Should You Buy A Classic Car Based On Its Individual History?
When we talk to people about classic cars and get to understand more about why they bought theirs, we often hear they did so because they’d always wanted one since they were a child or they discovered the model recently and fell in love with it straight away.
Reasons like these are all – obviously – valid reasons for buying a classic car. The vehicle has a special place in your heart because of the way it looks and drives and it’s these qualities that have basically sold you on it.
But how much of a factor should the car’s history be in the buying process? Would you buy a car based purely on its individual history?
The reason we ask this is that by offering a classic car storage facility, we get to see a range of different vehicles regularly. For some, it’s obvious why they’ve been bought (such as the fact they’re some of the most notable classic cars available). For several others, however, it’s not quite as clear.
Whilst we fully understand that everyone has their own tastes, we strongly believe that for many classic car owners, they haven’t been sold on the vehicle by its brand, age, condition or the way it drives, but by the history behind it as an individual vehicle.
American talkshow host Jay Leno actually wrote about this a few years ago in Popular Mechanics magazine, as a huge fan of classic cars. Giving his advice on collecting classic cars, he points out that some of the time, he buys a car based purely on its background.
Highlighting one particular story of his, he said that he’d been contacted by a lady in her 90s and given the opportunity to buy her 1951 Hudson Hornet. The only car her and her husband had owned, when he died in 1996 she put it in the garage and shut the door.
When Leno went to look at it, it needed a lot of work doing to it mechanically and it had covered over a quarter of a million miles – but he bought it.
He knew it needed time and attention to get it back up to its former mechanical glory, but this didn’t bother him, as he bought it because he loved its story. It was the fact a happily married couple had bought the car together and enjoyed many years driving around the country in it, obviously bringing a smile to their faces every time they used it.
We all have our own buying requirements when purchasing a classic car and we’ve spoken to numerous collectors and owners due to offering storage for cars, but we feel certain that no matter what condition the car may be in, if it has got an interesting story to go with it, it makes owning it all that more appealing.
