I have to say I am thrilled to see these sell offs. They've been a long time in coming, and while I feel sorry for guys who bought their cars at the top of the mark and are losing money, I am happy to see the investors getting out of the market and seeing more regular collectors taking control back and moderating the prices more and more. I wish it would have happened sooner as the folks who have loved these cars for decades are dying off, and we're going to find ourselves in very uncharted territory.
When it comes to automobile collecting, you generally have a standard supply and demand equation. First there is an oversupply of cars when they are new, then they get junked, wrecked, and stashed through their service lives, then they start to become popular again and there is an undersupply until the enthusiasts for the cars, generally people who wanted them when they were young, start dying off and the limited supply of cars meets the number of collectors. And while the supply of cars keeps dropping from wrecks, scrapping, parting out, etc., the number of collectors drops as well as the original collectors die off and are replaced with smaller numbers of interested collectors from the next generation. But thanks to the influences of so many investors in this market, tens of thousands of cars that would normally have been melted down decades ago were saved and most were restored, which is starting to create an over-supply situation when there should be an under-supply situation going on, so it's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out.
My hope is the over-supply situation will tank prices down to a point where younger kids will really be able to afford these cars and that'll help spur more interest in keeping them going. My fear is we've got some serious issues reaching a confluence here shortly. First is the folks who were kids in the 80s and 90s are already shifting their focus to the cars that were hot when they were kids, and the folks who were kids in the early 2000s will be doing the same before long. These folks weren't raised on carbs, vent windows, and gas fumes. If these guys smell exhaust there's something wrong with their car.
They want EFI, overdrive, ABS, and other systems and I suspect it won't be long before after-market suppliers start shifting away from producing parts for 50s-70s cars and start focusing on parts for newer cars. Second will be the ongoing reduced demand for newly restored cars, which will drive down the market for reproduction parts. And third is it's getting harder and harder to find a decent mechanic who can work on our cars, especially as we get older and older and the thought of crawling around in and under our rides gets to be more of a challenge, and there are really no organized training efforts to create new mechanics. All of which makes for a very unstable market ahead.
