1.1: Cars and Collectors
My goal for The Car Collector’s Handbook is to provide the reader a comprehensive look at car collecting in the most actionable and directly useful way possible. The book is broken into five major sections covering buying, storing, insuring, maintain, and eventually selling cars, each of which is chock full detail gleaned from my own experience building a medium sized collection of Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, and more over the past decade and augmented through interviews with other car collectors, each of whom have their own strategies for collection. Some of the other collectors interviewed are phenomenally wealthy and buy cars like normal people buy books, others are normal, everyday folks who have an intense passion for automobiles and have structured their lives to always have “something shiny and something fast” in the garage.
Why Read The Car Collector’s Handbook?
“Why do I need to read a book about car collecting?” is an excellent question. People have been collecting cars for decades without a handbook, guided only by their instinct, and they have been successful, right? There are innumerable collections in the world today, home to hundreds of thousands of cars and stored in as many types of facilities are there are individual collectors. These collections range from the modest, of which there are likely tens of thousands worldwide, to the 7,000 plus car collection of the Sultan of Brunei, all of which have been assembled, stored, and maintained in whichever way the owners decided was best. Thousands of car collectors can’t be wrong, can they?
Of course not.
The Car Collector’s Handbook does not purport that current collectors have done anything wrong. On the contrary, I believe that the world’s existing collectors have done so much right that it’s worth sharing that information. The goal of this book is simply to describe as much of the car collecting process that is practical so that current collectors can see if there is something they could be doing differently and, if you have been thinking about starting a car collection, you can benefit from the lessons the rest of us have made, occasionally the hard way.
To that end I have interviewed dozens of car collectors, ranging from the guy down the street with a few muscle cars all the way through to the true hyper-car collector for whom money is no object. Throughout my interviews several patterns have emerged with respects to decisions that had been made, goals that had evolved, and the entire collector car experience that are weaved into the balance of this book. It is my hope that my own collecting experience, augmented by the experience of others, will provide a platform against which future collectors can base their acquisition and retention strategy upon.
The Idea of a “Collectable” Car
Before we dig in too deep it’s worth defining an important term that will be used throughout The Car Collector’s Handbook, the idea of a “collectable” car. Now hopefully you already know what I mean since you were interested in this book in the first place, but just so we’re clear, everything I talk about in this book is focused on something other than your typical “daily driver.” The ’67 Mustang that your dad had when you were a kid, the air cooled Porsche 911 in mint condition, a classic ’69 Ford Bronco with a 302 V8, or even a class right-hand drive Mini Cooper imported from England years ago … it doesn’t really matter what car it is, only that it’s not something you’re going to take grocery shopping, let the kids eat in, or leave out in the rain unless you really, really have to.
It’s not to say that the advice in this book doesn’t apply to more banal cars, just that when we talk about buying collectable cars we really aren’t talking about the typical car buying, selling, and ownership experience. Sure, some Volvo owners get really, really excited about their sort of normal Volvo wagons … but at the end of the day this book is about cars that are special to their owners and so are likely to get a much higher level of attention, maintenance, and care than something that sits in your driveway or gets parked as close to the entrance at your local QFC as you can get.
If none of that makes sense to you, you may want to stop reading now. If a car is a utilitarian thing for you, something to move you from “point A” to “point B” as efficiently as possible, if you’re worried about gas mileage and your carbon footprint, or if you can never understand why someone would wash their car after every drive, regardless of distance driven … this book is not for you.
Types of Car Collectors
Assuming you’re still reading, let’s consider the different types of car collectors that I have come across in my research. It turns out there isn’t a single type of car collector, and so your experience reading this book will likely depend on your particular goals.
Single Car Owners and Passion Project Collectors
The largest target group for this book: people who have that one special car in addition to the usual assortment of daily drivers, grocery getters, kid haulers, and the like. Maybe it’s the car your grandpa had when you were a kid, maybe it’s the car you and your dad built together when you were sixteen, and maybe it’s that exotic sports car you always told yourself you would buy when you reached a certain age — there are a hundred reasons to own one, but they all need to be cared for differently than whatever you drive to work.
