Ever since my Mustang was stolen, I’ve been thinking about buying a classic car or a hot rod, or turning a classic car into a hot rod, to replace the Mustang. It’s a real dilemma for this former Motor City boy. I love cars. I’ve been in advertising for many years, advertising cars on TV and radio for local car dealers all over America. But I continue to think about it every time I go to a cruise-in, car collection, car museum, car show or watch a restoration project.
I really thought about it last Friday, the day before Flag Day. There was an American Flag retirement ceremony at a local American Legion Post and since I play Taps on trumpet, I attended and played. One of the Legion guys just bought a ’64 Ford Galaxy convertible off of an ad on ‘www.Craig’slist.com’ and drove it that night, with the top down. I tamped down my envy emotions and complemented his good fortune.
The next day, I decided to really search for that classic car that I can own… at a budget price. So I went where everybody goes now-a-days; Google. I thought of what kind of car would I want, what year, and in what condition. I immediately thought of a ’68 GTO convertible. I don’t know why, but the GTO was a gutsy manly car, with a deep rumble and the looks alone demand people’s attention. I also thought about a ’58 Thunderbird a saw once.
So I Google it and a bunch of websites came up with lots of links to classic car brokers. The first was www.classiccars.com. I went through the site and there were a lot of nice GTOs some with prices and a lot of cars that were listed as, “To be sold at auction.” http://www.Hemmings.com came up a number of times on Google with ’68 GTOs. On their site, they list over 160 GTOs of various years. Many had prices, but many were tagged, “Auction.”
Oldride.com showed up on Google with a lot of listing for all kinds of classic cars. I spent a lot of time there re-thinking what I want. A ’57 Chevy looked real good, but the price tags were huge. Although, when you compare it to new car prices versus classic cars that have been restored properly, it’s something to really consider for what will become a good-weather kind of car that you only drive occasionally. Now I’m thinking about the pitifully small size of my garage. This is an affliction of many classic car people; garage envy.
After that, http://www.autotraderclassics.com was the next big classic car source. Then I found a bunch of others like
There’s a lot of other sites I couldn’t get to because there are so-o-o-o many. It all depends on what kind of classic car you want. Do you want to drive it all the time? Keep in the garage only for parades? Lock it up in the garage and protect it until you sell it? The condition of the car has an enormous bearing on the sale price. The top quality conditioned cars are investments and based on what has happened to classic car prices by these collectors, TV auctions and investors, prices have been driven up sharply. The other day I watched a Mecum TV Auction where a ’68 Plymouth GTX in unbelievable condition, went for $3.5 million dollars. WTF??? My American Legion friend paid $4000 for his Dream Machine He went to to a local source like Craig’s list, or could have gone to your local classic car/hot rod magazine or website, or even to some cruise-ins. Whatever price and car you get, you will be buying your own personal ‘Dream Machine.’ Good Luck!
Ron Lundmark 