They call it “provenance”: cars that have been owned or driven by celebrities, and they tend to sell at a premium. This humble little Kia Cee’d, then, ought to be worth big bucks. But it’s listed on AutoTrader in the UK for just £4,500.
That’s because this is a “reasonably priced car” in every sense of the term. The hatchback you see here was used by numerous celebrity guests who appeared on the original Top Gear between 2010 and 2013.
Those include A-listers like Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Michael Fassbender and Rowan Atkinson. But if you look closely at the listing, you’ll notice that this car has an automatic transmission (and may even be the same one we saw on eBay recently). Most guests used the one with the manual, so we would deduce that this vehicle might have been driven by hip-hop artist Will.I.Am, actress Amber Heard, rock legend Alice Cooper and Labor politician Lord John Prescott.
The real provenance of this car, though, may be the role it played on the show more than the individual celebrities that drove it. Now if you’re thinking that it’s been put through the ringer, you’re right – it has. But it’s also been well maintained and even has a full roll cage and set of racing buckets with harnesses.
“Everyone tells you to look for a car with one careful owner, but you could be forgiven for worrying when that one owner is Top Gear, and we have clear TV evidence of the extreme driving behavior this particular car has endured,” noted Auto Trader editor Andy Pringle. “That said, this is probably the best maintained Kia Cee’d on the planet – and having been entrusted with the lives of some of the world’s biggest stars– its full KIA service history and low mileage could offer something different for a buyer who’s on the lookout for arguably the most famous Cee’d in the world.”
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