rubbed on what would be my first car, a 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale.

She was a sled. A big, green-and-white beast of a car, so outrageously enormous you didn’t really drive her as much as you pointed her in a desired direction and hoped for the best.

This Detroit City monster handled much like a blimp, floating around corners in a wide, meandering way that made sidewalk-using pedestrians nervous. More than once, I saw parents pull their children close to them out of concern as I maneuvered a left turn.

I didn’t blame them. Anything that big and that unyielding really could have used a skipper and not some dopey kid swallowed up by the front seat of a car the size of New Jersey – and only slightly more fuel efficient than the Garden State.

And yet, there I was, behind the wheel of that glorious Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale as happy as a boy could be behind the wheel of his first car. Let’s pump the brakes for a moment to appreciate not the car, but the car’s name. An Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale. Seriously. As if this whale of a four-wheeled wonder wasn’t impressive enough, Oldsmobile decided to slap on “Royale” just to make sure you understood the grandeur of your ride.

Thank you, GM, but the first time I saw her at Menchs’ Auto, a pristine beauty parked under the fluttering, multi-colored plastic used car lot flags, shining so gloriously green that St. Patrick himself would have bought her, I knew we were destined to be a royale couple.

Of course, the Old Man was there to give me his opinion, and, more importantly, to float me a loan. Dad was a seasoned veteran of Large Car Shopping, having owned a fleet of American-made behemoths during his lifetime.

When he kicked those balding, white-walled tires and popped the hood just to make sure an engine was part of the deal, I felt reassured. My first car, Dad approved.

I have forgotten many important details in my life – birthdays, anniversaries, bank account passwords – and yet I clearly remember the Old Man pulling out $800 from his wallet so the Oldsmobile could be mine.

The Delta 88 was a vestige of a long-gone era of cheap gas, which is why I got her for a song. While all my friends were buying smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, I was happily sailing the Queen Mary. My best friend at the time owned a Renault Le Car, a pipsqueak of a hatchback so puny it could have fit in the Delta 88 Royale’s trunk, if I moved the spare tire.

Alas, after a few years, I succumbed to economic reality, trading in the Delta 88 Royale for a smaller, more fuel-efficient car. And just like that, the Royale wedding ended in divorce, with me seduced by a younger, shapelier model.

On April 29, 2004, the last Oldsmobile rolled off the assembly line at the Lansing Car Assembly plant in Michigan, signaling the end of the 106-year-old automotive brand, America’s oldest.

I’m not sure where I was that day. No matter. I know where I will always be when looking back at my first car, the titanic Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale – trying unsuccessfully to parallel park that lovable beast.