grand tour budget

The Grand Tour’s Budget And Income Revealed

Jeremy Clarkson , his co-hosts James and Richard, and producer Andy Wilman set up a TV production company names W. Chump and Sons in 2015 once they’d left the BBC. This company holds the deal with Amazon to produce The Grand Tour .

W. Chump and Sons, the name being a mix of its owners’ names, apparently made a total of £8.39m in pre-tax profits from The Grand Tour’s 13 episodes of season 1. The company paid a total of 1.67 million in corporation tax, and the rest went in the owner’s pockets.

Not a bad payout indeed!

The company said this in its accounts:

“The profit was driven by television programming produced during the period ended 31 December 2016.

“The directors are keen to continue focusing on producing quality programming whilst ensuring that the company’s overheads are kept stable. The directors are satisfied with the results for the year end and will continue to pursue business opportunities as they arise in the future.”

By taking note of the company’s outgoings – a wage bill of £3m and £35.33m turnover (noted as being nearly all “terms of a commissioning agreement”), this indicates that the budget for The Grand Tour is much lower than the expected £160 million.

Amazon have declined to comment on the deal between them and the presenters, but from what we can see, Clarkson, Hammond and May, along with Wilman are doing perfectly well out of the deal!

Bring on Season 2!

Alex Harrington

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How The Grand Tour spent their £160-million to take on Top Gear

The way Jeremy Clarkson tells it, The Grand Tour, the new high-testosterone supercar show he’s hosting with Richard Hammond and James May, has all the ingredients that made Top Gear a world-wide success.

“It is full of middle-aged men falling over with the occasional car sticking its nose into the frame,” he says.

For legal reasons, they are being careful not to actually copy any Top Gear features, but Clarkson says the constant will be Hammond and May, “whom I hate”.

He adds: “But that is really what is at the core of The Grand Tour; our relentless and unending need to belittle and humiliate one another.”

The new show is launched next week via Amazon’s online Prime Video service.

Top Gear fans mourned when Clarkson was fired by the BBC after punching a producer following an argument over a cold buffet, and although May and Hammond were not involved in the fracas, they also left the show.

Their new roost has the biggest budget ever for a streaming internet TV series. So how have the trio, with their obsession for supercars, spent all that money?

£160 million

Total sum Amazon is reported to have paid for 36 episodes of The Grand Tour across three years. That’s nearly £4.5 million a show, about 10 times more than the cost of a Top Gear episode.

£10 million

Clarkson’s reported annual salary, making him Britain’s highest paid TV star. That works out at about £833,000 an episode.

At the BBC, he was said to be paid £1.5 million a year.

His replacement on Top Gear, Matt LeBlanc, is likely to be paid £2 million a year by the BBC, as lead host of the next series – a considerable increase on the £500,000 the former Friends star earned for his work on this summer’s shows, co-starring with Chris Evans, who has now stepped down.

£7.2 million

Reported annual salary for each of the co-presenters Hammond and May, which works out at £600,000 an episode – a distinct improvement on the £500,000 a year they were each said to earn on Top Gear.

£20 million

Value of the cars in the six-minute opening sequence of the first episode, which features 150 custom cars and six jet planes, as well as acrobats and stilt-walkers. The cars include a Bugatti Veyron (£1.4 million) and a Rolls-Royce Phantom (£750,000).

The entire Mad Max-style segment, filmed in the Californian desert with 2,000 extras, cost a flabbergasting £2.5 million to make.

That’s the top speed of the three hypercars in a race-off in Portugal – the £1,150,000 Ferrari LaFerrari driven by May, Hammond’s £712,000 Porsche 918 Spyder and Clarkson’s £866,000 McLaren P1 are among the fastest cars on the planet.

Grand Tour producer Andy Wilman, who had worked on Top Gear with old schoolchum Jeremy Clarkson since 2002, says: “Making that film was a joy. It was the first thing we’d done since leaving the BBC, and it has a real attitude.

“It hits you in the face like hearing a Clash album for the first time. It doesn’t matter whether you like cars or not, that film just has such a chemistry. There’s a massive air of refreshment, we’re all going at it like crazy.

“Partly, it’s because everyone was rested, and it’s because we were fresher than we had been for 15 years, getting back to a time when we were left alone to make the show the way we wanted.

