The Value of a Collector Car—Determining Its Worth

But let's take the cars of the 30's and 40's as an example. Two determining factors in establishing values are the public's awareness of the intrinsic value of these cars, and the resulting heightened activity in pursuing them. The end product is two-fold: fewer collector cars remaining to be found, and the owners' realization that they have more than a dust-collecting unwanted relic to be hauled away.

This taken alone would seem to indicate that values could only go up with the increasing scarcity of vehicles remaining to be found. But something else is also at work, bringing down the profit potential in car collecting. Old cars are subject to the same laws of commerce that dictate pricing in every other sphere of money matters. Markets are not static. They move up and down. And they are not automatically going to show an appreciation in value over time. Supply and demand were never more well defined by an item than they are by collector cars.

Scarcity is an established fact for these cars. So, you might think that since there are never going to be any more of them, the supply component of the formula should dictate a steadily increasing price structure. Not necessarily. The reason is because of the demand component.

A collector car to one person may be something else entirely to the next person. It can be a reminder of a time best forgotten. It can be a reminder of Aunt Tilly's incredibly bad driving skills. It can be unpleasant in as many ways as it can be pleasant. But personal memories and preferences aside, there is an even greater reason for the demand part of the equation to be weak.

The single greatest reason for declining prices on cars of the "Classic era" in recent years is probably the transition in focus brought about by the aging of our population. The people who saw these classics as the most fantastic cars of all time, are now much older and their numbers are dwindling. The age group with the most striking monetary influence today is more typically characterized as remembering the cars from the fifties and sixties as the greatest cars they ever knew. So the result is an actual decline in the values of much older collector cars, and a corresponding tendency for values to increase for those currently "remembered" fondly by the people doing most of the buying today.

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