VANCOUVER, B.C. — The only thing certain about the massive shakeup in the auto industry is that some familiar brands, such as Pontiac, will disappear when the shaking stops.
The end-of-an-era vibe often resonates with would-be car collectors who think the demise of a storied marque signals an opportunity to squirrel away a new or low-mileage example as an investment.
Mike Fairbairn tactfully suggests they reconsider.
Dead car companies are not like dead artists, he says. Their works don't inevitably rise in value.
When General Motors announced Pontiac would cease production at the end of the year, "my first thought was there's an awful lot of people out there going to waste a lot of money buying Pontiacs and putting them away."
Fairbairn is vice-chairman of RM Auctions of Bleinheim, Ont., one of the world's biggest purveyors of collectible automobiles, with more than US$320 million in sales last year.
RM, which also runs the world's largest classic car restoration shop, made headlines last month when a 1957 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa sold for a record US$12.4 million at its auction at Ferrari headquarters in Maranello, Italy.
Packard, DeSoto, Studebaker, Rambler, American Motors, Oldsmobile, Plymouth. The list of defunct carmakers is long.
And every time one succumbs, somebody thinks it's time to sock away a mint example as a nest egg.
"If you go back to the last year or two of any marque that's no longer made today, you can easily find examples with low or no miles that people put away believing that," says Fairbairn. "In general it's not true."
You'd make more leaving it in a bank, says Fairbairn.
"Over the course of history I think I can safely say there has never been a new car that made sense to buy new and hold until it became valuable."
There's no such thing as an instant classic. It can take a generation or more to discover if a car will be desirable.
"The thing that kicks off the collectibility of a car or an era is almost always the nostalgic motivation," says Fairbairn.
"You can set your watch by it. Look at 15-, 16-or 17-year-old boys' posters hanging on the walls of their rooms and now fast-forward until that 15-year-old boy is 50."
Twenty years ago, the generation that came of age after the Second World War helped fuel interest in the finned and chromed land yachts of the 1950s.
In the last few years, aging Baby Boomers have driven some 1960s Detroit muscle cars deeply into six-figure auction prices.
So the cars to be looking at now, says Fairbairn, are those of the early 1970s. It's the tail end of the muscle-car era before primitive emission-control systems strangled their engines. Models such as the 1971 Corvette LT1 and Pontiac Trans-Am Super Duty are attractive.
And for foreign-car buffs, the Datsun 240Z sports coupe is coming into its own. They were numerous but rust claimed a lot of them so a mint-condition example should be a good investment, says Fairbairn.
After that, pickings are slim.
"The mid-'70s to the mid-'80s are kind of a wasteland other than the exotics like Ferraris. But even those didn't make much power at that point."
"The cornerstone of value in a collector car is three things: rarity, desirability and condition," says Fairbairn. "All three must be present."
For example, Chevrolet has survived GM's downsizing. But the 500-horsepower Chevrolet Corvette Z06 will be collectible whether GM goes completely belly-up or not.
"It's extremely desirable," says Fairbairn. "It's a rocket ship; it looks great and all those kinds of things. It's rare by today's standards because they built it in the hundreds or low thousands."
That's not to say there aren't potential gems among the casualties.
For instance the Pontiac GTO, a revival of the storied model that began the muscle-car era in 1964, was offered from 2004 to 2006 but was a sales flop.
The 400-hp coupe was actually built by Holden, GM's Australian subsidiary. It meets some of Fairbairn's criteria although critics labelled the styling bland.
A low-mileage example will still cost more than $30,000. Better to wait 10 or 15 years until they depreciate down to $4,000-$5,000. Then look for a clean, low-mileage example and be prepared to pay, say, $8,000.
"You'll be paying less than it's worth today and buying it 15 years closer to when it becomes collectible," says Fairbairn.
On the other hand, the Pontiac Solstice two-seat convertible, while arrestingly styled, has been built in the thousands. Good examples will be easy to find for decades.
Chrysler's imminent takeover by Fiat puts some models in play.
Fairbairn fingers the Dodge Viper as a candidate for collectibility. The hairy-chested two-seater, featuring an engine pushing 600 hp, has been made since 1992 but there are enough different versions to make them interesting.
Not so much the 2004-07 Chrysler Crossfire, the product of the ill-starred marriage between Chrysler and Daimler-Benz.
The Crossfire, which retailed between $40,000-$70,000, featured Mercedes-Benz machinery a under flashy Chrysler body.
It was another sales disappointment, perhaps because of its odd retro-1930s look. Jeremy Clarkson, the irreverent host of BBC's "Top Gear" car show, likened it to a dog squatting to relieve itself.
Not a candidate for a teenager's poster wall, says Fairbairn.
He does, however, think there's future value in two high-performance Japanese cult cars, the Subaru WRX STi and Mitsubishi Evolution, driven by teens in virtual form via the video game "Gran Turismo."
What will those kids want in 30 years?
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