“We had that at the BBC in the beginning, but as the show became more successful, Broadcasting House got more involved in the everyday running. By the end, it had become a treadmill. Amazon have given us no notes, no directions, they’ve just given us a platform to make and broadcast a show. That’s lovely.

“The timetable has been horrendously tight, but we handled it because we’ve suddenly got so much more vim and vigour. Those three are banging off the walls like kids on sugar.”

Cost of destroying 20 G-Wiz electric cars in a gigantic game of Battleships. The 20 cars were used as missiles. “That’s the Christmas show,” says Wilman, “and we wanted to give the traditional board-game market a boost. So we used cars as torpedoes. It was gratuitously big-budget, I admit.”

£3.2 million

Total salaries for 80 crew, who flew a combined distance of 5.1 million miles (at an estimated cost of more than £750,000), taking the production to 15 countries and staying in a total of 1,500 hotel rooms – spending £270,000 on bed and breakfast alone.

The first show is based in California, for the second episode they are in Johannesburg, and the next two are in Britain, including one in the seaside town of Whitby in North Yorkshire.

After that, it’s Holland, and Finland for Christmas, before they go to Namibia for an African special. That one rang alarm bells in the legal department: the new show has to be demonstrably different from the old Top Gear, for contractual reasons, and in 2010 the team had shot one of their most celebrated specials in Botswana.

That episode had featured some of the most beautiful landscape on earth, and naturally the three presenters commented on it. This time, they were asked by wary lawyers not to do that. “So they stood and looked across the Skeleton Coast in Namibia at sunset,” says Wilman, “and went, ‘What a rubbish view!'”

Editing is not yet completed on the final shows, but they go to Germany, then Nashville, Tennessee, and Scotland, before finishing in the United Arab Emirates.

Price of 6000 rounds of automatic rifle ammunition fired in a madcap remake of the Tom Cruise movie Edge Of Tomorrow, filmed at a Middle Eastern special forces training centre in Jordan.

“We’re constantly aware of our previous form, our legacy,” says Wilman. “We have to plan things, we can’t always just let them happen, even though my favourite moments are often the spontaneous ones.

“So with our tongues well and truly in our cheeks, we set about reinventing this action movie, where life is like a video game: if you die, you go back to the beginning. Our version is, ummm . . . a pastiche!”

The size of the on-set audience in a marquee set up in different places for each show, compared with the 900 who used to fill Top Gear’s studio – an aerodrome at Dunsfold, Surrey – for each edition.

The scaled-down production is a matter of sheer logistics: it’s hard enough to transport a marquee big enough to display the cars and set it up in a dozen countries, never mind cramming in almost a thousand fans.

The smaller audience changes the dynamic of the show. The old Top Gear used to have the feel almost of a stadium rock event. The Grand Tour promises to be more intimate.

“Because the tent is much smaller, it alters the dynamic immediately,” says Wilman. “There’s a different atmosphere, an interaction that creates energy, with the audience really filling the space.”

A bigger difference is the loss of the aerodrome’s racetrack, on a converted runway, and its tame racing driver, the Stig. Forced to leave Dunsfold behind, the team also had to abandon the Star In A Reasonably Priced Car feature, where celebrities raced to beat each other’s lap records.

Wilman insists this gave them “a boot up the backside”, spurring them to come up with new challenges.

Some of these are outlandish. In Barbados, the presenters build an underwater reef from wrecked cars bought for next to nothing at a breaker’s yard.

“That wasn’t exactly a big-budget segment,” concedes Wilman.

Amazon releases details of The Grand Tour’s first four episodes

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The Grand Tour

Jeremy, Richard and James embark on an adventure across the globe, driving new and exciting automobiles from manufacturers all over the world. Jeremy, Richard and James embark on an adventure across the globe, driving new and exciting automobiles from manufacturers all over the world. Jeremy, Richard and James embark on an adventure across the globe, driving new and exciting automobiles from manufacturers all over the world.

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The Grand Tour: Netflix boss claims Amazon paid $250 million for series

Ted sarandos also revealed why netflix didn't outbid their competitor, article bookmarked.

