Coalescing Classic
Hi Friends!
Yesterday, I hosted the 2026 Phoenix Children’s Concours in the Hills at beautiful Fountain Park in Fountain Hills, Arizona. Once again, the experience was absolutely incredible. Over 1,000 cars were on hand and as always, the diversity of vehicles there was simply outstanding. Everything from modern supercars, to pre-war, ’50s Americana, military, aircraft, off-road vehicles, JDM, European sporting classics, race cars, was on hand for all to see and enjoy. From Ferrari 250 GTOs all the way down to Kei cars, to say that there was something for everybody would be an understatement.
Over $450,000 was raised to help Phoenix Children’s continue their amazing work not just here in the Phoenix metro area, but across the country as well. Without a doubt, this remains not only the best annual automotive event in Arizona, but likely the biggest and best community-based car show in the United States, if not the world.
Additionally, the amount of people at this thing this year was CRAZY. I’m not sure on the final totals yet, but we’ve routinely had in the vicinity of 50,000 spectators and this year was far busier than previous ones. From approximately 10:30 AM all the way until about 1:30 PM, the 1.3 mile long ring of people around Fountain Park was unbroken (and hundreds deep) in all directions. I’ve never seen anything like it at a car event before. This means that yesterday, from my little perch on the stage in front of the fountain, I got to see a lot of people, do a lot of stuff, around a lot cars and I was definitely paying attention as a result.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve gotten an avalanche of emails and DMs from people asking me general market questions coming out of a very active January in the collector car world. Nearly all of them landed in the same place: What is going on with all these “new cars” and will current and future buyers have any continued interest in “the classics”?
Before we can answer that question, I think what we need to do is actually formally define what It means for a car to reach classic status. According to the Antique Automobile Club of America (and corroborated by most insurance companies as well as state motor vehicle departments) any car 20 to 25 years old or more qualifies as a classic. Essentially, what this means is that 2002 Ferrari with the plastic interior, ABS brakes and adaptive suspension is actually already a classic and the people that are buying these cars and throwing down huge sums on them absolutely view them that way.
Will these buyers have an appreciation for older cars at some point? I think the answer here is definitely yes. Ask any McPherson kid or a good chunk of people currently working for auction houses that fall into the age range we’re discussing here and they’re likely to tell you that their personal favorite era of cars is probably pre-war. Do they have any frame of reference or any real emotional connection to these cars? Not really, however through exposure, they’ve begun to learn and understand what’s significant about these cars and we’ve seen the market adjust as a result. Of course, there’s caveats here (which we’ll get to in a broader sense below), but somebody’s driving that market right now and a lot of those cars do continue to have buyers.
The bulk majority of people asking questions however, have been really sort of focusing on one era of cars. European sports cars and American muscle cars from the ’60s and ’70s have been brought up repeatedly in the conversations I’ve been having over the last couple of weeks and I think that’s where the primary concern lies. Fortunately, these cars have something that 50s Americana, pre-war, etc do not benefit from. Pop culture has really continued to push these cars in front of younger audiences over and over again for years now. Video games, movies, music videos, short and long-form online media continue to reliably feature American Muscle cars and European classics along with retro cars, supercars, etc and that’s kept awareness high and will likely keep the longevity of this marketplace beyond what we’ve normally seen elsewhere previously.
This is what I witnessed yesterday. Younger enthusiasts (let’s say 14 to 55) were equally as excited by the Aston Martin DB4 Zagato as they were the R34 Skyline, Boss 302 Mustang and Lamborghini Revuelto. Across the board, these folks know what they’re looking at too. The internet has been an enormously powerful tool to not only expose, but educate current and future collectors and as such, they have the widest scope of any incoming group in the history of this hobby.
Another conversation I had a handful of times yesterday was about the experience component of collector cars. Guys/girls in supercar clubs that are networking and making business deals there are able to do that because of the cars they have. People wanting to experience historic racing or road rallies like the Copperstate 1000, Colorado Grand or Mille Miglia need vehicles with certain criteria. Then we consider Concours culture, the top of the food chain there most definitely remains mid-century and pre-war and if you want to do that stuff, you need to have one of those in order to get there too. Point is, along with the depth of knowledge that people have, they’re also seeing things come across their social feeds which open them up to new worlds, new relationships and new places to see and as we covered last week, that stuff is going to become more and more desirable as digital becomes a bigger and bigger component of our daily lives. You need to have the right car in order to be able to do all of those things.
Unfortunately, this era of collector car does have a few pretty significant downsides too. First of all, these cars are becoming less usable all the time. Although many of them have no trouble on modern roads, people are becoming so used to isolation that the exposure that they give, will eventually start to become a little bit unnerving for all but the most dedicated drivers. As speeds creep up and as municipalities focus on issues above and beyond the quality of our roads. The I-10 here in Phoenix for example is an absolute warzone that for about 80% of the day I would never consider taking a classic car on. Additionally, it’s hard to deny that people aren’t getting any smaller. The average American (both men and women) now weighs almost 30 lb more than they did in 1980 and interiors on vintage cars aren’t getting any larger.
There’s also the ever-present supply and demand a curve that defines every collector marketplace. For example, there were almost 75,000 (72,515) Jaguar E-Types produced over the course of its three iterations, with the earliest and most desirable Series I examples making up more than half of that number (38,419). An absolute ton of these things were restored to absurdly high levels in the 2010s also, which means there’s a lot of them out there right now and a bunch of them are really, really nice. If we’re talking American muscle cars, that number is even higher. Far higher.
Still though, if you really look at it, the top end of the E-Type market has remained remarkably stable. Cars that were $180,000-$240,000 in 2021 are still $180,000-$240,000 cars in 2026 (I’m not having any inflation arguments with anyone around this). Where we’ve started to see the drop off is on the opposite end of things. Less desirable cars which really started to pull pretty well from like 2013 to 2016, in many cases were worth a third more in 2021 than they are today. What this means, is that there’s a lot of examples out there, buyers have a lot of choices, well-sorted cars that are sold correctly and in the correct places are going to continue to pull the money and quality really matters a lot right now.
Again, I don’t think there’s any question that the interest remains with the new generation, there’s a love of all things automotive and the people that are car people have a broader appreciation of things than any previous group of collectors have ever had. I also think it means there’s a lot of runway left on mid-century cars, but you need to know what you’re doing, you need to prep right, sell right and understand realistically what you’re coming to market with before you do it. There’s no doubt that this incoming group will certainly prioritize the things that they’re most emotionally connected to first, but as we all know, oftentimes the surface level things that attract you to something are not the same as what you find when you dig a little deeper. This means that we need to continue to enjoy our cars for what they are, we need to come together and celebrate those things and we need to build around the communities that we create there as a result.
Yesterday, I got a pretty solid 10,000 ft view of everything and from where I was, that view looked pretty great.
That’s it for this week……
Darin Roberge