Jay Leno doesn’t just buy cars—he rescues them. From barn finds covered in dust to forgotten classics rusting in backyards, he sees potential where others don’t. Instead of lowballing sellers, he pays for honesty. That’s how Jay Leno built one of the world’s most valuable car collections, one abandoned project at a time.
Leno is the patron saint of classic car collectors. His collection includes 185 cars, packed with rare and exceptional finds. Dupont Registry valued Jay Leno’s collection at $53 million a few years ago. But some experts now estimate it’s worth closer to $100 million.
How does Leno land such good investments at such low prices? You might picture him hunting down pristine examples, then haggling to get them for bottom dollar. But that’s not his style. Leno focuses on unique cars—especially the ones nobody else wants. Even when their value climbs, he keeps them. He said, “I just never sell anything.”
Take the 1962 Maserati 3500 GTi coupe in Jay Leno’s collection. He found it in a barn. It wasn’t worth much because it was fuel-injected, and those models were notoriously harder to maintain than carbureted versions. Leno paid $20,000 and hired mechanics for a year of work—to the tune of another $20,000—to restore it. Once it was running, he didn’t need to touch it again. Today, it’s worth well over $100,000.
His Lamborghini Miuras were in even worse shape. One owner gave up on the car entirely. It was parked in his yard, and his wife begged him to call Jay to haul it away. Leno explained that back then, “You couldn’t just call the factory and order parts.” He joked you needed “a friend who spoke Italian, and probably lived in Italy,” just to track them down. But he restored both Miuras, and now they’re worth over $1 million each.
Jay Leno doesn’t inspect new cars for his collection
So does Leno inspect cars before adding them to his collection? Not really. Leno said, “The stuff I’m looking for, there aren’t any, so if you find even the pieces of one, you buy them.”
He shared another example: “I have a Doble steam car. They only built 40 of them. I have two of them. Okay, if you find one it doesn’t matter what condition it’s in. Just buy it because you’re not gonna find another one.”
When he finds what he wants, does he haggle? Almost never. “If the car is what they say it is, I usually pay the price.”
In fact, Leno said he’ll even pay extra for honesty. “I’ll say, ‘look I’ll pay you a price, just tell me what’s wrong with it.’” That makes sense when most of your cars are major projects. You don’t want a seller “forgetting” any problems just to squeeze more money out of you. You’d rather know the truth going in.
So why does he spend so much time and money on cars that need so much work? Jay Leno loves unique, even unloved cars and calls his collection “Kinetic artwork.”
Watch Jay Leno explain his process in this video:
