A Ferrari 365 from 1972 is expected to fetch somewhere around $450,000 during the annual Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in Monterey, Calif. this weekend. When it was last bought in 2008, the car was worth $160,000. For the investment, the lucky owner may receive roughly triple his money and a few memorable – albeit nerve-wracking – road trips with 8- track theme music.
So should you be trying to get into the vintage-car game? In a word: no. No way. Absolutely not. Here's why:
1. Lots of Idling
The Pebble Beach sales, like most marquee car auctions, are an exception. Only about 3 percent of vintage cars sell at auction and they are the best of the best. It’s like watching a super-cut of holes-in-one and deciding to try your hand at golf.
In reality, values for scads of vintage cars have been relatively stable for years. Detroit classics from the 1950s, for example, have mostly idled in the past decade, according to Hagerty Insurance, which tracks the values of the various old rides it underwrites. The same goes for muscle cars and so- called affordable collectibles like the Triumph TR6 and the Volkswagen Beetle.
2. A Tendency to Stall
Rolling assets are not in any way recession-proof, no matter what the exotic car dealer tells you. In the 2008 downturn, the only upside to owning a vintage Mercedes 300 with gull-wing doors was feeling slightly less frightened to actually drive it. From the third quarter of 2008 to the third quarter of 2009, the value of “blue-chip” collectibles like "the Gullwing" slid by 19 percent, according to Hagerty. That’s more than twice as much as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. A sampling of vintage Ferraris in that window fared even worse, plummeting 25 percent.
3. Running Hot
Post-recession, the rebound was swift. A lot of vintage-car gurus believe that the run-up in prices since the recession is officially in "frothy" territory. A Hagerty monthly index of expert sentiment on the market has dropped 9 percent in the past year.
Rick Drewry, senior claims specialist of collector cars at American Modern Insurance Group, said the auctions are starting to attract investors who don't know much about cars at all. "I'm starting to see cars that weren't ever that good go up in value," he explained. "For the longest time, they were throw- aways." In short, we may be approaching peak Porsche.