Opinion: The importance of driving your collectible cars

There have been a million and one columns about having sold a beloved old car for cheap, only for its value to explode a number of years, perhaps even decades, later.

But I feel I’m afflicted by a different torment of the soul that’s quite the opposite in effect. And I understand how this may come across as somewhat unbecoming but, please, bear with me.

Some years ago, I bought a car that was already beginning to appreciate in price. It was a car that I had dreamt about since I was a child, and a car that had always appreciated at a slightly greater rate than my income – since that first $6.75/hour job at Red Rooster – would allow. It was also a car that I knew likely had some future collector interest, and a car that I felt that, if I waited any longer, would simply grow financially impossible to own for the rest of my life.

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The car in question was a Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R, a global motorsport hero, and it represented, to me, the very vehicular pinnacle of the JDM scene and community I have loved ever since I can remember.

Because this was once a real community, an honest and pure culture, if you will. You see, I wasn’t one of the cool kids in high school. The cool kids were all about Aussie V8s. And, I think a lot of my friends and people who came up in the JDM scene a decade or two ago can relate; but as perhaps somewhat of a social outcast, the Japanese car scene was a way for me to connect with others of the same ilk.

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Of course, now all things JDM inhabit a completely different stratosphere in terms of value. And it’s not just Covid tax or others like me who grew up with nostalgia for these cars and are now grown up, working and earning. There’s something else at play here, something almost sociological.

My peer group became enamoured by these cars because they were cheap performance underdogs that no one really cared about. People now almost want them specifically because everyone else wants them, with no real knowledge or appreciation behind it. And that’s what the kids these days call hype.

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Although fashions inevitably wax and wane, it feels that right now, JDM culture has never been so readily accessible, and I’m afraid it’s simply the latest subculture to be tapped into and commercialised.

Look at what’s happened to skateboarding and sneaker culture over the past 10 years. Both once seen as niche and honest underground communities, are now billion-dollar industries whose household names are as powerful as European legacy high-fashion brands. And it happened on the coattails of this hyper product-focused, social-media fuelled and collecting-based philosophy that's permeated in contemporary streetwear culture. Cars are just another revenue-bubble opportunity.

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There’s an entire generation of kids out there who were brought up getting their validation by getting their Yeezys off for the ‘gram. And now they’re grown up, and have money, driver’s licences, and they’re coming for our cars.

Dylan Campbell, ex-captain of the MOTOR ship and current editor at Wheels, is also a long-term owner of a certain highly prized piece of JDM machinery; and talked about how the unimaginable price spike makes him not want to drive it as much. While that should be a crime, I understand it. Yes, logic dictates that I should retire my car from the track, wrap it in bubble wrap and sit on it, but I just can’t do that.

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I don’t get enjoyment from any car by it merely sitting there. I get it from driving. What’s the point of it otherwise?

For anyone else grappling with the same affliction, don’t let numbers thrown around on the internet keep you from enjoying your car. Go on, go for a spin. To not do so would be a true injustice, to both you and the car.