Sir Alan will sell you now: Apprentice star's Rolls Royce in Auto Trader at £179,500

A brash Rolls-Royce from which Sir Alan Sugar controls an empire – and now a star in its own right, thanks to The Apprentice.

But after three years of ferrying the entrepreneur around on our screens, Sir Alan’s Rolls-Royce Phantom has joined thousands of other second-hand motors in the advert columns of Auto Trader.

High roller: The famous car, which is up for sale and being advertised in Auto Trader, behind Sir Alan

The good news is that would-be buyers will not have to face the Amstrad boss across a table to close the deal.

The bad news is the price: £179,500.

The 2.5-ton, 19ft car, which does 0 to 62mph in 5.7 seconds, is for sale after Sir Alan, 61, part-exchanged it for an even bigger version.

It has a 149mph top speed and first appeared as his mobile office in the second BBC series, replacing the 1998 Rolls-Royce Silver Seraph of the first.

Last week, it carried winner Lee McQueen off to his new £100,000-a-year job – in contrast to the black cabs for those told by Sir Alan: ‘You’re fired.’

But it is an environmental nightmare, doing 11 miles per gallon and chugging out 385 grams of CO2 per kilometre – more than three Toyota Prius hybrid cars.

Not that Sir Alan seems bothered.

He has swapped it for an ‘extended wheelbase’ Phantom which gives him an extra ten inches of legroom in the back.

His former Phantom, on sale at Cheshire-based dealership Sytner Rolls-Royce Knutsford, has 24,000 miles on the clock, a 15-speaker sound system and a Spirit of Ecstasy flying lady statuette which retracts automatically in a crash to protect pedestrians.

But the buyer will not get Sir Alan’s ‘AMS1’ number plate, as he has kept it for his new car.

East London-born Sir Alan is worth more than £800million and has come a long way since 1967 when he bought his first car, a second-hand Mini van, for £50.

Now, while he has a Phantom, his wife of 40 years Ann has a Bentley Continental GT.

Richard Johnson, sales manager at Sytner Rolls-Royce Knutsford, said of the Phantom: ‘We’ve already had a massive amount of interest. I don’t think it will hang around long.’