This may seem counterintuitive to you — why would you need me to tell you how to take care of a single “fun” car in your garage? You may not, depending on how you’re wired, but The Car Collector’s Handbook will detail those subtle nuances that you may be forgetting, things like:
- Picking the right car for who you are, where you live, and how you’re likely going to be driving;
- Keeping the car on a good battery tender to prevent having to replace your battery every Spring;
- Making sure you have good notes on when you serviced the vehicle (since you’re not likely to log miles as quickly as a daily driver);
- Thinking about tires and tire pressures when the car is in and out of storage;
- Speaking of storage, are you sure your significant other wants you to use the entire garage for your grandpa’s Mustang?
The list goes on and on. And on. And on …
Small Collection Owners: Three to Five Cars
The obvious target market for The Car Collector’s Handbook, the individual who went from having a toy in their garage to having to consider an entirely new strategy for automobile storage. Now, it’s not to say that there aren’t garages out there that will hold a small handful of toys — clearly there are — but in my experience they are more rare than not, and so figuring out how to effectively and cost efficiently store four or five sports cars in addition to your daily drivers becomes a real challenge.
When you move from one “fun” car to a small collection you need to deal with all the questions you’d have for on car plus new issues including:
- Where and how do you store a small collection of cars, assuming you don’t live on an estate with a separate, secure and climate controlled outbuilding;
- If you do have an outbuilding, how do you ensure it’s appropriate for storing automobiles;
- How do you effectively keep track of maintenance records and service needs across multiple cars;
- How do you make sure multiple cars actually get run as much as they need to be run to keep them in good shape?
This list also goes on and on and on and, in all honesty, is the list of insights that I sure wish I had had before I started collecting cars. The jump from “one” to “several” is a critical inflection point and creates a litany of new challenges despite the sheer awesomeness of looking into your garage and seeing a small handful of incredible machines.
Medium Collection Owners: Six to Thirty Cars
If you have between six and thirty cars — you are all in on car collecting. You have crossed the line between being able to tell your significant other “oh, it’s just a few cars and I wanted to make sure I have the perfect car for every situation” and are a full-on car collector worthy of an Instagram account.
With this many cars you are looking at needing a dedicated facility for storage, possibly needing a dedicated mechanic and maintenance solution, and having a long conversation with your insurance agent about monthly costs relative to actual miles driven. You are well beyond hoping you remember the last time you checked the tire pressure on your Porsche and unless you have a demonstrable steel trap of a memory you are going to need a spreadsheet at a minimum to keep track of the various services that each car requires by age and mileage.
You are all in, and that is awesome.
My hope for your use of The Car Collector’s Handbook if you’re in this group is that I can provide you, as I said earlier, at least one valuable insight that will save you time or money at some point during your adventure in collecting. I am in this group — at our peak Dream Drives for Kids had just fewer than thirty cars — and so this book is full of insights I learned along the way, sometimes the hard way.
Large Collection Owners, Billionaires, and Whales
If you are already maintaining a collection of thirty cars or more, you buy cars like other people buy groceries, or if you have a YouTube or Instagram page dedicated entirely to your cars and automotive exploits, you really don’t need this book. Unless you grew up in a family of car collectors or inherited your collection, it is almost unimaginable that you haven’t learned all the lessons I describe in The Car Collector’s Handbook and probably more. What’s more, if you have the financial means to collect, store, and manage a substantial collection of cars, or if you’re buying the most rare and expensive cars made today, then you have the financial means to surround yourself with help. You will be able to hire the best auto brokers, the best people to find you space to store your cars, the best insurance agents and mechanics, etc. Hell, you might even be making money off your collection through sponsorships and advertising in social media, which is a great gig if you can get it no doubt.
It’s not to say that I don’t think you’d learn something, even something small, from reading The Car Collector’s Handbook, it’s just that your experience is so unlike the vast majority of folks that it’s hard to target a book to you. If you’re playing the game with Porsche, Lamborghini, and Ferrari, or if you are one of the few people in the world who the big exotic brands are calling directly to ask if you’d like to buy the newest halo car, I can assure you that I’m jealous and I’d love to chat with you about your cars and experience — but you almost certainly don’t have the problems that I am helping to solve in this book.
Next let’s dig into some of the reasons people collect cars.
