An Underwhelming Number for the Auction House
We reported on the fact that the Harley Electra Glide owned by the late and great Elvis Presley would be going to auction. Now the bike has sold, and it went for far less than was expected. The motorcycle was thought to pull in somewhere around $2 million, but buyers wouldn’t bid more than $800,000, which is what the bike sold for.
Despite all the hype around the sale of the bike, $800,000 is still a huge sum of money. It actually makes the Harley the third most expensive bike ever sold at auction. Still, I can’t imagine the auction house or the seller of the motorcycle were very pleased with the results.
Elvis bought the bike back in 1976, less than a year of his tragic death. He had Harley-Davidson do up a special version of the Electra Glide for him. The bespoke paint job and the fact that it’s the last bike The King ever bought make it historically significant. However, buyers must have thought it wasn’t significant enough.
The record holder for the most expensive bike ever sold at an auction is the 1951 Vincent Black Shadow that went for $929,000 in 2018, according to RideApart. It was the bike that Australian Jake Ehret set a world speed record on in 1954.