Missed opportunities?
11/03/2021
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In conversations among classic car enthusiasts, the topic of "missed opportunities" comes up again and again. If I had bought this Gullwing for DM 50,000 back then ... Or if this interesting Bugatti Type 35 hadn't slipped through my fingers ...
In fact, many of us were repeatedly offered interesting cars for sale. I myself remember a Lamborghini Miura in the five-figure range, a serviceable Porsche 911 Carrera RS 2.7 for just under 70,000 francs or a sprightly Aston Martin DB4 that cost little more than a well-equipped everyday car today. Some were considered a little longer, others were discarded more quickly.
Missed opportunities? Perhaps. Only very few of us had or would have had the patience (and the means) to wait until the value quotations shot up. From today's perspective, many interesting cars were sold again after a while because we wanted something else or because we weren't entirely happy with the car after all. And even if you had kept the classic until today, most of the gain in value would have gone on accommodation, maintenance and insurance costs.
Keeping it would only have been really profitable if you had simply put the old car somewhere cheap and forgotten about it. In the early seventies, you could buy a Ferrari 250 GTO for 20,000 francs. If it had been stored and maintained in a dry shed for 1,000 francs a year, the unrestored sports car could be sold for tens of millions today. For most cars, however, the ratio between the achievable sales price and the costs incurred is less favorable. And even with the GTO, the calculation would have worked out less well if the wrong time had been chosen to sell it.
These "missed opportunities" may be a nice topic for discussion, but they are almost a myth. I myself have only kept one old car for more than 20 years and in that time it has only increased in value by one and a half times. It certainly wasn't a smart investment, but the car has always given me a lot of pleasure on the road .... and that's actually the main thing.
