THE ECONOMY

Kdancy wrote:

Older guys dying, or cutting down on their "herd" and younger guys want something better on gas and just plain don't know enough about our type of collector cars.

Same sort of deal with the brass veterans. They used to be big dollar cars, but their prices are a lot softer than they used to be, the number of potential buyers has diminished greatly over the last 20 to 30 years.

Well when the credit was still loose your "hard times" speculators who were out of the stock market and into collectibles could finance the purchase of a collector car. A few things are happening now, credit is tight, and the stock market itself is not bad. Also assuming one would drive a collector car gas prices are up.
From a hobby standpoint though, there's less H.S.'s that have auto shop classes, less young people going into trades and less young people cultivated by car clubs and social organizations in general which are also competing with other and more glamorous and cheap forms of entertainment for time and dollars.
Americans kids in general are not interested in history, they want the next bigger and better thing so old cars are also competing against your "fast-n-furious" type modern cars/modern hot rods.

With all that going on only a few odd-balls like me would want to keep a pre-war classic Hudson or even a Dusenberg for that matter. If car clubs don't take collective steps to keep the costs down in another two decades there will only be a handful of people doing what we do and any other collector cars will belong to museums and rich people who never drive them and have them mostly only serve as status symbols.
Or... so many people will stop being involved or interested that the prices and values will tumble anyways. But that would also means parts would become very very scarce.

terraplane8 wrote:

From what I'm seeing young people are more interested in the virtual world of their computers and social networking than real things like cars........

Also the veteran cars seem to be holding up in value, just look at the prices of them in Europe. Even '20's tourers seem very expensive now, and then there is that Terraplane I mentioned. To be honest I'd expect a tidy Eight for that sort of money or a bit more, not a six needing quite a bit of work. Maybe it's the '50's stuff that is weak? I don't know as I don't follow '50's stuff including Hudsons.

Yeah that's true Europe is also importing a good chunk of old American cars. At American Car shows I see less and less stuff from the 1950's.

mikeyb wrote:

Yes. We LOVE classic American cars. And if you go to a meeting like Power Big Meet in Sweden (www.bigmeet.com) you will notice that there's a lot more younger folks than on US meetings.

But... if the economy is that bad... where are the two affordable solid-driver stepdown coupes (unmolested originals please) that my buddy and me have been looking for for more than a year now?

Mikey

That depends upon if you want a Pacemaker or a Hornet. LOL

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