It’s still depreciating, even if it is just sitting in your a nitrogen-filled garage. If you go to sell it in 15-20 years you’ll be getting a small premium for it, but it’ll still be basically in line with the used car price for that model.
If you did want to invest in cars, the trick isn’t to buy brand new and park it for decades, it’s finding under-appreciated used cars that are just at the bottom of their depreciation curve. Imagine like back in the 80’s when you could pick up any number of classic muscle cars for nothing, or more recently quite a lot of 80’s and early 90’s sports cars are in the process of going from bargains kids buy to flog around a track to collector’s items.
You mentioned in the OP that you would drain all the fluids, I would not do that. I would fill with new clean fluids and change them out before any attempt at a restart, but leaving them drained is not a good idea. Many of the rubber and plastic belts, hoses and seals will lose their volatile components and shrink and crack over time. For this reason whatever tires are on the car will not be safe to drive on after time, they will be brittle, cracked and unsafe. Tires will also develop flat spots on the bottom if the weight of the car is left to sit on the tires. A friend of mine had to replace the very expensive run-flat tires on his Corvette after a 5 year storage with the weight of the car left on the tires.
The volatiles in the interior plastics or leather are also going to cause those areas to deteriorate…
You are going to need to store the car in a temperature and moisture controlled environment, and maintain that environment. If you have high and low temperature changes during storage the air inside the engine will condense moisture out of the air and pool in the engine. Only a few drops but over time it will matter.
The long term storage costs for say 30 or 40 years will greatly outweigh any potential benefit you might gain. And there is still a high probability that after removing the car from storage you would need to do a major engine rebuild and body restoration before the thing could be driven.
Ultimately, I am reading this as fanboy collectible fantasizing. Similar to wishing you could go back to the late 19th and early 20th century and by Monets and Picassos.
For car fanboys it has huge appeal - as a guitar fanboy, the stories of “under the bed” finds are legendary.
I see that as a short-term bounce. In another 42 years, no one’s giing to be all that hot for a replica of a GT40, anymore than the modern Challenger, Charger, Camaro, or Mustang.
As someone pointed out, new isn’t the time to buy and store - the bottom of the depreciation curve is when you can read the market. Early (longhood) 911s didn’t start spiking until the Euro was strong enough for overseas Boomers to rationalize buying them back from the states. It seems no one saw the E30 M3 going up like it has recently. Now is the time to buy a MkI Miata, restore it and store it.
A friend of mine went through a phase where he was buying exotic cars, driving them for about a year, then selling them. Someone asked why he sold his Ford GT, since they started appreciating immediately. He said most people don’t understand what it would take to properly store a car for 30-40 years.
I still want a Ford GT. There’s rumors of a new one. Of course, it’s going to be some kind of EcoBoost/hybrid, I imagine.
Just for grins I took a look back 75 years to 1939 to see what cars were introduced that year. You’d think the first year of a model would be the most collectible, right? So here’s what might be in my sealed, climate controlled, 75-year old warehouse.
BMW 335
Cadillac Series 61
Checker Model A
Chrysler New Yorker
Daimler 18
Studebaker Champion
Now the BMW and Daimler weren’t even sold in the U.S., so the odds of getting one in 1939 would have been pretty slim. But which of the American models would you choose: the Chrysler, which was a Buick-level entry; the Cadillac, which was actually a step down from the larger, more powerful Series 70; the Champion, an all-new from the ground up model; or the Checker, which was a limousine rather than a conventional passenger car?
Looking back 50 years, in 1964 if you jumped into the market early you might have gotten lucky and scored the trend-setting Plymouth Barracuda. . . or waited a few weeks and settled for a Ford Mustang.
This is something that comes up in aircraft pretty often since it isn’t all that unusual to intentionally have a plane sit for years without being flown. In fact for my plane the manufacturer recommend that it undergo a storage procedure if it isn’t going to be flown for 30 days. While some of this is aircraft specific, a lot is generic to any engine and may give some ideas.
Drain the lubricating oil from the sump and replace with a preservative oil mixture.
Operate the engine until normal temperatures are obtained.
