VW Phaeton W12
Why 7.6: A W12 built to rival S-Classes and 7 Series, sold at a price no luxury buyer wanted attached to a VW badge — and it cratered accordingly. What's left is a genuinely engineered flagship for the price of a used Golf, and the people who buy one at that price are keeping it, not flipping it.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €88k (2004) → €14k (2026), trending down · illustrative data
The long version
Volkswagen built this to prove it could out-engineer Mercedes and Audi on their own turf, shared underpinnings with the Bentley Continental, and priced it like a Volkswagen anyway — a combination that guaranteed commercial failure and, twenty years later, guarantees a remarkable used-car bargain. Depreciation did what marketing couldn't: it found the car an audience of people who wanted a genuine flagship and didn't care that the badge says VW, and that audience drives the thing daily instead of trailering it. Nobody flips a fifteen-thousand-dollar W12 sedan for profit; they just enjoy that it exists at all.