This New 1998 BMW 740i Has Been in a Bubble for Two Decades, and Now It’s Finally for Sale
Time to burst that bubble.
If you're in the market for a brand-new BMW 7 Series but would rather have a car from the automaker's Ultimate Driving Machine era than one from the electrified age, you're in unusually good luck. This 1998 740i preserved in a complete plastic enclosure has just popped up for sale on German eBay.
Little is known about this Bimmer-in-a-bubble beyond what's specified in its eBay.de listing, posted Saturday. According to the seller, a German registration document dated 1997 shows this car was briefly owned by a woman born in 1927. What happened after the car's registration is unclear, but the original owner's tenure was evidently very brief because the car found its way to its current location in Gogolin Slaski, Poland with just 255 kilometers (158 miles) on the odometer. At some point, the car was committed to "an air capsule with mechanical air circulation," which prevented so much as a speck of dust from landing on its paint over the years.
With so little mileage, this 740i's powertrain—a 4.4-liter M62B44 V8 and a five-speed ZF automatic going by the photos—won't even be broken in, meaning whoever ends up owning this car will get the authentic '90s new-car experience. It won't be an experience most people can afford, however, because this pearl of an E38 has already been bid to €55,150 ($60,000) with six days remaining. That pricing alone puts it out of reach for most people, regardless of whether this whole pandemic thing has cost them their livelihood.
Edit: This article has been corrected to retract a mistranslation that led us to believe the seller will not ship the car to the United States or Japan. They have since clarified in their ad that the translated passage referred to the car's origin.
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