Here Are the Must-See Cars from the World's Fanciest Car Show

Motor Trend

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Interesting and unique vehicles that caught our eyes at the 2025 Pebble Beach Concours D'Elegance.
Scott Evans Writer, Photographer Aug 19, 2025
A fundamental shift years in the making is underway at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance. This year featured more post-World War II cars and fewer pre-war cars than ever before, and by a wide margin. The cars the collective we choose to collect and show are changing, and the Concours is finally changing with them. Even so, the Concours people continued to root out the most interesting, unusual, and often forgotten old vehicles for this year's show. Here are our favorites.
The 2025 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance showcased unique post-WWII and pre-war cars. Highlights included a 1924 Hispano-Suiza, 1948 Chrysler, 1962 Shelby Cobra, and 1965 Lamborghini. The event celebrated automotive history with rare models and special classes.
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We can start nowhere but with the 2025 Best in Show winner. Known as the 'Tulipwood Torpedo' despite being constructed very much of Mahogany, it has to be seen to be believed. Held together by roughly 8,500 rivets, the paneled body is a masterpiece of woodworking. As soon as we saw it, we knew it had a serious shot at taking the overall win. Concours judges love pre-war cars (and naming a post-war car Best in Show caused widespread pearl clutching a few years back), so it was no surprise this car beat out 228 other entrants for top honors.
Lest you may have forgotten, Lancia didn't only build little sports cars. The Italian engineering powerhouse once built big cars, too. The dual model year refers to the fact it was originally built in 1937 and rebodied in 1947 by coachbuilder Stabilimenti Farina under the direction of Giovanni Michelotti. A one-off, it represents a brief avant-garde period in Italian design immediately post-war. The swing-up wheel fairings (for changing a tire) put this one over the top. That, and the fact they still put hubcaps on the wheels despite hiding them.
One of the many special classes this year celebrated the 'woody' craze in American coachbuilding in the late 1940s. Picking just one was difficult, but we had to go with actor Leo Carrillo's '48 Chrysler. Gifted to him by the automaker in the color of his favorite Palomino horse, Carrillo had a taxidermy Texas Longhorn steer head mounted on the hood. The steer's eyes light up when you turn on the headlights.
Also celebrated with a special class this year was automotive design legend Virgil Exner. His semi-self-titled XNR concept is considered his magnum opus, but there was another star in the wings. It's unclear whether Exner actually sketched the initial design for this car or his longtime partners at coachbuilder Ghia did it entirely in-house based on his style. Regardless, it's a stunning piece of late Rocket Age car design despite being a bit toned-down compared to the XNR.
This one's complicated. Count Giovanni Volpi di Misurata owned the Serenissima racing team and supported a number of former Ferrari engineers who left the company to build their own race cars. This support pissed off Enzo Ferrari, who cut off the Count. Around the same time, Alejandro de Tomaso, who would go on to found De Tomaso, had just bought coachbuilder Ghia. The Count needed cars, and his friend de Tomaso needed a new sports car from Ghia. The latter called in American designer Tom Tjaarda, who worked off the De Tomaso Mangusta design to create the Serenissima GT. The business plan didn't work out, and the car never went into production.
Another special class this year celebrated the centennial anniversary of Chrysler, and the Thunderbolt stole the class. One of five built in 1941 to get Chrysler back on track after the Airflow flop and the Great Depression, it features a number of engineering innovations. It was the first car ever with a power-folding hardtop, as well as the first with a power-operated trunk lid. It also featured the first Chrysler Fluid Drive three-speed automatic years before that went into production. Finally, it was the first to feature a one-piece curved windshield. Built by coachbuilder LeBaron as the company's swan song, each is slightly different.
There are several times as many Cobra kit cars as there are real Cobras and it's cheapened the brand somewhat. Seeing a real one is still special, though, especially when it's the second one ever built. Ol' Shel dropped a Ford 260-cubic-inch pushrod V-8 (later upgraded by Shelby American to a 289) into a British AC Cobra body and chassis and wrote himself into the history books a third time (he was also a successful military test pilot and race car driver prior to building cars). The prototype was repainted several times between public showings to convince potential buyers and investors the company had more than one car ready to sell. This is the first production model.
DB5s get all the love thanks to the James Bond franchise, but we were drawn to this DB2 set up for rally racing. The DB2 was the big-engine successor to the 2-Liter Sports, known retroactively as the DB1. Success in European sports car racing saw the company lean into performance models, starting with the DB3.
Named 'Pollyanna' by original owner Barbara Toy, an Australian actress, playwright, and author, this Series I is a record-setter. Toy set off to visit a friend in Baghdad and just kept going until she'd circumnavigated the entire planet. She became the first person to do so in a Land Rover, and Pollyanna was the first Land Rover to complete the journey.
Wedge-shaped Lamborghinis get all the love, so much so people often forget the company started out making big, front-engine touring cars. Yes, the Miura and Countach changed all that, but the 350 GT got Ferruccio's fledgling Ferrari competitor off the ground. Initially designed by racing legend Giotto Bizzarrini before he left to start his own company and finished by another racing legend, Giampaolo Dallara, before he started his own company, the 350 GT—along with some clever marketing by Ferruccio Lamborghini in the form of a made-up feud with Enzo Ferrari—put the new supercar company on the map despite only selling 120 copies.
