Is There A Future For Collectible Cars?
Wall Street Journal: September 7, 2024
By Dan Neil
The text of this article appears after the newspaper pages below
Is There A Future For Collectible Cars?
Wall Street Journal: September 7, 2024
By Dan Neil
Photographs by Anna Sophia Moltke for WSJ
Sept. 6, 2024
IN MOST STATES a motor vehicle 25-45 years or older qualifies as a classic car and is usually exempt from emissions and vehicle-safety requirements. According to Hagerty Insurance, specializing in the classic/enthusiast auto market, there are about 31 million such cars just in the U.S., and no doubt many millions more around the world. Out of this rusty, musty multitude is chosen, every August, one stupendous example of automotive art and history, one king, one classic car to rule them all: the Best of Show at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.
Check your barns and garages: You may already be a winner.
Every August for the past 10 years I’ve volunteered as an honorary judge at the world’s most famous classic-car competition and, believe me, the honor is all mine. My fellow invitees are titans of industry, legends of design, wealthy collectors, racing demigods. Derek Bell! Jacky Ickx! I can’t even get to the judges’ breakfast on time, for want of a winner’s-circle Rolex Daytona. The other judges call me Miss Congeniality.
I may not know a ton about rare automobiles but I know disruption when I see it. This world is gently motoring toward a great generational unknown, not unrelated to the one facing mainstream consumers. It’s understood that the collectors of tomorrow chase the cars that thrilled them in their youth. But what if, like now, the cars of their youth are lame?
While waiting in line to be introduced, I posed a question to a half-dozen executive-level car designers: Name a new car that a person could buy today that could win Best of Show in the year 2080, that is, 56 years from now? Some laughed. Some took a deep breath and asked that they not be quoted. The verdict was unanimous: Tesla Cybertruck.
Uh-oh, I thought. I’d better take some notes.
Why 56 years? The year 2080 seemed conveniently round. It also puts the question several decades past the tailpipe bans expected to be enforced in the 2030s. By then “internal-combustion engine cars will become a 21st-Century version of early 20th-Century steam cars,” said Ed Gilbertson, Chief Judge Emeritus and the head goat-roper in charge of the honorary judges. “They will still be around, but they will be obsolete.”
In the next few decades, “supercars like the McLaren F1 or the Pagani, or bespoke present-day Bugattis and Maybachs, will be more frequent Best of Show contenders,” said Gilbertson. “But by the time 2080 rolls around, the older generation who identify with such cars will be gone,” he said. By then the BoS “could well be a one-off custom autonomous car or a humanoid custom agent car.”
And what of the tens of thousands of late-model Porsches, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Aston Martins, Lucids, Corvettes, Cobras, Mercedes-Maybachs, Rolls-Royces and Bentleys that overcrowd the peninsula every August? Most of those palookas don’t stand a chance. “There has not been a standard production car selected or in contention as BoS in the ‘modern era’ of the concours [post 1968],” said Colin Feichtmeir, chief class judge and selection committee member. “If I am picking a modern car, I would have to lean towards the unique and quasi-one-off cars being built.”
Such cars are unicorns, but Monterey Car Week is a Unicorn’s Parade. I saw, parked casually at a strip mall among 16 other Koenigseggs, the King’s Blade itself: the Koenigsegg Agera RS, which claimed the world’s-fastest production car record (278 mph) in 2017. Given its provenance, historic significance and vulgar allure, the time-traveling Agera RS might make the cut, 56 years hence.
As might the Bugatti Tourbillon I saw around town, or Aston Martin Valkyrie, or the latest honking cygnet from Italian swan-breeder Pagani. I myself coulda been a contender, driving a Lucid Air Sapphire, a stunningly beautiful electric luxury sedan that keeps up with the Koenigsegg in the quarter-mile.
If you find any of those in your barn, consider yourself lucky, although you probably already do.
For most of its 74-year history, the Pebble Beach award has been dominated by a handful of European and American luxury marques paired with exclusive coach-builders. Bugatti and Mercedes-Benz have both won 10 times. Packard, Rolls-Royce, Duesenberg, Jaguar, Isotta Fraschini. The youngest winner is the 1954 Ferrari 375 MM Scaglietti Coupe once owned by director Roberto Rossellini, which took BoS in 2014.
“We’ve known for a long time that for the Concours to survive it must evolve with the times, with the age and experience of the audience,” said Gilbertson.
It really helps to have something for the Boomers. This year’s outreach included a special class for the dramatic, improbable Atomic Age designs of the 1960s-1980s, characterized as the “Wedge-Shaped Concept Cars & Prototypes Class.” This collection of fantastical futurism starred the pencil-pointed Lancia Stratos HF Zero Bertone. Designed by maestro Marcello Gandini while he was working for Carrozzeria Bertone, the Stratos sits a mere 33 inches high and is so thin-sectioned it doesn’t have side doors. The windshield opens on rear-mounted hinges; drivers climb in head first, much as they would gain entry into a boa constrictor.
In a bit of a surprise, the fantasy Lancia (1970) was recalled to the field as one of four finalists for the BoS. Had it won, the Lancia would have displaced the Ferrari 375 MM as the youngest in the modern era of the Concours, post-1968.
As it turned out, the judges had a rather different message to send about time and mutability. The BoS went to an unrestored 1934 Bugatti Type 59 Sports, presented by a jubilant Fritz Burkard. The Bugatti is the first winner chosen from one of the Preservation classes, created to encourage owners to preserve originality as much as possible. The Type 59 Sports rolled onto the award platform wearing the same tatty, gravel-strafed black paint it acquired in the possession of King Leopold III of Belgium and in which it sat for generations—a used-up, run-down, nearly forgotten race car.
Have you checked in the barn? I mean, really looked?
As for the Cybertruck, none of the real judges I contacted thought much of that nomination. “Its wonky design is contrary to everything we believe about elegance,” said Ken Gross, one of the Concours’ head judges. “Top winners are undeniably sexy, very exclusive, with long hoods and short decks, and styling that takes your breath away,” said Gross.
I think he just called it ugly.
“I don’t think there will be a bias as to the type of propulsion or for electric,” said Feichtmeir, “nor do I think there will be any prejudice against a car because it was considered a polluter at the time of its production.” BoS has most often gone to the best examples from the 1920s and 1930s “because this was an era that saw the peak of mechanical creativity coupled with artistic coach building. If anything, I think the further we have come from that era (both in time and car design), the more celebrated it has become.”
“I think Pebble will remain the place where the car world comes to see the greatest cars, regardless of when they were made,” said Paul Hageman, another chief class judge and selection committee member. “While change is generally necessary and positive, it’s important to remember that Pebble changes collectors, more than collectors change Pebble.”