Experto crede

Nobody knows anything; a quote attributed to movie mogul Sam Goldwyn and in the sense he gave it, I agree.  It’s about the cult of expertise and the gullibility of the rest of us.  It’s about truth and marketing and incompatibility.

One of my pet subjects is automobiles and as far as I’m concerned it’s impossible to get a valid opinion from any journalistic or industry source that isn’t mostly advertising and as larded with hyperbole as Kobe beef is with fat.  Advertising does not come free. Journalists know where their paychecks come from and their editors know where their revenue comes from. Journalists mostly write for neophytes and neophytes love to quote journalists and use the jargon they are given to hide the fact that they are neophytes at best and idiots at worst, so you’ll hear that the Yamaguchi 50 is edgy or blingish, has lots of valves or has attitude or is “race car inspired.”  You’ll hear about sound systems but you won’t hear a damn thing about lap times or braking distances or quarter mile ET’s. You’ll hear about how American cars don’t “handle” and “understeer” from people who have no idea what that means and will tell you with a straight face that their family sedan has “neutral” handling which is better.  If the car is a dog, you brag about how many gazillian RPM you need to get useful power out of it and people will eat it up because bigger numbers are better unless they refer to bigger displacement which is better but is sold as worse – understand?  I don’t either, but as I said, nobody knows anything.

So I’m not even partly surprised to read on CNN that a poll by a insurance company specializing in insuring collector cars claims that in the future the big deal will be Japanese cars.

Now I’ve been reading the car mags for over 50 years and I’ve yet to hear a description of the car of the future that proved true.  What is held to be of supreme importance in one decade is ignored in the next,  for the last few decades, what is held to be important is what the massive advertisers want you to think is important – low drag coefficients one year, variable valve timing the next, tiny engines today, huge honking V8’s the next, so I’m not inclined to believe a bit of this, but I have to include myself in the group called nobody and nobody knows anything.  You can only glimpse the truth in retrospect and looking back, I can’t think of more than one Japanese car that has collector value today and that one just barely.

We are assured however that, “in the future, Toyota's Scion cars and its FJ Cruiser off-roader might be hot items at car auctions.”  That’s as likely true as those once upon a time predictions that we’d all be driving two seaters with two cylinder, two cycle ceramic engines or maybe Wankels.  The reason collector cars are desirable and expensive is that predicting what people will want 30 years hence is nearly impossible.  

The main ingredients that make cars desirable, said Hagerty Insurance president McKeel Hagerty, are “cool designs and honest performance. Cars that look hot but don't perform won't end up being desirable in the long term,” he said.  Is this why a 1953 Corvette, a disappointing dog on the road is worth many times what my 2006 model is even though it will run 100MPH faster?  Is this why people buy dead-dog slow cars, insist they’re “ultimate” and try to take on Vipers at stoplights?  Nobody knows anything. Will people 20 years from now think “cool design” means a cube with tiny wheels and a fake wing on top?  What about some swoopy things full of curvilinear triangles, a grill like a yellow smiley and lots of fake aero devices; who the hell knows and surely not Haggerty.  He’s trying to predict what the children and grandchildren of today’s collectors will want to spend big bucks on and I think he’s got a better chance at winning the lottery.

It’s a fact that people who buy what they think will be the hot ticket 20 years hence and put it in storage usually lose a lot of money, unless it was something very rare and very expensive in the first place and the people who buy McLarens don’t usually care about turning a profit 30 years hence.  Even collector cars that were hot in the 80’s are going for half or less than their peak prices.  Nobody knows, but here’s a wager:  I will meet you at Pebble Beach  or the Palm Beach International Concours D’Elegance in 2050.  I’ll bring what I have now and you can bring a pristine, skate-board inspired Pokemon Special and bring your title and registration.