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After months of waiting, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May’s new motoring show, The Grand Tour, finally reached Amazon, leaving hundreds of Dad’s around the country confused about how to set up Prime on their TVs .

With so many new Prime subscribers, Amazon are likely raking in money, but will it be enough to compensate the cost of the show? According to previous reports, the company spent upwards of $160 million on the series, equalling an average of $4.5 million per episode.

Netflix boss Ted Sarandos has weighed in on the situation, claiming that even more money was spent on the series than previously claimed.

"That's an under-reported number,” Sarandos told The Telegraph . “It was about a quarter of a billion dollars.”

That’s almost an addition $100 million spent on The Grand Tour than previously claimed. Does Serandos regret not acquiring the show for Netflix?

"We knew what it was worth,” he continued. “We made a play for that show, definitely, but we've had every season of Top Gear on Netflix in most territories in the world, so we had a better sense than most of what the audience was for Top Gear on our platform.”

So far, The Grand Tour has received rave reviews across the board, including The Independent’ s which labeled the show “T op Gear with a bigger budget.” Episode two will be available on Amazon Prime this Friday.

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The Grand Tour Cost Amazon $250 Million, Claims Netflix

• Earlier reports put the cost at 60 million pounds
• Netflix CCO Sarandos claims it was $250 million
• TGT producer Wilman says budget is between 1-4 million pounds per episode

The Grand Tour , a new motoring show from ex-Top Gear trio Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May, reportedly cost Amazon around $250 million, according to Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos.

While earlier reports had said Amazon paid around £160 million ($200 million), Sarandos told The Telegraph : “That’s an under-reported number. It was about a quarter of a billion dollars. We’ll be able to figure out later what it was that made the show the show. It’ll be interesting with [The] Grand Tour to see how much of that is the players, who in many cases are big personalities, but what elements of Top Gear will people miss?”

Sarandos revealed that Netflix was in the running, but didn’t break the bank because they “knew what it was worth”. “We made a play for that show, definitely,” he added. “But we’ve had every season of Top Gear on Netflix in most territories in the world, so we had a better sense than most of what the audience was for Top Gear on our platform. We knew what it was worth.”

While it’s easy to think that all of that money went directly into production, meaning Amazon will have spent $7 million (£5.6 million) per episode for a 36-episode contract, that’s not usually how it works. For instance, the opening sequence of the first episode reportedly cost £2.5 million ($3.1 million) on its own.

( Also see: The Grand Tour Is Great Because It Stole the Best Thing About Top Gear )

Meanwhile, The Grand Tour’s executive producer Andy Wilman has blasted the £4 million per episode figure that had been circulating around before, let alone a new £5.6 million figure. "That figure is nonsense,” Wilman told BBC Radio 4 in an interview. “It was reported in the papers and it's stuck there for good now. It's not true. It's lower than that.”

When pressed on whether it was more than what BBC spent on Top Gear (£1 million per episode), Wilman added: “It's more than that. Somewhere between £1 million and £4 million.”

Whatever the final cost, the show’s premiere has received praise from most corners, including us. The Grand Tour works fantastically, owing to the presence of the best part of Top Gear – its hosts, in Clarkson, Hammond, and May .

New episodes of the show will air Friday 12:01am GMT for the next three months on Amazon Video, with the service going global in over 200 countries and territories next month .

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NEWS... BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT

Jeremy Clarkson brags over budget to rival Marvel as The Grand Tour is renewed for season 4

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The Grand Tour has been renewed for a fourth series as Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May abandon the tent for bigger – and more expensive – adventures.

After Clarkson was let go by the BBC for slapping a producer with a steak, he managed to land an eye-watering £160 million deal for three series with Amazon Prime.

The 58-year-old and his merry men will follow a similar pattern to their old Top Gear specials as the boys ditch the studio and spend the streaming giants’ bottomless wallet on needlessly blowing up cars in exotic locations around the world.

‘The Grand Tour is a worldwide hit and fan favourite,’ enthused Jay Marine, vice president of Prime Video. ‘We’re delighted the guys are coming back for series four.’

And, getting their money’s worth, Amazon have struck a deal with Clarkson, Hammond and May which will see them branch out in ‘new TV shows with them individually’.

‘We’re proud to say that Prime Video will continue to be the home for Jeremy, Richard and James,’ Marine announced. ‘They’ve got some ambitious new ideas that Prime members are going to love.

