Following the death of O.J. Simpson last week, and with the 30th anniversary of his infamous slow-speed police chase approaching in June, the white Ford Bronco that made that highway run might soon be up for sale.
The vehicle's three owners — Simpson's former agent Michael Gilbert and two friends of original owner Al Cowlings — told cllct Sunday night, with interest surging, now is the time to relinquish one of the most well-known vehicles in American history.
“Before O.J. passed, we had always thought this was going to be the year we were going to sell because it’s the 30th anniversary,” Gilbert said. “Who knows if we are all going to be around for the 35th or the 40th?”
In a conference call with cllct, the three owners said the last offer they received for the 1993 vehicle was $750,000.
Since 2016, the car, which was watched by nearly 100 million people as Simpson was pursued by police, has been on loan to the Alcatraz East Crime Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
The owners said they are looking for at least $1.5 million through a public or private sale.
For 17 years, the SUV was parked in space 144 at a condominium garage in Los Angeles. It then made its way to Las Vegas' Luxor Hotel, which used it briefly to help open a sports museum.
From there, it went to Gilbert’s house. “My wife didn’t like it there,” Gilbert said. "She wanted her parking spot back."
Finally, it moved to Alcatraz East in Tennessee when the owners signed a lease agreement for an undisclosed sum.
It’s an important piece of the museum, which also has the car used in the 1967 film “Bonnie & Clyde,” John Dillinger’s 1933 Red Essex Terraplane and Ted Bundy’s 1968 Volkswagen Beetle.
Celebrity cars have sold for massive sums before. Clark Gable’s Gullwing Mercedes and many of Steve McQueen’s cars have sold for millions. But those vehicles would be worth huge sums without the celebrity name. The Bronco, on its own, is not.
But the Bronco is much more famous than any car in history, perhaps with the exception of the Lincoln Continental limo that President Kennedy was riding in when he was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963.
The highest price paid for a notorious vehicle was for the Ford used by Bonnie and Clyde, which they drove on their infamous crime spree and had 112 bullet holes into it. That car sold to a Las Vegas casino in 1988 for $250,000.
Cowlings' white Bronco is often confused with the same model that Simpson owned. The one that Cowlings was driving on the Los Angeles freeway on June 17, 1994, did, in fact, belong to Simpson's former teammate.
Simpson’s car was taken in for evidence by Los Angeles police. After the LAPD was done tearing it apart, the car — owned by O.J.’s longtime sponsor Hertz — was completely destroyed.
In late 1996, Cowlings originally agreed to sell the car for $75,000 to Startifacts, a celebrity memorabilia shop in Las Vegas. But word was the store's owner was going to use the Bronco to give O.J. Simpson tours in L.A., where he would drive tourists on the freeway and make several stops involved in the 1994 double murder of Simpson's wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.
When Cowlings told the three men what was happening, they cut checks equaling $75,000 and became the new owners.
Even though the owners haven’t been near the car recently, they have had some unusual moments. Like in 2020, when one of them incorrectly got a ticket for the Bronco not paying a toll. A different driver had made a vanity plate with the same license plate as the Bronco.
“We had to show them the timestamp from the security cameras in Tennessee, that showed at the exact same time it went through the toll booth, the car wasn’t in the same state,” Gilbert said. “It was impossible for anyone to take it on a joy ride. We convinced them that it would have had to take down a wall.”
There was also the time when Gilbert was transporting the car and he had to take it to a gas station because the battery had died.
"This guy asked me, 'How often do you get asked if that's O.J.'s Bronco?'" Gilbert recalled. "After he helped me jump it, I told him that it was, in fact, the white Ford Bronco from the freeway chase. I Googled and brought up the famous pictures of the Bronco zoomed in and compared the license plates. He was shocked."
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct.com and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectible market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.