Opinion: The days of barn-finds are almost over

It’s hard to imagine that modern cars will appreciate like the classics have.

They don’t make nostalgia like they used to. You probably read about that barn-find XW Falcon GTHO which some clever – and lucky – sonofagun restored and auctioned off for more than half a million. Who exactly forgets about buying a car, let alone a GTHO? I’ve forgotten about cars before, once or twice, but those were loaners, review cars, not something I’ve paid my own money for; and it was always when I had something more exciting to drive to distract me.

Aussie ‘barn find’ car worth millions

I think I once had a Mazda6 sitting forgotten in a garage somewhere, and it would probably still be there now, lurking like a barn-find waiting to happen, except I found the keys in my desk drawer while I was looking for some aspirin.

Opinion: Progress is Overrated

Finding an i3 under a tarp decades from now would be like finding an old Nokia brick in the crap drawer in your kitchen – you’d think “Hey, look at that, I remember that old thing”, and you think about turning it on just for a giggle, but you can’t find the cord that charges it and, now you think about it, you probably threw the plug away in that box that also had a broken Wii and a Furby in it.

Old cars age like, well, not like a fine wine – more like a fine T-bone, which is to say, in all but the rarest conditions they start to fall apart into a rancid mess, which means in time they become scarce, and thus valuable. Modern cars age like a McDonalds cheeseburger – they just sit there, wilfully not biodegrading, just getting dusty and a little wrinkled, and then one fine day you stumble across it in essentially pristine condition and realise its cousin is probably in a similarly untouched state somewhere in your lower intestine. Or maybe that just happens to me.

Opinion: Are Australian speed limits correct?

The era of the barn-find might be almost over.

And besides all that, the way developers are turning old farms into new suburbs, 20 years from now there won’t be any barns left. When it comes to vintage rubber, gentlemen, smoke em if you got em.