It's time we all stopped pretending. For all intents and purposes, the last collectible serial production car rolled off the assembly line sometime in the mid-1970s.
SCM has long maintained that the 1955-73 period will be regarded as the Golden Age of collectible cars, when the automotive equivalents of Van Gogh, Puccini and Frank Lloyd Wright were churning out landmark vehicles, one after another.
From the 1955 Chevrolet 210 to the 1973 Carrera RS, cars simply got better and better each year. In fact, the advent of governmental smog and safety regulations in 1974 marked the first time in automotive
history that performance and appearance declined-a trend that continued through the early '80s when engineering and styling finally got ahead of emissions and safety regulations, and performance began to re-emerge.
But along with the increases in horsepower came ever more convoluted government regulations, so complicated that it would be impossible to build any of the limited-production sports cars of the 1955-73 era today. For a contemporary manufacturer to survive, they have to amortize the costs of building, crash-testing and smog-certifying a car or truck across as many units as possible.
For instance, there is no way a manufacturer could build a car like the Ferrari 250 SWB today. It would be impossible to make a production run of 122 economically feasible, as the very high costs of emission and crash testing would be spread against so few vehicles.
JUST TOO MANY BUILT
So what will our children collect? We've always repeated like a mantra the notion that "people collect the cars they wanted to have when they were young." When our grandfathers reached their 40s, they bought Model Ts. Our fathers bought restored Chrysler Airflows. And we're snapping up muscle cars like there is no tomorrow.
But the same pattern simply won't hold true for future generations. We hold that 99% of the cars that are deemed collectible will be those built in the Golden Era and before-with the remaining 1% being those built after 1974.
Why won't cars built since then ever be collectible? Because none of those that are street legal have all four elements of blue-chip collectibility: rarity, beauty, performance and provenance.
And before insecure Modena 360 and Enzo owners rise up to defend their cars, let's be direct. All serial-production Ferraris since 1974 will always be a cut beneath the earlier cars when it comes to true collectibility. For starters, most street Ferraris since 1974 have been built in relatively large numbers (above 10,000 for the 308/328 series) and none have serious competition history. Hence, they will never achieve top-tier status.
As to "instant collectibles" like the Ford and Carrera GTs and the Mercedes SLR, the performance of these supercars is designed solely to get them onto the covers of the big buff books, to give manufacturers bragging rights and owners "flavor-of-the-month" swagger. Whereas the original 300SL, GT40, and Porsche 904 actually cut their teeth in competition, these modern day vehicles will see little but the inside of climate-controlled garages for their entire existence. Care to guess how many of them you will see offered for sale in the next ten years with more than 3,000 miles on them? If it's more than a dozen in total, we'll extend your subscription for a year. And if even one of them has a trophy included from a podium finish in something besides the Abilene, KS, Beef Bar-B-Que and Concours, we'll extend it for a decade.
In fact, what makes us wary of the soaring values of certain muscle cars like Hemi 'Cudas is that they, too, have an imbalance of attributes. Performance, yes. Beauty, arguable but okay. Racing heritage, none. Rarity? Well, there's an interesting question. While the combination of, say, a Hemi engine, a four speed and a 'Cuda convertible body are very rare-just seven built in 1971-the body style itself is not unique or unusual. There were 16,592 Barracudas and 'Cudas built in 1971, and you could order one with a variety of engines that began with a puny 198-ci six-cylinder. (Which is why it is so easy to build a clone of these cars-there is lots of material to work with.) Imagine if 90% of the Ferrari Daytonas had been built with a Dino engine-it would certainly change the way we look at and value them.
FROM BENTLEYS TO BUG EYES
Which brings us back to the question: What cars will the kids of today collect? I propose that rather than scouring garages for well-preserved slammed Honda Civics with wings, or first-generation side-curtain Vipers, their collecting tastes will begin with the cars from the 1955-73 era, and as their tastes mature, to older Full Classics and Brass Era vehicles.
If I were giving the neighborhood kids a lesson in Car Connoisseurship 101, I'd be sure it included a little bit of everything. It would offer them a chance to understand the idiosyncracies of sports cars, including just how well a Bug Eye Sprite sticks to the road all the way to its top speed of about 45 mph, how an early air-cooled 911 makes an umistakeably raspy sound when fired up on a cold morning, and how you'll need at least 6,000 rpm to get an Alfa Giulietta Veloce off the line.
They'd get a chance to lay twin strips of rubber by dropping the clutch on a 383 Road Runner, and feel how the entire chassis twitches and shakes when you give full throttle to a Camaro with a 396.
Then they'd spend a day learning to crank a Model T, and pilot a right-drive, center-shift Bentley 3-Liter.
Above all, they would learn to think about the intent of the engineers and designers when each of these types of cars was constructed. What were their goals? How did they measure their own successes? What was their competition? Which of them are blue-chip collectibles, and why?
We Baby Boomers are the last generation of "collect by Braille" enthusiasts. We grew up with cars like 275 GTBs and Yenko Camaros and Boss 302 Mustangs, and they imprinted on us forever. It just so happens that these are very cool cars as well.
But our children will already have an installed base of collectible cars to judge against their current cars, and the current cars will always lose. Would any educated collector really prefer a Ferrari 360 or 430 to a Dino 246? Would they give any water-cooled 911 a second thought compared to a '73 Carrera RS? Or a 2005 Mustang GT compared to the 1965 version?
We've been lucky enough to live through the Golden Age of collector cars. But our children can look forward to having the entire spread of automotive history to pick and choose from. And hopefully they'll have a far better rationale for adding a car to their collection than just, "I drove one when I was in high school."