’We’re excited to be bring more Clarkson, Hammond and May to Prime Video for years to come.’

When asked if The Grand Tour’s new series would have the same hefty lump sum behind it as its three predecessors, Clarkson boasted to The Sun: ‘Put it this way, Marvel will be jealous of our budgets.’

Oh the new specials, he added: ‘They will be big exciting shows — proper event TV.

‘We’re not doing the big studios shows anymore. But we all love travelling and still enjoy each other’s company after all these years.

‘You get to the point where it’s the specials when we’re out on the road in far flung places that we like doing the most.

‘We did five in season three across the world in places like Mongolia and the US where we didn’t have the studio tent.

‘Amazon like them and they’ve done research that shows the audience like them, too.’

The Grand Tour returns to Amazon Prime on January 18.

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MORE : The Grand Tour ‘ditches the tent’ for season 4 as Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May ‘quit studio shows’

MORE : The Grand Tour mocks Jeremy Clarkson’s jeans as they prep for season 3 banter

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Amazon can no longer justify the cost of The Grand Tour

I n 2015, Jeremy Clarkson lost his contract with the BBC – and therefore Top Gear , which he had fronted for 13 years – after a reported “fracas” with a producer. For most television presenters it would spell the end of their career, but for Clarkson – king of failing upwards – it was a blessing. Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos came knocking, with an eye-watering £160m in hand and an order for three series of a new car show, co-hosted by his Top Gear pals Richard Hammond and James May . The Grand Tour was born.

Almost a decade later and those three series have been and gone. On top of that, Prime Video has made several feature-length Grand Tour specials, each with a crude subtitle indicating the level of humour viewers could expect.

The bantering boys have been sent down the Mekong Delta in Cambodia and Vietnam (Seamen ) , to Madagascar ( A Massive Hunt ), through Central Europe ( Eurocrash ) and – as of today’s new one-off episode, Sand Job – to Mauritania and Senegal.

If you’ve watched any episode of The Grand Tour , there’s not much need to tune into Sand Job . It’s the same format as ever – three blokes bumble their way through a foreign country, their bemusement at other cultures bordering on disrespectful (they can’t quite believe that a Muslim country such as Mauritania – which Hammond repeatedly jokes “isn’t real” – would have no alcohol readily available).

Their cars break, they bicker over directions and there’s lots of driving breaks during which the trio flex their childish (despite now being in their sixties) funny bones – in Sand Job, Hammond and Clarkson attempt to urinate on camera as they bounce off crass names for their inability to relieve themselves in a hot country. I’ll spare you the details.

The entire exercise is far too reminiscent of Top Gear – a programme that launched in 2003 at the dawn of British lad culture , a year before Nuts magazine hit the stands, when Soccer AM regularly featured “soccerettes” (attractive women who happened to be football fans) and misogyny was not only accepted, but often celebrated. In 2024, The Grand Tour is painfully out of date, harking back to a bygone era. It’s repetitive, it’s contrived, and, worse still, it’s often very boring.

Reports suggest that Clarkson takes home £10m a year from The Grand Tour alone. On top of that he has another deal with Amazon for his farming series Clarkson’s Farm .

It costs roughly £4.5m per episode (supercars and explosions – there are always inexplicable explosions – don’t come cheap). Meanwhile, Amazon has recently introduced an ad-supported tier, asking its loyal subscribers to shell out £11.98 to watch programmes without being interrupted by ads. Something isn’t quite adding up.

Until now, though, The Grand Tour has been a worthwhile investment. Amazon doesn’t publish its Prime Video viewing figures, but in 2018 Reuters reported leaked numbers that proved the Clarkson/Hammond/May series had been the most successful programme in driving new customers to sign up to the streaming service.

One-and-a-half million people watched an episode as soon as they signed up (also known as a “first stream”) and the “cost per first stream” was valued at $49 (£38.96) – not a bad conversion rate.

