Not the best worded title, but I watch these shows where they rebuild old classic cars, and the one I just saw has the guy redoing I think a 1970 LeMans, but once he’s done, the only original parts left are the chassis, trunk pan and maybe one quarter panel. Does the classisc car industry regulate itself in anyway, so that you must you have a minimum amount of original parts to call a restore an original?
It kinda depends on how anal you are about classifications and definitions.
“Restoration” covers a lot of ground, but “original” is often reserved for when only normally-replaced parts are not the original pieces of the car. (Oil filter, valves, etc.)
Within the UK, IIRC yes there is a certain minimum of the car that must remain for it to be original, if you wish it to have a period registration plate and not just have a new one issued from the top of the pile. Something to do with certain key parts of the car, the chassis for one.
I wondered something similar years ago, when I used to read a lot of classic VW magazines. One of them featured an essentially custom-built car, with a specially made frame and interior, built to house a Corvette engine and transmission, with a Beetle body stuck on top.
I thought it was absurd to call this car a VW. It would be like taking the body panels of a Corvette and sticking it on top of a Beetle chassis. No one in their right mind would call that a Corvette, so why was the reverse a VW?
It really all depends upon the make and model of the car. Any car that’s in good shape and is all original will be worth more than a restored model. However, if a car’s particularly rare, then one that’s been almost completely replaced will still hold a lot of it’s value. There are situations where people will take a car that’s been wrecked, put new parts on it, and then someone will take the scrapped parts and use those to build a completely new car. In one of his columns, Leno talks about going to a car show where all seven of a particularly rare model of a car were going to be there. The factory only built five.
Nearly every car club has an “authentification committee” who are the experts on a car, and can quickly tell if the car’s all original, a professionally restored model, an amature restoration, or a “clone” of the original.
My Dad wrote to a group like that, when he was trying to register his Royal Enfield with a period plate. He was surprised to be written back to so quickly by people who could ID the month when his engine left the factory and when the chassis did (two years earlier).