Are classic cars dead as history repeats itself?

If what you mean by cohesive is what I'd term organic I think we agree. They say a good design is one where no detail can be added or removed without reducing the appeal.

 

Well put. Realisticaly there were not many if any 70's designs of note, the camaro firebird, boxer,308 esprit, but that is about it. The 80's had questionable taste as did the 50's but htere were some more desirable cars. In the 2k there are many future calssics, the new camaro, the zo6 and zr1 vette witll be revered. The current CTS is both original in design and well proportioned/harmonised. A quotroporte. the Nissan GTS is and will be seen as a seminal car. While the looks may be challenged EVO's and STI's will fetch big bucks in the future, all the kids into cars now ant one, very few will survive and 30 years from now when some of these kids have $$$ they will pay fortunes for a pristine one. the current ferraris may have a future if they get cheap enough and attirtion takes care of them. A porche GT3 is a reasonable bet. Also in the future some of the big SUV's will be calssics, they are unlikel;y to be produced then and are huge evocative machines.

Corrolas lexus etc forget ti. The crysler 300 with hemi has a chance. Miatas are always going to have a following. The elise will be the next healey/mga.

Although i personaly do not find the design harmonious beautiful or inspired i think the testarossa will at some point appreciate more tan almost any ferrari, it is very evocative of an era and totaly in your face, to a degree that little before or after has approached.
A california is a commodity like an SL merc with time and attrition they will have some following but no magic. In short there are many great modern cars that can and will be come classics, it is just a funtion of time and attritiuon, not every modern is a potato appliance. we will all be surprised by which ones really go up in value and how fast they do. The 70's were a drpought of desigm, build quality, performance and overall desirability since then there has been a steady improvement, bangles bungles aside.

 

No, so the prices will drop, many will be attritioned out of existance, then they will rise in value. Or maybe you are right and they will end up like the last lotus esprit, only owned by the truly mad and deicated because they are way more expensive to keep than they are worth.

The nice thing about brass era cars is that a fair number were restored/preserved and will remain so, only with less intererest the price will become affordable.

 

I have seen over the last 30 years that the collectible/desirable cars are the ones that highschool kids go nuts over, then 20-30 years later when they have the bucks, they want those same cars that they fell for when they were 18 years old. That's why muscle cars from '68-'70 are so popular right now. Look who's sitting in the audience at Barrett-Jackson----fat old guys with beer bellies and bald heads, all with Medicare cards in their wallets!!
In the 1980's, it was the '55-'57 Chevy convertibles that were selling for $130K! So TODAY, what do male high school kids want real bad? It's the ZR1, maybe Z06, the Porsche GT3 and for sure the GT2, but not much else! These new driving games like "Need for Speed" and "Gran Turismo" have introduced a lot of kids to cars they would otherwise never see, so I also think the new Ford GT, any Lambo and the current mid-engine Ferraris will be good long-term investments for possible future desirability. I have a first-generation Mini Cooper S convertible and a first-gen Beetle Turbo convertible sitting in my storage bin, 'cause those are two cars that EVERBODY goes nuts over! What folks love today are they will want to have again 30 years from now, if you have a nice original one!
Don't forget, however, that our government may someday make it illegal or virtually impossible for anyone to drive an Austin Healey or split-window Corvette on public highways! There could be laws passed that say you cannot put a car on a public highway unless it has six airbags, side-impact protection, and emits zero emissions!! Has anybody considered that? They just took over health care for "the greater good", and they could do the same with cars/transportation/pollution control! I would bet than someday, you will not be able to drive cars from the 1950's or 1960's on public roads. And of course,how safe would you feel driving a 1920 Model T Ford on the road today?
--Dr.K

 

Well, no one who has studied law has considered that...

 

Or read the Non Existent Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966...

That said:

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/transportation-department-embraces-bikes-and-business-groups-cry-foul/

 

Completely agree with you on the new Chevrolet Camaro. I'd love to have one of those as a daily driver and its stunning looks are more than enough to see it as a future classic.

