The Collector Car Market Is Seeing an Influx of Younger Cars

Modern cars—those made from the 1980s to today—are on an accelerated path toward collector status. That’s what our analysts observed when crunching the data on vehicles featured at auction over the last decade. Collector cars are getting newer, faster.
Eventually, certain used cars gain collector status as enthusiasts decide to start preserving and restoring them. That’s just the natural order of things. Just look at the rise of Fox-Body Mustangs, first-gen Miatas, and almost anything in a Radwood show. Trends in more recent years, however, show more than just simple passage of time when it comes to collectability. Across the thousands of public auctions (live and online) for the six years prior to 2020, the average model year of vehicles listed got one year newer every 12 months. But from 2020-24, that pace has more than doubled: the rate is now 2.3 model years per year.

A few factors contribute to this quickened pace. These younger cars enjoyed a burst in popularity during COVID. From 2020-21 alone, the average model year of cars listed at public sale got 4.7 years newer. While it’s calmed down since then, the rate is still significantly above where it was (note in the chart above, there was even a period between 2018-19 where the average model year got older). We’ve written before about online offerings being significantly younger than their in-person counterparts, and the hastened adoption of online platforms as places to buy and sell collector vehicles has naturally supported younger cars—not to mention the younger consumers who more readily embraced the concept of buying a car online, sometimes sight-unseen.
Those consumers are another element—the generally agreed-upon start of Gen X (1965) and end of millennial (1996) generations puts these buyers at about 30-60 years old, a sweet spot for collector car purchases. It’s only natural that their preferences become a focal point of the market as their earning power is in its peak years.
Finally, by virtue of age, attrition and sometimes production numbers, there are simply fewer older collector cars than there are newer ones that have recently transitioned or are about to transition from used car to collector car. Add in the extra reliability and usability of 1980-and-up vehicles, and their increased popularity among old car fans makes even more sense. The rise of these cars doesn’t take away from existing classics, it just makes the enthusiast tent that much bigger.
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