When a music legend like Prince passes, myth tends to outrun fact. Stories of fleets of purple sports cars and exotic supercars circulate freely, but the most reliable picture of what Prince actually owned comes from a far less glamorous source: the official legal records of his estate. According to those filings, Prince’s vehicles were registered not to him personally but to his various companies, chiefly Paisley Park Enterprises and NPG Music Publishing. With one notable exception, nearly all of them carried Minnesota plates, a quiet reflection of how rooted his life remained in his home state.
Worth noting, too: the estate records include a forklift among his holdings, a reminder that running Paisley Park was as much an industrial operation as an artistic one. Here is what the records show.
Paisley Park Enterprises
The vehicles owned through Paisley Park Enterprises form the bulk of the collection, and they sketch the portrait of a man with eclectic and sometimes contradictory taste. There is American muscle-meets-nostalgia in the 1993 Ford Thunderbird and the wildly retro 1999 Plymouth Prowler, a factory hot rod that looked like nothing else on the road. Practical American luxury shows up in the 1997 Lincoln Town Car, the 2011 Lincoln MKT, and the stately 1985 Cadillac Limousine.
The sportier and more exotic side of the garage includes the 2004 Cadillac XLR Roadster, the nimble 1996 BMW Z3 Roadster, and a 2010 Mercedes-Benz. There is even an everyday-capable 1995 Jeep Grand Cherokee in the mix.
The standout, and the one true outlier, is the 2006 Bentley, which is the only vehicle in the entire collection registered in California rather than Minnesota. In a list dominated by MN plates, the Bentley sits apart both in pedigree and in paperwork.
NPG Music Publishing
The vehicles held under NPG Music Publishing lean older, rarer, and more personal. The 1964 Buick Wildcat, the Buick Electra 225, the 1984 BMW 633CSi, and the 1991 BMW 850 speak to an appreciation for classic and vintage machines rather than the latest models.
But the most evocative entries are not cars at all. This is where Prince’s motorcycles live, including the two most famous two-wheeled machines of his career: the “Purple Rain” motorcycle and the “Graffiti Bridge” motorcycle, both tied directly to his films and forever woven into his iconography. A Honda motorcycle rounds out the bikes.
And then there is the 1995 Prevost bus, the tour coach, the rolling home base for an artist who spent so much of his life on the road.
A Garage That Tells a Story
What emerges from the estate’s records is not a stereotypical celebrity supercar collection. It is something more interesting: a blend of vintage Americana, German engineering, screen-famous motorcycles, a touring bus, and a single conspicuously out-of-state Bentley. Many of the flashier vehicles often attributed to Prince in popular lore simply do not appear in the legal documentation, and as the principle goes, if he is not photographed with it, it likely was not his.
Sources
Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review, “Inventory of Prince’s estate lists cash, property, gold bars” (Jan. 7, 2017) — https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/jan/07/inventory-of-princes-estate-lists-cash-property-go/
InsideHook, “Prince’s Car and Motorcycle Collection Is as Fabulous as You’d Expect” (Jan. 12, 2017) — https://www.insidehook.com/autos/prince-car-motorcycle-collection
ABC News, “Prince’s Minnesota Properties Are Worth $25 Million, Estate Reports” (Jan. 6, 2017) — https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment
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