Rubbish. Governments regulate on what is required from new-build cars, but cars that were road legal when they were first registered will continue to be road legal.

My dad's 1959 Triumph TR3A didn't even have seat belts in it until recently when he installed an aftermarket roll bar so that he could fit seat belts. Previously, he'd driven it just fine on the highway without seatbelts to a classic car show. I'm pretty sure it's federal law (or at least a universal State law) to wear seat belts in the car - unless the car is so old it never had them fitted in the first place.

Unless the government chooses to subsidise the retrospective upgrade of all the cars on the road that don't conform to their new requirements, there's absolutely zero chance such a law would get passed. We're heading that way for new cars, but it won't be applied retrospectively - it'd be a vote-killer for 90% of the population if it was.

All the best,
Andrew.

 

Your right and after that generation dies off the value of the cars that were cool when they were in HS drops substantially. Max value on said cars will top out when the guy that couldn't afford the cars that were cool in high school reach ~50 y/o. IMO I would be selling anything I had from the 70's and picking up stuff from the 80-90's. The 50 stuff has already been crushed and the 60's stuff is going to get crushed.

 

Some of the cars mentioned in the article ( pre-war Bugatti) and others not mentioned but highly regarded today (pre-war Alfa, the 'French' art-deco styled cars of the same period) remain at the pinnacle of collectibility without any 'generational lust' to inspire their desirability. I'm not sure their value will drop in ten years, but who knows? If the analogy is to 'art,' there are cycles of fashion in the marketplace for collecting and little of it has to do with intrinsic value. (How can you measure the value of a Van Gogh compared to a Rembrandt anyway, apart from what the market will pay? Which is the 'better' painting?)
Apart from cars at the top of the vintage stratosphere, todays' cars hold little interest for me- due to uninspired design and indistinguishable features- even ugly can be collectible in the long run, but I doubt anybody is hoarding Pontiac Aztecs for the future. One big difference is simply the cost of manufacture in today's world- very few cottage manufacturers today, compared to the first half of the 20th century, when there were probably thousands of brands, with real differentiation and the unique fingerprint of the designer and manufacturer. And, there is something cynical about buying a new 'retro' inspired car today in the expectation that it will share the history or desirability of the original. I'd much rather have the Gullwing than the latest top of the heap Mercedes inspired by it, even if the new car is more capable, more comfortable and more reliable.
Collecting is not rational. Not sure we can make it so.

 

Whether you agree with McCluggage or not, it's wise to remember that she's suggesting the Miata and PT Cruiser could be "classics". Really? I think in one fell swoop, she undermines her credibility with that statement.

CW

 

The new Camaro will be in landfills and recycle bins. Fun car for young people right now, but no lasting value.

The real first generation Camaro will probaly always have classic status, but for the most part they're still very inexpensive except for certain option packages and top condition cars.

That would be an ex post facto law. You can drive a Triumph TR3 to work every day without seat belts, from a legal perspective. (From a safety perspective, I wouldn't do it anymore - a TR3 would be the slowest and lightest thing on the road unless you're lucky enough to crash into a Smart car.)

Agreed.

The art example is a good one, because there is no generational pull to own a Van Gogh, unless post'ers here want to argue that Van Gogh paintings were what current art buyers all wanted as teenagers.

Classic cars are art -- design art, metalworking art, engineering art. There's inherent value to the vintage stuff that is desperately hard to create in the modern world. (And I would agree, the Merc "Gullwing" and Ford GT are very good cars -- just no competition for the flawed but charismatic originals.)

 

I really like modern interpretations on iconic cars. I currently drive a 1st Generation (2004) MINI ONE, which I bought from new - the only reason I could see at the moment for selling it is if I move out of the country and it's impractical to take it with me. I look on the 2010 Camaro in a similar way, but have yet to actually drive one.

Ah, didn't know there was a specific term for retrospective laws. Are many introduced in that manner?

Indeed - hence the roll bar and seatbelts now. Actually, I have a SmartCar... it's my second car / fiancée's primary car. Quite nippy and packed full of airbags.

