Modern Cars Are Flooding The Collector Market

We (and you, probably) love classic cars. We love vintage cars. We love historic ones and collectible ones, too. But what do any of these words even mean? If you ask the Classic Car Club of America (CCCA), a so-called “Full Classic” is a “Fine” or “Distinctive” automobile, “produced only between 1915 and 1948 … a high-priced, top end vehicle when new and was built in limited quantities.” Insurers and some states would put the cutoff at 25 years of age for a “classic,” “historic,” or “enthusiast” vehicle. If you just ask regular people, classic or collectible mainly just means “old,” and just how old is up for debate.

Look at the graph below, though, and one thing is clear: Newer and newer vehicles are rapidly entering this old car hobby of ours.

Naturally, with the passage of time, fun cars tend to go through a cycle. They start out as exciting new kids on the block. Then they become used cars, moving down the line through their second, third, fourth owners, etc. Then, once attrition has taken a significant number of examples off the road and enough time has passed for nostalgia and historic license plate eligibility to kick in, they start to become classic or collectible. And new cars are making that transition all the time. In the year 2000, a 30-year-old car was from 1970. In 2026, a 30-year-old car is from 1996. But, as the data shows, collector cars appear to be getting newer at a faster pace than just the flipping of the pages on the calendar.

The graph measures the average model year of vehicles sold via live and online auctions. Twelve years ago, the average model year was 1968, or 46 years old at the time. Two years later, in 2016, the model year had jumped to 1969, or 47 years old at the time. Fast forward 10 years to early 2026, and the average model year is 1989, which means the average age of collector vehicles sold at auction today is 37 years.

As for what is behind this trend, there are probably a few factors at play. The auction site Cars & Bids, which launched in 2020 and until last year catered exclusively to vehicles from the 1980s-2000s, marked the beginning of an amplified focus on selling newer enthusiast vehicles online. Another could be the shift in preferences over the past few years for reliability and usability in a collector car, which naturally skews towards newer stuff. The quick ascent from ’60s cars to those from the late ’80s may also be rooted in the fact that, frankly, there just weren’t as many noteworthy, enthusiast-oriented vehicles from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s as there were in the 1950s-1960s and late-1980s to the 2000s.

Then there’s the surge of instant collectibles and limited editions on the new car market that make their way to enthusiast car auctions. For example, how many no-mile Dodge Hellcats and Demons did you see at Mecum last month? (The answer is 32.)

Finally, there’s the general sense of electrification and computerization encroaching on the new car market, along with the manual transmission’s gradual march towards extinction and the dearth of analog, driver-focused new cars that pushes enthusiasts to the next closest thing—used enthusiast cars.

“Classic,” “vintage,” and “collectible” don’t have any universal definition in this hobby. They never have, and this one little graph doesn’t establish any. But it is clear that cars are becoming classic, vintage, and/or collectible at a faster pace than ever before.