Are vintage off-road vehicles undervalued?
08/09/2018
There are already too many of them! The SUV share of new registrations in Germany is currently 26.3 percent. In Switzerland, the figure is probably even higher. More and more people are driving one of these high-legged and actually aerodynamically suboptimal (due to their large cross-sectional area) sports utility vehicles in their everyday lives. The proportion of the total volume is constantly increasing, and this trend will not end any time soon as the range on offer grows - there is a really wide choice these days.
Now, of course, we have to ask ourselves how these changing preferences will affect the classic car market in the medium and long term. Won't everyday SUV drivers also enjoy driving a classic off-road vehicle because they are used to the high driving position and feel more comfortable and safer in an all-terrain vehicle? Won't they just like the rusticity of early all-terrain vehicles because their modern cars are so comfortable and refined?
But will there even be enough supply if the demand for early off-road vehicles increases? There wasn't that much choice back then. Of course, there was already the Land Rover and the Toyota Land Cruiser back then, and the Range Rover was created almost 50 years ago.
And the Mercedes-Benz/Puch G came along not too much later. The Americans were also there right from the start. However, the survival rate of these vehicles is not very high and the choice is therefore limited today.
So it could well be that we will see a price surge here in the coming years, as we can already see from the first advertisements that Jaguar Land Rover is producing "new-born" Range Rovers that can be sold at handsome prices. And orignal early Land Cruisers or Land Rovers have been achieving considerable prices at auctions for some time now. But this could come to a head ...
