When the past overtakes the future
12/09/2016
The news in the press came as a surprise! According to a note in the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger , sales of vinyl records (£2.4 million) exceeded spending on digital downloads (£2.1 million) in the UK for the first time last week. This is a trend, not a single figure. Sales figures for the good old 33-track record, which still has to be mechanically scanned, have been rising steadily for a good eight years. This is not only the case in the UK, but also in the USA, Italy and Japan (increases of 50 to 80 percent per year). Sales are also rising sharply in this country. Nostalgia is in, haptics and technology you can feel are also gaining favor with music listeners.
And what does this have to do with classic cars? Well, a similar trend can be observed here. In Germany, there were around 368,000 cars with H license plates in 2015 - the mobile past.
In comparison, just over 12,000 electric cars - the future - were newly registered in 2015. If you assume that a classic car changes hands every seven years, then around 52,000 classic cars were traded in Germany in 2015, but in reality there were probably significantly more. And then there were the old cars (including youngtimers) that do not have an H license plate, so that we can probably assume that well over 100,000 old cars were sold in one year, almost ten times as many as new electric vehicles were put on the market. So here too, the past is overtaking the future, especially as sales are increasing every year.