All the best,
Andrew.

 

I believe the term in law is prior non-conforming use. In common usage they're Grand-fathered in.

 

The courts would strike them down.

"Grandfathered-in" is probably the best way to explain it.

Either way, the realities of gasoline quality/availability is a more serious issue over the next decades than paranoia over the government outlawing Austin Healeys.

 

Gasoline was not so great when the first healeys were new. Wind the clock forward say 100-200 years and auto buffs will be brewing alcohol for fuel, assuming civilization survives.

Or there may be specialist gas suppliers assuming alternatives are in wide use.

 

Considder if you will that current mustangs camaros vettes may be for some time the last of the "real mohecans" Legislation and other priorities destroyed affordable performance cars for the 70's thru 90's creating a market vacum and driving up old car60s" prices and desireability. Prior to then old car were an eccentric hobby because people knew the newer ones were better. My point is once the current crop of performance cars goes out of production(excluding exotics) we may have another dry period making many of the current crop highly deireable and collectable in say 15 years. If chevy builds the supercharged z28 it will be expensive for a camaro and they will be unliukely to make them for very long, it will be a collectable. Unless of course the moderns are just going to be like 76 eldorados too many saved to be valuable.

MAYBE 150 YEARS FROM NOW ANY GASOLINE FED CAR WILL BE COLLECTABLE, BUT SOME WILL STAND OUT, THE 60'S CARS SO REVERED TODAY ARE REALLY BUILT LIKE JUNK, A FUTURE GENERATION IS GOING TO PREFER CYRRENT MUSCLE CARS FOR THEIR SUPERIUOR PERFORMANCE GREAT LOOKS HANDLING ETC.

 

In general when that much time has passed the utility of an object has little to do with its
value. Be it furniture, firearms or spinning wheels. Historical significance and style matter much more.

 

A physicist at the labs I'm doing my PhD at worked for Exxon-Mobile for a while. They were using MRI technologies to try to find additional sources of easily drillable oil. Anyway, he told me oil availability isn't going to be much of a problem... Exxon-Mobile have the right to drill enormous fields of oil that they just can't reach quite yet as they need deeper drilling technology - as soon as that's developed, then they'll have access to it.

Furthermore, everyone refers to it as "fossil fuels", yet there are lines of thinking that fossils would not sink through the Earth's crust to the depth for which oil is being found. It's highly likely that the oil is actually a waste product of a bacteria, and even lab bacteria has been genetically engineered to excrete biodiesel as a waste product.

So what we're really running out of is oil in known and accessible fields. What we have plenty of is oil in currently inaccessible fields. So we either need to find new accessible fields or find a way to drill much deeper than we are currently. If we do the former, all will be fine. If it requires the latter, oil prices might go up a little but availability we'll still be fine.

I've no worries about oil availability during my lifetime.

All the best,
Andrew.

 

personally, i think that the wrong person to ask about "future collectible cars" is most definetly not a person over 70 years old... They are experts on current classic cars... not future...


I think who you really have to ask are the younger generations. I know that my generation and younger will go NUTZ over an enzo in the future. I personally would rather have a 288 or f40... but I am an old soul despite my spelling of nuts as NUTZ. LOL. To get a good picture of the cars that are going to be future collectibles (regardless of price) you have to ask the ones who will be buying them in the future... the people who are going to be 40-60 years old in 15-30 years... They are going to be the people who always wanted one, but couldn't afford it and now they can etc... Fore example, I know I will purchase the cleanest 97 championship white acura integra type-r I can find... I know I will purchase the cleanest lowest mile most original 1993 Mazda Rx-7 R-1 I can find... a michelloti built 360 challenge... BMW M3 lightweight all stock spoilers still in the trunk (i want to be the one to put them off because I am a dork like that) Are these 250 californias? nope... will they be collectible.... very very likely.

 

I tend to think cars like the Ferrari 355 and the Porsche 993s/993TT are some of the last modern classics out there.