The BBC should have scrapped Top Gear eight years ago

But the cultural tide has turned on Jeremy Clarkson once again, and rumours abound that Prime Video is cutting ties with the presenter in the wake of his incendiary Sun column about Meghan Markle . If you need a reminder, in late 2022 Clarkson wrote that he hated the Duchess of Sussex more than Rose West and that he dreamed of making her “parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.” Clarkson and The Sun apologised, but there was national outrage – another indication that the petrolhead’s way of thinking is unacceptable in what we like to think are more enlightened times.

Sand Job and the upcoming series of Clarkson’s Farm were filmed before the column fallout, and it wouldn’t make financial sense for Amazon to abandon projects they’ve already spent (a lot of) money on. Only time will tell if the streamer will decide whether the pros of housing Clarkson and his cronies on their platform outweigh the cons, and this new episode of The Grand Tour will act as a litmus test.

If it was down to me, The Grand Tour would soon be laid to rest – just as the BBC has done with its predecessor Top Gear (spurred on by Freddie Flintoff’s crash that left him with “life-altering” injuries ). The egregious amount of money spent on providing Clarkson, May and Hammond with visas and fast cars would be better funnelled into more engaging, entertaining programming. Or, Mr Bezos, you could use that money to fund your streaming service directly, rather than asking us to pay for ads.

‘The Grand Tour: Sand Job’ is streaming on Prime Video.

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The grand tour’s penultimate special is out now.

After an eight-month wait since the release of the last episode, Eurocrash, the penultimate special of The Grand Tour has finally premiered on Amazon Prime.

Subtitled Sand Job (nice), the feature-length special sees Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May cross the Sahara desert, retracing the original route of the Dakar Rally . Their journey starts in in the heart of the West African nation of Mauritania, and roughly retraces the famous race’s route to its iconic beachfront finish. 

That’s an infamously tough journey even in specialised desert racing machinery, but it wouldn’t be The Grand Tour without some extra peril, so the team is undertaking the journey in some of the most inappropriate vehicles possible: big, front-engined, open-top sports cars, more suited to cruising the south of France than tackling the biggest sand desert in the world.

Jeremy has chosen a V6 Jaguar F-Type, Richard an Aston Martin DB9 Volante, and James a Maserati GranCabrio, all of which have undergone some serious modification in order to take on the challenging terrain. Clearly, we’re a long way from the days of the three-figure budgets seen in early Top Gear cheap car challenges.

As we saw in the trailer, the journey isn’t an easy one, with the trio having to deal with sand storms, massive dunes, ravines and actual minefields, as well as a pretty perilous-looking river crossing. There’s also an appearance from the world’s longest train, a 1.2-mile-long beast that transports iron ore and also delivers the cars to the starting point. All the while, the team must protect their vital fuel bowser, required to keep the cars going in this remote part of the world.

It’s more of what we’ve come to know and love from The Grand Tour’s big-budget specials: there’s incredible cinematography showing off the Sahara’s stark beauty mixed in with driving sequences that push the trio’s sports cars far beyond anything they were designed for. Oh, and some explosions, of course.

It was the filming of this special that Clarkson said made him realise how “ unfit and fat and old ” he was, leading in part to his decision to step back from the show.

We know there’s still one more special to come after this, filmed in Zimbabwe, which Amazon says is coming “later this year.” Interestingly, Amazon refers to that as the “final special of The Grand Tour with the trio,” reinforcing the suggestion that the show could continue in one form or another after the departure of Clarkson, Hammond and May.

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Amazon's most expensive TV show is revealed – and it's NOT The Grand Tour

Although it may be the best at getting new subscribers.

It turns out that not only is that not the case, it isn't even the most expensive show that Amazon has produced.

Reuters has obtained documents that apparently reveal the production and marketing costs of each Amazon Original, with The Grand Tour season one allegedly costing $78 million.

This would make the motoring show the fifth most expensive on the platform, behind Good Girls Revolt ($81 million), Goliath ($82 million), Sneaky Pete ($93 million) and The Man in the High Castle season two (a whopping $107 million).

That's not all, these documents also apparently contain what is known as a 'cost per first stream', which in short is the cost of production and marketing divided by the number of people who have signed up to Prime and watch that particular show before any other (the thinking being 'if you watch show x first, you probably signed up for that show').

With this in mind, The Grand Tour actually turns out to be Amazon's best show at getting new subscribers to its Prime services, with a 'cost per first stream' of $49 compared to The Man in the High Castle 's $63.

