5 Cars You Could Buy For The Same Price As These Outrageous Paint Options

1. Audi customised paint finishes

If you want to have an Audi A8 or S8 - or any Audi, for that matter - painted in a custom colour (a regular metallic finish is pictured above), you’ll need to stump up a cool £2000. That’s quite a figure, especially considering that you could buy a used ‘D2’ A8 for the same amount.

You could even buy an S8 if you don’t mind galactic mileage. Not the most sensible of purchases, granted, but one of these 340bhp barges would let you live out your dreams of being that chubby bloke from Ronin who’s a rather excellent wheelman.

2. Mercedes-AMG GT 'AMG Solarbeam'

Merc’s new AMG GT looks brilliant if you spec it in the ‘AMG Solarbeam’. However, this handsome splash of yellow paint ain’t cheap. At £10,695, it’s over 10 times the amount of most of the AMG GT’s other paint options. It’s also more than enough to buy a whole AMG Mercedes on its own, like a CLK 55 AMG.

So what do you get for the price of your AMG GT paint option? Quite a bit, it turns out. There’s the pretty coupe body, a luxurious interior (this is more of a fast cruiser than an out-and-out sports car), and best of all, a thumping great 5.4-litre AMG V8, which produces 367bhp. This gets you from 0-62mph in 5.4 seconds, and on to an electronically-limited top speed of 155mph.

3. BMW - 'Individual Pure Metal Silver'

This chrome-like finish - proudly showcased on an F10 M5 in the image above - is the result of hundreds of thousands of ‘ultra-thin aluminium flakes’ in the mix. Finishing a car in this stuff is a labour-intensive job, and the car is removed from the production line to get it done. As a result, it’s expensive: £6400 in the UK, €8000 in much of Europe, or $10,300 if you’re in the ‘States. So, getting your M5 painted in this colour costs about the same as buying an actual M5.

In the UK, £6000 or so is about enough to get hold of an E39 M5, with a 400bhp N/A 5.0-litre V8 heart and an incredible rear-wheel drive chassis. And the potential for quite a few expensive garage bills. But let’s gloss over that last part…

4. Porsche 918 - Liquid Metal

Once buyers had paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for a Porsche 918, they were then invited to pump the price up further with jolly expensive options. One of these was the option of a ‘Liquid Metal’ paint finish. This finish required nine coats of paint, three clear coats and a hell of a lot of manual labour. The metal particles in the paint are actually aligned, where their placement would normally be random. Of course, this didn’t come cheap: it was a £36,000 option in the UK and $63,000 in the US.

However nicely arranged the particles are, that’s an incredible figure. For the same price, you could bag yourself a low-mileage 997-generation 911 Carrera, and have a 379bhp 3.8-litre flat-six to play with.

5. Bentley - Personalised Satin

As a luxury car brand, Bentley offers a massive list of options to turn the posh levels way up to 11. The choice extends to colour. If you don’t fancy any of the 120 different options the British company offers, it’ll colour match literally any item and paint your car that shade.

To account for the curvature of the body shell, the cars are hand-sprayed in different depths to make everything look even, and the finished article is polished with lamb’s wool for 12 hours. 12. If you’re going for a personal colour, solid and metallic finishes will set you back £7210, but if you’re feeling more flush, a satin finish is available for £24,320 on a Continental GT (pictured above with a less fancy paint finish). Remarkably, that’s about what you’d pay for a used Continental.

Of course, for that amount of money you’ll only get an early first-generation model with a W12 - the brilliant V8 and V8 S versions didn’t arrive until the second-generation. But with 552bhp on tap, they’re incredibly quick, even with that two-and-a-bit tonne kerb weight.

*Any other ludicrously expensive paint options you think deserve a mention? Hit the comments with your suggestions! *