The Last Manual V-12 Lamborghini Cannot Come to America

RM Sotheby’s is selling a 2010 Lamborghini Murciélago LP 670-4 SV without reserve, calling it the last V-12 stick from Sant’Agata. Chassis 4015, one of five known Super Veloce manuals, closes on the house’s Sealed platform at 2 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, August 26.

The Last-Manual Script That Failed in November

Nine months ago the same auction house ran the same product: a sealed sale built around a final gated V-12. The car was a 2012 Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano HGTE, chassis 187007, billed as the last manual Ferrari, estimated at £750,000 to £850,000. Classic.com records the lot as not sold when the sale ended on November 6, 2025.

That 599 was not a clean analog for tonight’s Murciélago. It was right-hand drive, built to Hong Kong spec, and it had a replaced left front fender after a minor crash in Japan. Luca di Montezemolo had signed the sill, and a factory plaque on the parcel shelf read “THE FINAL 599 GTB MANUAL.” The story was strong. The bid was not.

In that catalog, RM Sotheby’s wrote that rising prices for gated 599s had already lifted interest in stick-shift rivals, and it named the Lamborghini Murciélago in that group. The house is now asking the market to finish the sentence it wrote on the last manual Ferrari 599 GTB.

THE CLUTCH PEDAL TIMELINE

1. 2004: Lamborghini unveils e-Gear, a six-speed automated manual with paddles and no clutch pedal, three years into Murciélago production.
2. 2009: The LP 670-4 Super Veloce debuts at Geneva as the run-out Murciélago, with 100 kilograms cut and another 30 horsepower over the LP 640.
3. 2010: Chassis 4015 leaves Sant’Agata Bolognese. RM Sotheby’s believes it is the last manual SV, and therefore the last manual V-12 Lamborghini.
4. 2013: The Gallardo LP 560-2 50th Anniversario becomes the last Lamborghini of any kind sold with a stick.
5. November 6, 2025: RM Sotheby’s sealed sale of Ferrari’s final gated 599 ends without a sale.
6. August 15, 2026: An e-Gear Murciélago SV sells for $3,140,000 at RM Sotheby’s Monterey, a world record on the International Lamborghini Registry’s tally.
7. August 24 to 26, 2026: Chassis 4015 is offered with no reserve as a Sealed lot from Blenheim, Ontario.

The sequence is the wager. Lamborghini spent a decade steering customers off the clutch, then watched the leftover gates become the cars that set the family ceiling. RM Sotheby’s is testing whether “last” still prints when the format already failed once.

Chassis 4015 Carries One of Five Gates

The SV was only the third Lamborghini to wear that badge, after the Miura SV and the Diablo SV. Luc Donckerwolke drew the Murciélago, Audi signed off the engineering, and the LP 670-4 was the last Lamborghini with a steel body and the last with the Bizzarrini-derived V-12 that had powered the Miura. RM Sotheby’s catalog puts the power-to-weight jump at 379 bhp per tonne to 422.

How many SVs exist is still a live argument. Lamborghini planned 350. RM Sotheby’s describes a run of about 300. Classic.com lists 186. A Monterey consignment note on a different SV put the figure near 165. The manual count is tighter and still not fully settled. The house lists five known six-speed cars; some VIN tallies go as high as seven, with two unaccounted for.

WHAT CHASSIS 4015 ACTUALLY STACKS

• The gearbox: A factory six-speed gated manual, one of five documented on the SV, believed by the auction house to be the last to leave the line.
• The color: Ad Personam Marrone Eklipsis, a metallic brown used on 21 run-out Diablo VT 6.0 SEs as the sunset pair to Oro Elios, and on no other SV.
• The wing: The Low Drag package, one of just three, raising top speed from 209 mph to 212 mph instead of the usual Aeropack blade.
• The seats: LP 640 “comfort” chairs in Avorio Lilium with Grigio Phoenix stitching over Marrone Janus Alcantara, ordered because the SV’s carbon race shells were harsh.
• The miles: 7,906 km, about 4,912 miles, at cataloging, with a bill of sale only.

The catalog goes further than a spec sheet. It calls 4015 the best-specified SV and “the most important and iconic modern Lamborghini ever built,” language that does a lot of work on a no-reserve sale.

