As we all know, so much of the rise and fall of car market sectors and eras have to do with the age of the people who can afford them and admire them. 60s and 70s muscle rose through the roof when the guys (let’s be fair, it’s almost all guys) who dreamed of having those cars when they were young, finally had the money to buy them. Before that, 50s Bel Airs and Eldorados were coveted by guys who dreamed of having them as kids.. Before that, people wanted Packards and Duesenbergs. As those older guys age out, pass away, or start to give up their collections, the values of some of those older classics have stagnated or dropped. There just isn’t a generation coming up behind them that dreamed of those cars and is dying to have them in their garage.
Now, it’s 70s and 80s Japanese cars. Some of the fascination is that some versions of these cars never made it to our shores and now can be imported. Some of the fascination is that several generations of these models made it into video games (think Skyline R32) and were coveted by kids who could “drive” them on screen a few years ago, and now can afford to do so in real life. I owned a new, ’94 Acura Integra GS-R. I loved it when I owned it. But I got to live that experience because I’m 53. I don’t covet that car now, I buy stuff from my childhood. Guys who are now in their 40s couldn’t have that GS-R or NSX experience back then, so now they’re driving up the price of clean, un-modded (which is hard to find) examples of their “dream cars." We’re seeing it in the European car market, too. First gen M3s are valued by a group of guys who knew what they were when they were new, but couldn’t afford them or were too young to even own one, and now they have the means to make their dreams come true.
So, the real question is, what’s next? What did kids covet in the 90s and early 2000s? They’ll (hopefully) have money soon, and they’ll want to make their dreams come true, too. They may not look twice at a Ferrari 250, but maybe they had a Lamborghini Diablo poster on their wall, and are working their tails off to make enough money one day to finally own one. Let’s hope!
