'Your special edition classic car might be rare because nobody wants it'
It was possible to order ’70s cars with a Kermit green dashboard, writes Tristan Judge. And that's a good example of why rare doesn't always mean desirable for classic cars
One of the important parts of our job is to advise and guide our clients – and sometimes one of the hardest things is helping them come to terms with the fact that rarity and desirability are not always the same thing.
Sure, if you have a coach-built Ferrari one-off with a Le Mans history then you can pretty much set your own price tag – and if Ferrari had built half the F40s it did then they would be worth more – but it doesn’t matter how many times you say only a handful of BMW 840s were ever finished in Dakar Yellow, they will still be worth less than a blue, green or silver one.
You see, rarity is frequently a function of undesirability; if your treasured classic is finished in a rare colour then that’s almost certainly because it was an unpopular choice when it was new and the passage of time tends not to make much difference to people’s tastes.
“Don’t rely on a Subaru XT coupé becoming the deposit for your house”
Similarly, just because only one of thousands of the deluxe model of a 1970s repmobile has managed to evade the jaws of the crusher, doesn’t mean it’s definitely worth more than a Jaguar, and if you are one of those heroes with a Subaru XT coupé or SVX, enjoy it but please don’t rely on it ever becoming the deposit for your next house because *spoiler alert* it won’t.
It’s much the same thing with all those late Mini and Mazda MX-5 special editions, the ones that comprise a different paint job and maybe some different material for the seats. The fact that the factory only churned out 500 to try and stimulate some interest in an ageing model generally doesn’t add much to their value 20 years later.
It’s not just the exterior colour, either; a bright interior might be a little more nuanced in its effect on a car’s value but, because it was usually a cost option, it tends to be relatively rare – and in this case rarity can help. Sometimes. The Mercedes-Benz 450SLC we sold recently for £11,752, for example, attracted a great deal of interest and a lot of that was down to its bright red leather interior. And we can all agree that a white Jaguar XK150 looks much better with a red interior, can’t we?
But be careful with this scenario. It was possible to order a number of ’70s and ’80s German cars with a Kermit green dashboard. They were rare. Probably rarer than red. But because value is driven by desirability, and red appeals to more people than green, the perennial law of supply and demand drives the value accordingly.
Why might this be? Well, perhaps it’s as simple as what we want from our daily drivers is very different to what we like to see in our high-days-and-dry-days classics; do we tend to value discretion in our normal cars, but are happy to be more extrovert in our classics? The Renault Avantime is a modern example; the quirks that made it a corporate financial disaster as a new car are largely the same as those making it a modern classic, and values are (gently) increasing.
And that 450SLC’s red interior was so bright that it was potentially migraine-inducing if you had to face it day after day, but as a mood enhancer, when you need cheering up, it would work brilliantly.
Which leaves the car restorer with a bit of a conundrum: if a nice red leather interior seems to increase a car’s desirability and value, does incorporating one during its restoration increase its value, or decrease it as it is no longer finished to original spec?
The jury is still out on that one, but perhaps it does give you permission to be a little bolder in your decision-making if that’s the colour you’ve always fancied.