We had a good run, but we’ve reached the end. Let’s pour one out for all the second, third, and thirteenth owners of cool enthusiast-spec vehicles with internal combustion engines everywhere. As recently as two or three years ago, the common man could hop on craigslist or marketplace and find a nice used BMW, Porsche, Mustang, Corvette, etc that wasn’t fresh off the showroom floor, but it was still ready to drive. I’ve made it a bit of a lifestyle to buy and enjoy just these types of vehicles. I’ve managed to buy a few “needs TLC” types of vehicles in the sub- $10,000 range that I was able to enjoy and then re-sell without taking a loss, and I’ve also bought some genuinely nice, reliable cars at a steep discount too.
I fear these days have passed. Simply put, there are no deals out there anymore on gently-used vehicles, enthusiast or otherwise. Several years of nearly-free-to-borrow money, choked supply lines, and quarantine-driven boredom have taken their toll on the preowned market.
To make matters worse, the reasonably-priced preowned car is getting squeezed at both ends. On the one hand, you have your “whale” customers. These buyers are wealthy enough to be unaffected by (or have benefited from) pandemic economics. The inconvenience they are facing is that the lead times on their usual staple of paint-to-sample GT2RS Weissach editions have gone through the roof, creating an artificial bubble on nearly-new cars having market values tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars above MSRP. These collectors are now seeking out other interesting projects and have gone down market. That fifteen-year-old 911 no one has liked in a long time? That’s a classic now. “It’ll look great in the collection; just make sure you outbid whoever else is on Bring a Trailer” these buyers tell their secretaries. E46 M3s, Porsche 996 and 997s, Honda S2000’s and many more have all suffered similar fates. It’s nice that they’re being appreciated, but I’d rather see them at the track than under an indoor car cover.
Okay, no problem, us regular folk will just buy some of those sub-$10k “TLC required” projects and fix them up, right?
On the other end of the spectrum, Drift Tax is killing the beater car market. Every beat-up car with Christmas tree dash and rusted rocker panels that was $900 in 2019 is now a $7000 car. Don’t get me started on rear wheel drive manual cars like the 350Z, the E36 or E46. To make matters worse, a lot of car culture has now embraced destroying your car as cool, which further increases the rarity and price of the nice-ish cars and reduces the market value penalty for having significant damage. This effectively eliminates the price benefit of buying a fixer-upper because the pool of buyers who are okay with the car being wrecked has increased dramatically. Especially when interest rates are lower, the eagerness of poor-taste buyers to borrow big and ruin cars outpaces the patience of mechanically-inclined enthusiasts that are exercising even the slightest financial discipline.
To further complicate matters, dealerships have been ruthless with “market adjustment” markup greed, which has made buying an entry-level enthusiast vehicle like a Toyota 86 expensive even if you can manage to get one delivered after a year-long wait.
By the time supply catches up to deliver the needs of new-car buyers, the Golden ICE Age will be long gone. $5+ gasoline coupled with the introduction of more and better “normal person” EVs like the F-150 Lightning will relegate the remaining ICE-powered vehicles into the garages of collectors, and not into the hands of your average track day enthusiasts.