Remove spark plugs
Through the spark plug hole, spray the interior of each cylinder with approximately two ounces of the preservative oil mixture using an airless spray gun.
Replace spark plugs with dehydrator plugs
Preferably before the engine has cooled, install small bags of desiccant in exhaust and intake ports and seal with moisture impervious material and pressure sensitive tape. Any other opening from the engine to the atmosphere, such as the breather, and any pad from which an accessory is removed, should likewise be sealed.
At 15-day maximum intervals, a periodic check should be made of the cylinder dehydrator plugs and desiccant. When the color of the desiccant has turned from blue to pink the preservation procedure must be repeated.
This. Folks who’re 50 to 80 years old now were often car fanboys in their youth. So now cars from their youth are the thing they treasure. Given 50 years of their profitable saving & investing and the ever-increasing scarcity of surviving cars of the era, they can now bid up the price on the few surviving examples.
What are the things that 15-25 year old people are fanboys about today? THAT is the thing you want to buy now & store for 50 years so … profit!!!
Looking at cars & youth today I’d bet cars are not that thing. Recorded music and smartphones and games are probably the hot ticket. But obviously in modern digital form 2010’s recorded music isn’t going to be rare in 50 years. It’ll all still be available for instant download by anyone anywhere for a nominal charge.
Serious question: how long do you think the technology will be maintainable on cars once we move to efficient-battery’d, self-driving electric cars? Access to tires, spark plugs, stuff like that. I have no clue.
As a guitar fanboy, I wonder how much longer tube amps have. How long before new vacuum tubes/valves are no longer made, and the old stocks run out?
There’s always going to be niche builders. There’s still people that use wooden templates and shape sheet metal with a hammer to build bodyparts if you want a handmade car. I’m sure self-driving electric cars will still use tires.
I’m not a fan of classic cars or keeping things original just because it’s supposed to be that way. If I could have a 65 Shelby Cobra with a future electric drivetrain that had the same performance and range as a gas powered engine, I’d take it in a heartbeat.
The Ford GT is a bit an outlier in the supercar market in that it was mostly bought by collectors instead of playboys and has appreciated in value, but that’s not because it was rare or had great performance. It was because the GT40 has a hell of a story behind it, and the GT has a hell of a lot of engineering behind it. It’s beautifully made, and when you see one you’re taken back to Le Mans 1966 and American giving the finger to Ferrari.
If you’d spent your money on a Ferrari F430 in 2006 instead of the GT you’d be pretty pissed off right now, because they’re selling for 5 figures all day long.
Now yes, those presumably all have some miles on them and were not hermetically sealed, but anyone who’d bought one of those when they were new under the assumption that any Rolls Royce would be worth a ton of money someday would be sorely disappointed. How can a Rolls Royce that was the most expensive car in the world at the time now sell for about the same price as a moderately sorted, numbers matching 69 Camaro? Because the collector market makes no sense. It’s not worth it to try and guess what’s going to be hot 80 years from now unless you’re going to enjoy the car in the meanwhile. Drive it, take it to shows, do some parades… then if it ends up that your prediction was wrong, at least you had some fun.
Wait a second! Are you telling us that in addition in addition to shrink-wrapping the car, storing it in a pit filled with argon gas and all the other things everyone mentioned upthread, we have to go and check EVERY TWO WEEKS :eek::eek::eek: to make sure everything is okay?
Could we just take the cars to Tuscon and leave them there?
Had you been able to buy a 1965 Shelby Cobra you could have kept it in the garage, driving it on Sundays around the block and sold it for an average of…
Year Make Model Submodel Body Type Engine Average Value
1965 Shelby Cobra 427 Competition Roadster $1,997,500
Clearly that would be worth the problems of storing a car for <50 years, all the time driving it and enjoying it.
Also from Hagerty, if you had a 1965 Corvair Monza convertible in pristine condtion, you could fetch $24,700 for it.
Want to drive it around the block a few times before you sell it? That knocks the price down to about $15,800.
Given that the $2,600 or so a brand new Monza convertible cost in 1965 works out to about $19,647 today, you’d be better off driving the hell out of the car and dumping it in 1969.