Most enthusiasts can rattle off the ownership dramas at Alfa Romeo or Maserati without much thought, but De Tomaso’s story is stranger and far less told. The Modena marque that once built the Ford-powered Pantera went into voluntary liquidation in 2004, its factory equipment sitting untouched for years while lawyers sorted out what remained of founder Alejandro de Tomaso’s estate. Two decades later, a Hong Kong-backed ownership group has finally delivered a customer car again, and the vintage models that carried the badge through its lean years are quietly becoming one of the more interesting corners of the collector market.
A Liquidation, Then Nothing, Then a Convicted Buyer
Alejandro de Tomaso died in 2003, and the company he had run on and off since 1959 filed for voluntary liquidation in June 2004, with the Guarà coupe as its last production model. For five years the Modena workshop sat effectively abandoned. The brand didn’t find a buyer until 2009, when Italian businessman Gian Mario Rossignolo purchased the trademark and set up De Tomaso Automobili SpA with plans to build cars at facilities in Livorno and Grugliasco. That attempt collapsed in 2012 when Rossignolo was arrested and later convicted for misappropriating roughly €7.5 million in Italian government development funds meant for the relaunch, according to reporting on the case at the time. The name went back on the shelf.
A more durable buyer emerged in 2014 and 2015, when Hong Kong-based investment firm Ideal Team Ventures acquired the De Tomaso brand for €1.05 million, installing Norman Choi as chairman. That deal is the one that stuck. The company’s own legacy pages describe the original mission as building “high-performance sports cars that combined the romance of Italian styling with precision engineering,” a line the current ownership has used to frame everything it has built since.
The P72 Took Seven Years to Reach a Single Customer
Ideal Team Ventures unveiled the retro-bodied P72 at the 2019 Goodwood Festival of Speed, promising a run of 72 examples powered by a supercharged 5.0-liter Ford-based V8 making 700 horsepower and 605 pound-feet, sent through a six-speed manual with no dual-clutch option and no touchscreen in the cabin. Getting from that debut to an actual delivery took far longer than the company projected. The first customer car, a deep blue commission nicknamed “Aurelian Night,” was handed over in June 2026, nearly seven years after the concept’s reveal, according to coverage of the delivery. Pricing starts around $1.8 million before options and taxes.
The relaunch has not been without turbulence. In a December 2024 statement, De Tomaso Automobili publicly addressed allegations raised by a former consultant, calling the claims “unfounded and lacking factual support” and noting it had filed for summary judgment against them the previous month. The company used the same press release to reiterate that it remained “steadfast in its mission to craft iconic machines that push the boundaries of automotive design,” while confirming the P72 program was continuing toward its first deliveries.
What the Vintage Market Is Actually Doing
The more measurable evidence of renewed interest is showing up in what people will pay for the cars that kept the badge alive between 1971 and 1992. Market tracking site Classic.com currently lists an average Pantera transaction price near $116,678 across recent sales, with benchmark values running from roughly $109,893 for a standard car up to $213,305 for a GT5-S and over $300,000 for the rare 90 Si variant. Fifteen were listed for sale on the platform at the time of writing, out of 128 tracked listings overall.
A single sale this spring put a number on that momentum that even casual observers noticed. Ford CEO Jim Farley bought a 1972 Pantera in 2024 for roughly $121,000, then sold it on Bring a Trailer for $293,000 when the auction closed on April 16, 2026, a gain of about 142 percent according to reporting on the sale. That kind of swing in under two years is unusual for a fifty-year-old car whose values had been comparatively flat for much of the 2010s.
Why Collectors Are Paying Closer Attention Now
None of this means De Tomaso has fully arrived. A single-digit annual production run of a seven-figure hypercar doesn’t move a market on its own, and the brand’s ownership history is littered with false starts that make longtime watchers understandably cautious. But the combination of a functioning factory finally shipping a real car, a company willing to put its name on legal disputes rather than quietly settling them, and vintage Panteras climbing in value at auction all point the same direction. Serious collectors tend to move early on brands with this kind of story, buying the classic cars before a revived nameplate’s halo effect fully kicks in. Whether De Tomaso’s current ownership can sustain deliveries past its first handful of P72s will decide if that bet pays off, but the vintage side of the ledger is already behaving like people expect it to.