The 1980s brought us a lot of things, but for a certain generation of car people, the most important of those things was the VCR.
When the VCR became commonplace in the American household, kids could all of a sudden watch movies or recorded TV over and over again — and that’s exactly what we did. For a lot of us, interest in and availability of content turned minor fascination into full-on obsession.
Those household VCRs were where a lot of today’s younger car generation took in our content. While we had Countaches and Testarossas on our walls, our TVs displayed Doc Brown’s DeLorean flying through time, Michael Knight and KITT gut-punching high-tech silicon valley crime syndicate goons, the A-Team shooting at everyone and never hitting anyone, and Bo and Luke Duke Dixie-honking their way across every body of water. And we watched all of this again, and again, and again because we could.
That’s why movie and TV cars became obsession for us, and it’s why real-deal cars and replicas from that era are now bringing big interest and good money when they sell. Scoff if you want, but this is a trend.
Take, for example, the DeLorean time machine replica pictured above. Offered at Mecum Portland last year, it was a full, complete replica built in painstaking detail. It had a crowd of people around it all weekend, and it sold for $48,400, which was both crazy and not crazy depending on your point of view. I loved it.
You might consider things like this to be on the fringe of the market, but these cars are a reflection of next gen car builders’ and buyers’ obsessions. And just like those VCRs, these things are an entry point into the obsession for yet another generation to come — and when it comes to expanding interest in the old car world, that matters.