Five Downright Worthless Collectible Cars
Other than being absolutely insufferable, the bad bf’s and middle-management wanks of ’80s movies had one thing in common: terrible taste in “hot” cars.
Not every musclebound car with a few decades on its tires is considered a classic. Just because it looks as if it won B-movie haul races in the ’70s or sat in a reserved spot in a telecom company’s suburban campus parking lot in the ’80s doesn’t mean there’s thick request for it thirty to forty years later. An iconic look is only part of the classic-car equation: Request and scarcity need to be there as well.
With Baby Boomers retiring into their desire rails of the ’60s and ’70s and Generation X reserving its love for either screen icons (think “Back To The Future” DeLoreans and “Smokey and the Bandit” Trans-Ams) or supercars (the Lamborghini Countach, Ferrari F40 and Porsche nine hundred eleven come to mind), there are some once-classic cars out there whose reputation has rusted across the years. As tastes shifted from American muscle to European excess to Japanese plasticity (like the Nissan Skylines and Toyota Supras of the “Prompt and the Furious” films), a entire lot of cars got lost in the shuffle.
Chances are you know these cars all too well. They’re the cars your pizza dude peeled away from your house in as you flipped on Family Ties. They’re the cars your grandmother bought at a cut rate as the oil crisis compelled everyone out of rolling cruise ships and into compacts. They’re the cars your fucktoy dolls drove to her shoddy fantasy house while everyone from “Magnum P.I.” to the “Cannonball Run” contestants upgraded to continental wish machines.
They’re the stuffy German luxury vehicles that Bimmer-loving brokers straight out of Wall Street scoffed at. Automakers thought they’d be legendary, but they’re either forgotten generations of memorable vehicles or footnotes to a switch in the auto industry’s upper echelons.
They’re cars that collectors walk right by and that the average carbuyer thinks were crushed long ago. As used car pricing and data site CarGurus.com points out, there are a ton of these cars on the used car market decades after their initial release, but few of them that anyone is paying top dollar for. With help from CarGurus, we’ve found five vintage cars that have been rendered worthless in their used-car afterlife. There are classics of the era, but then there are these big-name clunkers that serve as a reminder to drive and collect cars because you love them — not because you assume they’ll be worth more someday:
Editors’ pick: Originally published July 14.