A Rare Chance for Ferrari Aficionados to Own a Classic Model With Virtually No Miles

If you like your Ferrari purchases to have only delivery miles on them, this sale might be for you.

What RM Sotheby’s is calling the Factory Fresh Collection includes 17 Ferraris, many barely driven, as well as a rare Jaguar XJ220 supercar, a highly desirable E-Type roadster, and a Bentley Turbo R Drophead Coupé. The auction takes place at Marlborough House in London on Nov. 4, coinciding with the famous London to Brighton run for pre-1905 veteran cars the next day.

Pride of the Factory Fresh collection is this 1994 Ferrari 512 TR Spider with just 570 kilometers recorded.
OneSavage/sgcarshoot, courtesy of RM Sotheby’s

The star of the collection is probably the 1994 Ferrari 512 TR Spider, just one of three built that year, and the only one in its combination of Blu Cobalto paint and Blu Scuro Connolly leather interior. The odometer shows just 570 kilometres (354 miles). In keeping with the as-delivered theme, the car comes with its service book, technical manual, and a spare key. Provided it’s been serviced for the road, the owner will in effect be getting a new car. The estimate is £2.1 million to £2.7 million (US$2.56 million to US$3.3 million).

“This a truly remarkable collection,” Peter Haynes, RM Sotheby’s marketing and communications director for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), tells Penta. “There are some very rare cars in their own right, but the standout feature across the majority of the cars is the very low mileage—barely driven in some cases. My personal highlights include the 1994 Ferrari 512 TR Spyder which is one of just three in existence, in addition to the 1992 Ferrari Mondial T, which reads a hardly believable one kilometre on the odometer.”There are two other 512 TRs in the collection, a 1992 (also blue) and a second 1992 in U.K. specification (right-hand drive) with only 3,904 miles recorded. The first of these has a high estimate of £275,000 and the second £320,000.

The 1990 Ferrari Testarossa has just 161 kilometres on the odometer.
Courtesy of RM Sotheby’s

The 1990 Ferrari Testarossa has a surreal 160 kilometres, and is one of just 438 built in right-hand drive. The high estimate is £200,000. The 2001 Ferrari 550 Barchetta Pininfarina (high estimate £350,000) was one of 48 built with drive on the right side, and has traveled only 220 kilometers. One of the two 2008 599 GTB Fioranos has covered only 267 kilometers—making it one of the lowest-mileage in existence. Its high estimate is £180,000.

The Bentley Turbo R Drophead is a performance-oriented convertible.
Robert Cooper, courtesy of RM Sotheby’s

Other Ferraris in the collection with their recorded mileage: 1994 Mondial T Coupé (one kilometre); 1992 348 TS (130 kilometres); a second 1992 348 TS (179 kilometres); 2007 F430 (104 kilometres); 1994 348 GTB (181 kilometres); 1983 400i (2,743 miles). A highly admired earlier Ferrari is a numbers-matching 1973 Dino 246 GTS by Scaglietti. Its high estimate is £450,000.

The 1993 Jaguar XJ200 two-seater is one of very few built.
(sgcarshoot, courtesy of RM Sotheby’s)

Non-Ferraris include a very rare 1993 Jaguar XJ220, one of 282 produced. In keeping with the sale, it shows only 46 miles on the odometer. It’s been recently recommissioned for spirited driving, and is high-estimated at £425,000. A 1969 Jaguar Series 2 E-Type Roadster is also being auctioned, as is a 1991 Bentley Turbo R Drophead Coupé. The Bentley convertible, which is just out of extensive refurbishment by London specialist P&A Wood, has a high estimate of £475,000.

Buyers have the choice of keeping these cars in the garage—and preserving their low-mileage status—or forgetting about all that and driving them with alacrity.

OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.

The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.

The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.

Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended a United Nations Security Council meeting about AI last week. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.

The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.

In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.

OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.

Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.

Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.

Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.

GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.

“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”

While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.

OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.

AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.

In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.

Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”

An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”

“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.