Opinion: Can a car ever truly be unsellable?

What happens in your head when someone unexpectedly enquires about buying a car you swore you’d never sell? If you’re as attached to a car as I am, it’s actually rather unsettling.

You see, for reasons that only now am I beginning to unpack, early on in my life I decided that Nissan was ‘my’ brand. Never had I really questioned it, either.

It wasn’t because of Gran Turismo (although shoutout to the Pennzoil R33 GT-R LM of GT2), or The Fast and the Furious, either. It was, like so many of these stories, down to my dad.

Dad’s a car guy, and granddad was too. Part of me thinks it might actually be somewhat hereditary.

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It’s only as I feel I’m beginning to get older, that I’m starting to reflect more on where I come from. I come from a family of immigrants. I’m a first generation Australian, and dad is a first generation South African, whose dad left a poverty-stricken life in China at 15 by himself with nothing but the clothes on his back. He did well for himself, built a life in South Africa and, in his later years, was able to own a W123 Benz that became something of family lore to a young me here in Melbourne.

Growing up in apartheid South Africa as the more globalised post-war car industry matured in tandem, dad has always placed German sports cars on the very highest pedestal. That was also instilled in me from birth. I was raised on air-cooled Porsches, BMW M cars and the view from the back seat of an AU Falcon. Dad eventually bought his dream car though, a BMW M3.

I was still at that age when you think your father is an infallible superhuman figure, and I thought the same of that car. But dad had a habit of taking it to JDM workshops when investigating weird sounds, thinking they were cheaper than the dealership. I remember going with him once and us both peering through a service window at two R32 GT-Rs and two GTS-T sedans, double stacked on two side-by-side lifts. I remember making some quip about his M3 being faster than those old things, and him quickly rebutting that they were probably faster.

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That was the moment, or at least the conception of the idea that I might be a Nissan guy. Subsequent years, including learning more about the R32’s controversial (more so back then) local motorsport provenance in the face of homegrown V8s, only bolstered my passion. They felt like underdogs, and I always backed the underdogs.

All this means that the very notion of selling my GT-R involves some internal disentanglement from an identity I’ve unknowingly spent my whole life cultivating.

So when a polite message landed in my Facebook inbox a few weeks ago, raising the notion of relinquishing a car I swore I’d never sell, it felt something akin to cutting off my own finger.

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After deep reflection, I did throw out a number – knowing it was far beyond market value. But it’s not just the car, it’s everything I’ve collected around it over the years: period Bathurst merch from ’91 and ’92, vintage Nismo clothing, stacks of literature (including Phil Scott’s famous July 1989 issue of Wheels) and too many scale models to count. If the car ever does go, the only things I’m keeping are photographs.

It’s not just ‘stuff’, though. These things are tangible capsules for stories (historical or sentimental), memories and relationships. I’ve unearthed rare gems in an unknown suburban hobby shop with my old pal Angelo from Unique Cars, and treasured the HotWheels Cameron Kirby bought me for Christmas in my first year working here.

Therein lies the true value of ‘collecting’; it shouldn’t simply be about the money or simply owning things that others don’t. In the same way that cars represent more than mere transport, their ability to connect you to other people and things larger than yourself is what makes them so captivating.

And yes, I still have the car, and I’m still a Nissan guy.

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