Food For Thought – Collector Car Industry Insider Quotes To Munch On by Drew Grundfor

Over the past few months I’ve been pondering how to quantify what’s been going on and where things are headed in this crazy collector car industry of ours that seems hell bent on constantly breaking price records. If you’re a follower of Hagi and their tracking of trends in collector car prices you’re familiar with their coined term “better than gold” and it’s topical suggestion that cars have become a hard currency to be reckoned. And that does have a good deal to do with the overall story of what’s happening in the market, however it does indeed say more about what’s going on now and not all that much in specificity of where things are headed further down the line, which is, in any industry, the million, or perhaps in this case, billion dollar question.

So with the idea of what the future might hold in mind, I’ve sourced some good industry insider quotes from around the web and posted a bit of commentary on each to further engage the ideas in the quotes themselves. Hopefully you, the reader, can glean some insights of your own from the information to follow and for your own prospectus of sorts…hopefully it sparks something novel for you in any event.

“Trends in collecting may come and go, but the collectors tend to remain the same – they’re 40 to 60 years of age. While the buyer demographic may have remained the same for decades, a 50-year-old today doesn’t want to collect the same vehicles as a 50-year-old did in the 1970s. Each generation makes its own choices about what cars it will value. 20 years ago, I never would have thought 1950s concept cars would become the object of bidding wars.” SOURCE

-Don Williams, most notably the assembler of the Blackhawk Collection

 

“Another trend is the appreciation for cars that have been preserved rather than restored. A car can be original only once, such cars are motorized time capsules and are being sought ‘like jewels’ by automotive collectors.”  SOURCE

-McKeel Hagerty, Hagerty Collector Car Insurance Group

 

“The best estimates we have at the Hagerty Group peg the number of collector cars in the U.S. at roughly 5 million, of which 58 percent are owned by baby boomers, or those born from 1946 through 1964. Our data says that the median age of collector-car owners is 56 years.” SOURCE

-McKeel Hagerty, Hagerty Collector Car Insurance Group

 

“50 percent of my sales of 1950s and ’60s Ferraris are to European buyers. Most of the cars go to England and are registered there, because the U.K. taxes historic cars at 5 percent, versus 30 percent for the EU. Europeans are looking for places to park tax-free money, and collectible cars are a particularly wonderful place to do it.” SOURCE

-Michael Sheehan, a Los Angeles–based Ferrari broker

 

“In China, where incomes are swelling, the government has banned all cars older than 15 years, making importation extremely difficult.” SOURCE

-Hagerty Collector Car Insurance Group

 

“Gen Xers and millennials don’t work on their cars as much, with high-school shop classes having been largely eliminated just as computerized complexity made self-wrenching more difficult. Tastes change, a fact that will likely also affect the hobby. While today’s collector-car market is dominated by mostly original cars and more-or-less accurate restorations, the future may be about restomods—old cars with modern equipment. Heretical as this may be to some, anecdotal evidence already suggests that restomod buyers tend to be younger, which makes sense.” SOURCE

-Hagerty Collector Car Insurance Group