Obviously Amazon is going to be shelling out the big bucks for its TV adaptation of The Lord of the Rings , but will enough people sign up to Prime specifically to watch it?

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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer and resident Welsh person at Digital Spy , having worked there since 2016. 

In his time he's covered a host of live events, interviewed celebrities big and small and crowbarred a countless amount of great/awful (delete as appropriate) puns into articles. 

A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe's main interest is in video gaming. Although particularly a PlayStation gamer, he plays across Xbox, Nintendo and PC/Steam Deck, and likes to keep tabs on many games he's not got the time to play.

Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I'm a Fish (which you really should do).

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You Won't Believe How Much The 'Grand Tour's' Opening Scene Cost To Film

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The first episode of "The Grand Tour" will air on November 18th, and we can't wait to see what Amazon is giving Jeremy Clarkson and company so much money for. The entire budget for the show is substantial, apparently in the region of $200 million. This budget will be spread over three seasons for an average of around $5.7 million per episode. This is much more than the BBC ever spent on "Top Gear." The Sun reports that the first scene of the show alone reportedly cost around £2.5 million ($3.2 million) to film.

The scene was filmed in the California desert and features 150 cars, 2,000 "petrolheads," acrobats, stilt walkers, and jet planes. The Mad Max-style scene has Clarkson, May and Hammond in red, white and blue Mustangs being followed by a slew of expensive cars costing over $25 million. Some of the cars include a Veyron and a Rolls Royce. Not much else is known about "The Grand Tour's" first episode, other than that it will be filmed in South Africa . Amazon took a huge gamble with the show, and even though we haven't even seen so much as a trailer for the show we think the company's money was well-spent. Amazon has been producing original video content for a while now but nobody puts its work in the same league as, say, Netflix.

But with the star power of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, along with a massive budget, that could all change. If nothing else Amazon should see a surge in Prime memberships as the only way to watch the show will be on the company's online streaming video service, at least for the moment anyways. We'll be counting the days until November 18th until the show premiers. Until then we'll have to rely on little leaks like this to hold us over.

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10 Best (And Affordable) GT Cars

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When we think of grand touring, we think of Aston Martin, Bentley, Mercedes-Benz, and even Rolls-Royce. The GT cars that these companies produced have been the very definition of the term "Grand Tourer." Other manufacturers do their best to compete for cars that people can use to go grand touring around the country.

RELATED: 10 Cheap Cars That Are Great For Grand Touring

With time and depreciation, the GT cars of yesteryear are now in reach of owning. There are also cars that are just as good as these GT cars that are also in the same market but for a more reasonable price. Here are a few examples of all of these GT cars that can be found with a budget of $40,000.

10 Aston Martin DB9

The Aston Martin DB9 was widely known as the Grand Tourer to have back in the last decade. A smooth and yet fierce V12 engine under the hood packing around 540 horsepower and a suspension that feels like driving on clouds, the DB9 was the almighty GT car.

It held the standards of what a GT car was supposed to be like but at quite the price. Automotive journalists went on and on about just how great of a car it was. Now, a prime example of an Aston Martin DB9 can be found on CarGurus for under $35,0000. That is a great deal for a car that has that sort of prestige.

9 Bentley Continental GT

The Bentley Continental GT , like the Aston Martin, also holds the same prestige as its counterpart. The only difference is that the Continental GT nameplate still lives on. Journalists boasted on and always compared the Aston Martin DB9 and Continental GT and said just how great of a car the GT was.

Powered by a W12 that made about 550 horsepower on a suspension that felt like floating, the early Continental GT was a masterpiece. Since time, mileage, and depreciation are always something to keep track of, good examples can be found on CarGurus for under $30,000. A bargain for anyone willing to grand tour.

Most people wouldn't think a BMW would be on this list but they would be wrong. A car with great and soft suspension powered a V10 producing around 500 horsepower, it would be wrong to count out the German manufacturer. The BMW M6 is known to be a comfortable ride for long periods of time, which makes it a great car for grand touring.

Some good examples can be found on CarGurus for under $15,000. A great car for a great price cannot necessarily be beat. Don't count out the BMW M6 for something that would make a remarkable GT car to tour the country.

