The transformation of the automobile into a collectible

HostIt's funny to think that if you kept a broken old car eighty years ago, your neighbors probably thought you were a bit of a pack rat. We see a shiny vintage car today and think it belongs in a museum, but back then, most people just saw a heavy piece of trash taking up space.

GuestThat's so true. In the first thirty years of the twentieth century, cars were basically like hammers or shovels. They were tools. If your car stopped running well, or if a newer one came out with a better engine, you didn't keep the old one in a garage. You junked it. The tech was moving so fast that a car from ten years ago felt like an ancient relic that no one could use. In fact, most of those early cars ended up being melted down. During those first few decades, society looked at cars as disposable machines, not things worth saving for history. It was only in the 1930s that a few people started to worry. They noticed that the very first cars, those shaky things with handles instead of steering wheels, were almost gone.

HostBut why would anyone want to save them? I mean, if they were loud, slow, and didn't even work right, what was the draw? It sounds like they were just collecting junk.

GuestWell, at the time, people did mock them for it. They looked like eccentric hoarders. But these first collectors saw themselves as a kind of amateur archaeologist. They were digging through barn floors and scrap heaps to find what they called the mechanical ancestors of the modern world. They weren't looking for luxury or speed. They were trying to rescue the very first horseless carriages before they were lost forever. By 1935, this went from a weird hobby for a few people to a real movement. That was the year the Antique Automobile Club of America started. It changed everything because it turned hoarding into something more like a job. They started setting rules for what was actually worth saving.

HostRules for cars sounds a bit intense. Was it just about which ones were the oldest, or did they have a specific look in mind?

GuestIt became very disciplined. They started breaking cars down into eras, like the Brass Era for anything built before 1915. And the goal changed. It was no longer just about making the car move again. They wanted authentic restoration. That meant every nut, bolt, and paint color had to be exactly like it was when it left the factory. This is when the show culture started to take off. These events weren't about how fast the car could go or how useful it was. They were judged on beauty and how close they were to the original state. After the big war, this grew even more. By 1952, a new club started just to honor the really high-end luxury cars from the twenties and thirties, like the Duesenberg. They called these the true classics.

HostSo it went from saving junk to making sure the paint was the exact right shade of green from 1920. That feels like a huge shift toward the high-end, rich collector side of things. Does that mean the average person was priced out of the hobby?

GuestThat really started to happen in the 1970s. That's when the whole nature of the hobby shifted again. It stopped being something you just did in your home garage on the weekends and turned into a serious way to make money. Big auctions started popping up, like Barrett-Jackson in 1971. Suddenly, a car was a blue chip asset, almost like a stock or a piece of fine art. This was the era where people started caring about the car's life story, or what experts call provenance. If you had papers proving who owned the car and where it had been, the price could jump into the millions.

HostI can see that for a rare luxury car, but what about the cars most people actually remember? My dad didn't have a Duesenberg, but he sure loved his old Mustang.

GuestAnd that's exactly what kept the hobby alive for everyone else. While the rich were buying pre-war cars, middle-class fans in the seventies and eighties started buying back the muscle cars of their youth. We're talking about things like the Shelby Mustang or the GTO. It proved that nostalgia is just as strong as historical importance. People wanted to own a piece of their own childhood. Now, in the last few years, the internet has changed the game again. Sites like Bring a Trailer have moved the hobby out of those fancy auction houses and put it on everyone’s phone. It's a twenty-four-hour global market now.

HostDoes that mean we're still looking for those same 1960s muscle cars, or has the target moved again?

GuestIt has moved quite a bit. We're in the era of the modern classic now. Younger collectors are looking for cars from the eighties, nineties, and even the early two-thousands. They want things like a clean Toyota Supra or an old Land Rover. These buyers don't care as much about how old the car is. They care about the analog driving experience—the feeling of a car that doesn't have a computer doing all the work. We're seeing prices for these newer cars that used to be reserved for old Ferraris. It shows that in the end, the most valuable thing in collecting is how a car makes you feel about a specific slice of time.

HostOld cars went from being scrap metal to museum pieces, and now they're basically time machines that people can buy on their phones.

GuestThe neighbor with the tarp over the car in his yard might just be sitting on the next big thing, because what we think of as a tool today almost always becomes a treasure once enough time passes.

HostNeighbors might have laughed at those first collectors for filling their barns with old horseless carriages, but they were the only ones who saw that yesterday's junk is often tomorrow's history.