Tom Hanks has played an astronaut, a war veteran, a marooned FedEx employee, and a man who lived in an airport. At some point between all of that, he also owned what might be the finest open-top Mercedes ever built: a 1971 Mercedes-Benz 280 SE 3.5 Cabriolet. Good taste, it turns out, is not just a character trait. That very car is now going under the hammer at RM Sotheby’s Sealed June auction as Lot 15, currently located in Costa Mesa, California.
The current owner bought it from Hanks and Rita Wilson in 2014, promptly stripped it to bare metal, and restored it in its original livery of Tobacco Brown over Cognac leather, with all brightwork and woodwork refinished to period specification. Since the restoration, the car has covered just over 700 miles, and it looks the part completely.
How much would a Mercedes-Benz 280 SE go for?. The highest recorded sale price for a 1971 Mercedes-Benz 280 SE 3.5 Cabriolet was $676,000, reached in August 2022, with the floor sitting around $106,000 for lesser examples. A fully restored, celebrity-owned Cabriolet in correct colours sits comfortably in the $300,000–$500,000 territory once you factor in the Hollywood premium. No official estimate has been published, but if Tom Hanks’s name wasn’t on the provenance sheet, that would already feel like a bargain.
What makes the car worth it? Under the hood sits a 3.5-liter SOHC V8 with Bosch electronic fuel injection producing 200 hp, mated to a 4-speed automatic, and good for 0–60 mph in 9.5 seconds and a top speed approaching 125 mph. These were numbers that embarrassed many sports cars of the era. Only 1,232 of these Cabriolets were ever built across the 1970–71 model years. This is genuinely the last of the hand-finished Mercedes flagships. It’s got Paul Bracq’s bodywork, the walnut wood trim, the hand-stitched leather and none of it was done by robots.
For similar money you could have a special-edition Porsche 911 or a new Ferrari. But none of those came with a two-Oscar winner’s name attached. Life is like a box of chocolates, and this one is clearly the good kind.
