Source: MSNBC
A second-hand car once said to be registered in the name of Joseph Kardinal Ratzinger — the new Pope Benedict – is up for sale on eBay and the sky seems to be the limit when it comes to bidding.
The vehicle, a metallic grey 1999 Volkswagen Golf, went up for auction on the eBay German web site at a minimum price of 9,900 euros ($12,790) on Wednesday and, just over 24 hours and more than 300 bids later, the price had hit one million euros ($1.3 million).
German Web site n-tv.de identified the seller as Benjamin Halbe, 21, from the town of Olpe in Germany’s Sauerland region, who said he bought the car from a local dealer in January.
The web site of the German newspaper Bild quoted an eBay spokeswoman in Germany as saying the online auctioneer had checked with the vehicle licensing office which had confirmed the name of the original owner was genuine.
“Does black smoke or white smoke come out of the exhaust pipe?” one posting on the site asked – a reference to the signal used at the Vatican to show whether a new pope has been elected by the secret conclave of cardinals.
“Very funny,” was the reply.
The MSNBC article didn’t list the eBay item number or have a link to the auction for the car.
Since my German is quite terrible, I enlisted the help of the web site PROMT-Online to help me with the translation of the German eBay web site.
Guess what? I found it!
Here is the link to the auction. It is in German. The eBay item number is 4545301886. You can find it by searching in the regular US version of eBay at www.ebay.com, however, like the German site, the auction is all in German.
As of about 6:20 p.m. Pacific time, the auction has had 116 bids and is at approximately $59,667.34 US dollars or 46,150.00 euros. I’m not sure where the $1 million bid is coming from. It certainly doesn’t reflect the current price on the auction site.
Just in case you’re in the US and you want to bid, please note the Seller will arrange for local pickup only, no shipping.