That small difference completely transforms the character of the LP 670-4 SV, placing the driver at the very heart of one of the most visceral driving experiences of the era.

RM Sotheby’s, catalog notes for chassis 4015

The car is offered without reserve via Sealed, so there is no public estimate to argue with. That is the point of the format. Bidders do not see each other. The house does not have to defend a number. The last comparable in the family already did that job in Monterey.

An E-Gear SV Just Sold for $3.14 Million

Eleven days before this sealed lot opened, RM Sotheby’s sold another 2010 Murciélago LP 670-4 SV at Monterey for $3.14 million. That car, chassis ALA03896, showed 791 miles and used the paddle-shift e-Gear box. The International Lamborghini Registry logged it as a world record. Curated, which helped consign a four-car Lamborghini group that weekend, had previewed a $1.75 million to $2.25 million estimate on that lot. The hammer cleared the high end by almost a million dollars.

The Monterey result reset the model. It also boxed this sale in. If 4015 sells under $3.14 million, the “last manual V-12” claim did not beat a paddle-shift car with one-sixth the miles. If it jumps that figure, the gate just became the most expensive option Lamborghini ever hid in a Murciélago.

A quieter print sits underneath both numbers. Classic.com’s SV market benchmark of $1,411,976 still trails the Monterey hammer by more than double, which tells you how fast the top of this market moved in one weekend.

Why U.S. Collectors Cannot Import This Car

The addendum on the RM Sotheby’s lot is the term that changes who can actually pay. Chassis 4015 was built to European specifications. It does not meet U.S. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards or EPA emissions rules. The house says it cannot be legally imported or registered in the United States for about 10 years, and it will not stand behind any plan to federalize it early.

NHTSA’s own import FAQ is blunt on the clock. It says vehicles at least 25 years old can enter without meeting those safety standards, and that the 25 years run from the date of manufacture, not the model year on a brochure. A 2010 car is not there yet. Show-or-display waivers exist on paper. RM Sotheby’s still warns that this chassis is not eligible now.

The car sits in Blenheim, Ontario, on a temporary import. The winning bidder has to export it under Canadian rules or register it in Canada for good, and every duty, tax, and shipping bill is on the buyer. That knocks the largest collector pool out of easy reach on closing day. Deep U.S. money can still bid. It cannot park the car at home.

That is the objection that keeps surfacing around this listing, and it is sharper than taste arguments about brown paint. A gated SV still startles people who assumed every Super Veloce left the factory with paddles. The rarer fact is the garage. The analog trophy is for sale in a country that is not the country most of the money lives in.

Stick-Shift Murciélagos Already Trade at Double

The premium for a third pedal is not a theory invented for this catalog. Across the Murciélago range, Classic.com’s market benchmarks already put manuals at about twice the automatic money, before anyone says “last V-12.”

Hagerty’s guide for a 2010 SV in #3 Good condition sits at $887,000, up 10.2 percent on the tool’s latest read, and the same page adds 35 percent for a factory manual. Even with that bump, the guide is still a long way under Monterey. Price guides follow sales. They do not lead a no-reserve sealed lot with a one-off color.

So the market has already decided that a gate is worth roughly another car. What it has not decided is whether “the last one” is worth another million on top of a record e-Gear sale, paid by a buyer who may have to keep the thing in Canada or Europe until the 25-year clock runs.

The Sealed Lot Closes Tonight in Ontario

RM Sotheby’s put the pitch on the record on Monday, in the same words the catalog uses.

https://x.com/rmsothebys/status/2091839452620460484

Sealed bidding opened August 24 at 2 p.m. Eastern and ends at the same hour on August 26, 7 p.m. BST. There is still no public hammer as of Wednesday morning. Four other documented SV manuals remain in private hands, and they become the next comps the minute this one trades, or the minute it does not.

The house already knows what an e-Gear SV with 791 miles brought under the lights in Monterey. Tonight’s bids have to live with that number, with last November’s unsold Ferrari, and with a U.S. import door that stays shut for about a decade. Chassis 4015 is the last V-12 Lamborghini the factory is willing to call a stick shift. The sealed envelope is how we find out what that sentence is worth when the largest buyer pool cannot take the car home.