If you were rich enough to drive any car you wanted, absolutely any car, and money is no object, what would you go for? A Lamborghini, Bugatti, Mercedes, Aston Martin, or how about something outrageous like a Formula 1 car.
But what if you were truly rich, not just “getting by” like Bill Gates or Sir Richard Branson, but truly rich. The Sultan of Brunei is the richest man on earth; he is not counted on rich lists because he does not earn his money it comes from his tiny country’s oil reserves which are essentially his. Estimates of his wealth pop up from time to time but the truth is that no one really knows how much money he has.
So which car do you think the richest man in the world drives, well if you said Lamborghini, you’d be correct, if you said Aston Martin that would be right too, and if you guessed F1 Race-car you would have been nearly right because he owns every F1 championship winning car for the last thirty years.
These cars fit very nicely into his garage which is a bit bigger than your garage at home, it has to be to be able to accommodate the estimated 5000 personal vehicles owned by the Sultan. If he picked one car to drive down to his local corner café for bread and milk each day, it would take him thirteen and a half years to use each one.
He seems to quite like the Rolls Royce range he has over 500 hundred of those, if you tried unsuccessfully to buy a Rolls during the 1990’s that would be because he accounted for over half of their entire sales for that decade.
His collection, which may well be far more than 5000 vehicles, is estimated to have cost over US$4 billion. Filling them all up may be a little expensive, at $1 per litre that’s estimated at a minimum of half a million US dollars.
Those that voted for the Lamborghini will be happy to know that he has 20 of those, but he seems to prefer the sleeker appearance of the Ferrari’s as he opted for 367 of those, Jaguars are nice little run-arounds, all 177 of them, as are the 362 Bentleys.
He’s also not into buying boring, run-of-the-mill BMW’s (185 of them) and likes something a bit more exotic such as the Bentley Dominator 4X4 and Bentley Java, Ferrari FX (6), the worlds only right hand drive Mercedes CLK-GTR and the Cizeta Moroder V16T (3).
Added to the burden of deciding which car to use each day a visitor of the sultan’s garage’s once said: “It can take an hour and a half just to get a certain car out if it’s been parked right at the back.”