Post-war BMW wasn't the company we know today. Getting back on its feet was a much slower process than for rival Mercedes-Benz, which at this time had just come out with the legendary 300SL. Famous American importer Max Hoffman leaned on BMW to respond, and they did so with the 507. Hoffman thought he could sell 5,000 per year in America alone, and with Elvis Presley ordering two, it seemed like success was all but guaranteed. High production costs drove the price through the roof, and eventually only 252 cars were sold. The project nearly bankrupted BMW, which lost money on every one. This led directly to the Quandt family taking a controlling interest in BMW, which it still holds today.
Sometimes, odd one-off requests lead to major trends. San Francisco restaurateur Al Williams, proprietor of the Papagayo Room Mexican restaurant at the Fairfield San Francisco, wanted a car that could accommodate his Great Dane. Ghia came up with a hatchback and a folding rear seat, an industry first. Famous Fiat tuner and racer, Carlo Abarth, would help with the design and tuning, which cleverly works the Alfa Romeo shield motif into both the grille and the headlights.
This year also marks the centennial of the Rolls-Royce Phantom, and this first-generation car is special. The 'Brewster' portion of its name refers to the coachbuilder and tells us this car was made not in England, but in America. From 1919 to 1934, Rolls-Royce operated its only foreign factory in Springfield, Massachusetts, with bodywork done by coachbuilder Brewster in Long Island City, a neighborhood of New York City. Bare chassis fitted with just a wooden seat, an engine, and a steering wheel were driven 140 miles from Springfield to Queens to be finished by Brewster before the Great Depression ended the entire enterprise.
Another of Ghia's collaborations with Chrysler and Virgil Exner, the DeSoto Adventurer II concept was originally designed by Ghia and reworked by Exner to fit it on a DeSoto chassis, giving it its trademark dramatic length. The technical highlight is an early prototype for the power sunroof, in this case the rear window which rolls down into the trunk for an open air feel without all the wind and noise. It never made it to the production Adventurer range, and DeSoto was shut down just six years later.
Mercedes-Benz claims to have invented the automobile (debatable) and the sports car, too. In 1907, the Prinz Heinrich Tour was organized as one of the first sanctioned European automobile races. In 1908, a 50-hp Benz won and the company celebrated by building and selling the Benz 21/80 Prinz Heinrich Rennwagen model. A road-going competition car, it's generally considered the first sports car.
Siata (Società Italiana Auto Trasformazioni Accessori, or Italian Car Transformation Accessories Company) started as a tuning shop back in 1926, but after the war, it tried making cars all of its own. The 208 CS coupe and 208 S convertible were the company's third model line, with the convertible being more popular. This coupe, bodied by coachbuilder Balbo, is just one of 18 built.
If you want drama, read up on Ruxton. It was originally conceived as a way to show off a new front-wheel drive powertrain designed by automotive parts supplier Edmund G. Budd engineer William J. Muller. The prototype was built by the Hupp Automobile Company, and eliminating the front-to-rear driveshaft let the body sit much lower than contemporary cars, giving it a far sleeker look. A Budd investor, Archie Andrews, then gets involved and more or less steals the car with the intent to manufacture it rather than license the powertrain. He goes through multiple potential manufacturing partners before landing a somewhat stable deal with Moon Motors Car Company. He names it Ruxton after investment banker William V.C. Ruxton, who he hoped would be an investor but instead sued. All of 96 were built before the whole thing went under, many painted in vivid ombre schemes by famous scene painter Joseph Urban. The headlights are as useless as they look.
The cherry tomato on top of an excellent show. Giovanni Moretti (no relation to the Moretti brewery) wanted to build motorcycles, but he eventually got into commercial vehicles and passenger cars. In the 1950s, the company started building small city cars and sports cars, with the 750 Gran Sport line being the most successful. Offered as a coupe, convertible, sedan, wagon, and even commercial vehicle, bodies were designed by coachbuilders Zagato and Michelotti. The racing versions saw a bit of racing success but couldn't compete with Fiat in sales. Moretti gave up on building its own cars in the late '50s and switched to customizing Fiats, which lasted until the late '80s.
Were you one of those kids who taught themselves to identify cars at night by their headlights and taillights? I was. I was also one of those kids with a huge box of Hot Wheels and impressive collection of home-made Lego hot rods. I asked my parents for a Power Wheels Porsche 911 for Christmas for years, though the best I got was a pedal-powered tractor. I drove the wheels off it. I used to tell my friends I'd own a 'slug bug' one day. When I was 15, my dad told me he would get me a car on the condition that I had to maintain it. He came back with a rough-around-the-edges 1967 Volkswagen Beetle he'd picked up for something like $600. I drove the wheels off that thing, too, even though it was only slightly faster than the tractor. When I got tired of chasing electrical gremlins (none of which were related to my bitchin' self-installed stereo, thank you very much), I thought I'd move on to something more sensible. I bought a 1986 Pontiac Fiero GT and got my first speeding ticket in that car during the test drive. Not my first-ever ticket, mind you. That came behind the wheel of a Geo Metro hatchback I delivered pizza in during high school. I never planned to have this job. I was actually an aerospace engineering major in college, but calculus and I had a bad breakup. Considering how much better my English grades were than my calculus grades, I decided to stick to my strengths and write instead. When I made the switch, people kept asking me what I wanted to do with my life. I told them I'd like to write for a car magazine someday, not expecting it to actually happen. I figured I'd be in newspapers, maybe a magazine if I was lucky. Then this happened, which was slightly awkward because I grew up reading Car & Driver, but convenient since I don't live in Michigan. Now I just try to make it through the day without adding any more names to the list of people who want to kill me and take my job.
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