RELATED: 10 Most Comfortable Yet Affordable Cars

7 Jaguar XK

Jaguar has been known to make very elegant looking cars. To not include the XK on this list would be wrong. A mid-luxurious manufacturer with a V8 with horsepower that ranged from a near 385 to 550 horsepower.

A smooth ride, elegant looks, and great for long-distance driving, the Jaguar XK is one of the few definite options to buy if someone were to take a grand tour of the country. A few good examples can be found on CarGurus for under $30,000. A bargain for a car that is known for its elegance.

6 Maserati GranTurismo

The Maserati GranTurismo has been known to be the manufacturer's GT car for quite some time. The one thing about Maserati is that their cars are also known to depreciate the most throughout the history of modern vehicles. Why wait to buy a new Maserati when it will be worth less than half the price in a couple of years?

The same goes for the GranTurismo. The early model was given a soft ride with a V8 pushing slightly over 400 horsepower is not bad at all for a car made for grand touring. Some fine examples can be found on CarGurus  for under $20,000. Talk about depreciation. A car that costs over $100,000 more than 10 years ago falls that far down in price.

5 Porsche 911 Carrera

The Porsche 911 Carrera 996 makes a perfect specimen to be a GT car. Sure it is mid-engined, but it has a comfortable ride and slightly under 300 horsepower fro a flat-6 engine, but the 996 911 Carrera was keen on being the ultimate sports car of that time.

Now it can be an ultimate affordable GT car since the ride comfort is known to be comfortable. A few great examples of the Porsche 996 911 Carrera can be found on CarGurus for under $15,000. That is a great price for a German manufacturer known for making remarkable sports cars to drive.

RELATED: Top 10 Porsches Ever Built: Ranked

4 Mercedes-Benz SL550

A car manufacturer like Mercedes-Benz is widely known for everything luxurious. The SL550 is no exception. The fifth-generation SL550 came with a 5.5L V8 pushing around 380 horsepower with a ride comfort great enough for drivers to go long distances and have no issues.

Talk about luxury and sportiness, the SL550 would make the grand touring scene like a walk in the park. As mentioned before, Mercedes-Benz does come to mind when GT cars are brought up in conversation, and rightfully so. Luckily, great examples can be found on CarGurus for less than $30,000. What a bargain for a GT car made by a manufacturer known for its prestige.

3 Cadillac XLR

Cadillac made a wonderful GT car named the XLR. Sadly, it had a short production life. The manufacturer is known throughout the world as a high-quality company known for its luxuriousness with ride comfort and style. With the Northstar 4.6L V8 only producing 320 or so horsepower the Cadillac XLR offered quite the comfortable ride.

Not as great of a ride as others, but good enough to be considered as a GT car. A great example of the XLR can be found on CarGurus for under $26,000. The Cadillac XLR should not be overlooked as a car to be bought to go on a grand tour of the country.

RELATED: 20 Cars GM Never Should Have Stopped Making

2 Ford Thunderbird

The Ford Thunderbird used to be a car to combat the Corvette over 60 years ago. When it last came out, it looked like it was a GT car of yesteryear, just retrostyled. Why should it be considered as a GT car? Because at the time, Ford owned Jaguar and the Thunderbird were built on the S-Type platform.

A comfortable ride made by a luxury manufacturer with a 3.9L V8 making around 280 horsepower. Sure, it is not a lot of power, but the comfort makes up for it. Grand touring in a Thunderbird would make perfect sense which is why it should not be overlooked. A fine example can be found on CarGurus for $13,000 or less. A bargain that can't be passed.

1 Plymouth Prowler

It would be wrong not to put the Plymouth Prowler. Plymouth did what it could to make one of the stylish yet retro-looking cars of yesteryear. Sure, it is powered by a V6 that only made around 250 horsepower, but it has the looks. It has the ride comfort as well. Not as great of a ride as other GT cars, but it fits the qualities of a GT car.

Some horsepower to overtake on a highway, ride comfort, and slight sportiness. The Plymouth Prowler checks all the boxes. A few fine examples can be found on CarGurus for under $25,000. Sure they're older than most cars, but they hold value and mileage is quite low. A bargain for a car that would be great for grand touring.

NEXT: Lamborghini Diablo Totaled Just Hours After Purchase

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