When it comes to collecting cars, I really do try my best to not be judgmental; everyone has their own very idiosyncratic car interests and fetishes, and who am I to judge what gets one’s auto-pleasure-glands all excorpulated? And yet, somehow, despite all my efforts to be a better human, I still find myself being judgmental about the kinds of cars people collect: for example, I find collections that are exclusively pristine high-dollar supercars to be boring and predictable, even depressing. But I think I’m even worse about how I feel about collecting cars with incredibly low mileage on them. I can’t imagine a worse type of car to own.
I know they can be incredibly valuable and desirable; there was a 2016 LaFerrari with less than nine miles on the clock that sold for over $4 million dollars, for example, and even more pedestrian cars like a 1990 Fox-body Mustang can go for almost $100,000 because it only has gone 82 miles in its lifetime. There’s no doubt that almost any car with ridiculously low mileage is going to end up having lots of value to some collector, almost no matter what it is, but I have no idea why anyone would want to own one.
There definitely are people who want to own such cars, and they even have their own Facebook group, unsurprisingly, where they post for sale listings of cars with, usually, well under 10,000 miles. Low-mileage is, of course, a bit subjective and based on the age of a car, so while 20,000 miles may qualify as low mileage on something from the 1960s – and it definitely is low – that wouldn’t cut it on something newer.
Look, here’s a video about a guy flying all over the world just to get other low-mileage Ferraris, including a 99-mile 288 GTO, a cart that, when it is acquired, I can almost guarantee will never, ever be driven:
My problem with owning an extremely low-mileage car is that, fundamentally, it seems like an exercise in frustration. Look at this 1978 Beetle convertible from our pal Gary Duncan’s collection, for example; it has 84 miles on the clock. It’s essentially in like-new condition, and from that perspective, it’s incredible. Same goes for another Beetle Gary has, a 1977 standard Beetle with only 26 miles under its little air-cooled belt; it’s as close to a time capsule car as you could possibly imagine, as close as you’re likely to get to going back in time and sitting in a showroom-new Beetle at your local VW dealer.
And, in that context, these sorts of cars definitely do have value. If you were doing a restoration of an old Beetle and wanted to be absolutely certain you were getting everything right, this car is likely the best resource you could imagine. When I’m emperor, I may command the Smithsonian Institution to keep an automotive library of like-new cars just for restoration reference, now that I think about it. I better make a note of that.
But as far as owning one of these cars? It seems terrible! It’s not the cars themselves, of course – I would love to have a Beetle like either of those, in something even close to the condition those are in – but it’s the fact that so much of the value of the car is linked to the low mileage, it makes the entire thing a useless, immobile burden.
Not only can you not drive it, you can’t even really easily take it places to show it or let anyone else appreciate it, because it would need to be trailered everywhere, and even the small amount of distance getting it to and from and on and off the trailer would add up, over time, and for a car where the low odometer reading is the crucial element, you wouldn’t want to do that.
It just seems frustrating; a machine that is denied the ability to do the thing it was designed to do, because all of its value is that it has hardly ever done it. Every part on that car is wasted potential, and there’s little worse for a car than just sitting, so even if you start it and idle it religiously, rot and decay will still occur. Just because it’s not moving doesn’t mean it’s magically free from the ravages of time, after all.
Owning an absurdly low-mileage car just seems like a joyless burden. In a museum context, sure, I get it, the cars are meant to be stationary things you walk around and scrutinize and try to touch when the guard isn’t looking. But in a private collection? Why?
Is it some strange frustration fetish thing, like those people who like to wear chastity devices? Is that it? Is the tension of having something you’d love to just drive around, carefree, but are forbidden to because of some arbitrary and abstract concepts of “value?” Isn’t it incredibly maddening? You have an amazing thing, and you can never truly use it. It would drive me batshit. Especially because there’s a tension there, too. It would be so easy to make some mistake and it rolls off a trailer or gets stranded somewhere and you have to drive it a bit – I bet each of those miles that would get put on it, if you were still under the spell of low-mileage, would burn like fire. Every mile a wound you feel, a knife in your heart and wallet!
No thanks.
I bet there’s a sort of cathartic, unhinged release that must happen to people who have owned ultra-low-mileage cars and then have decided to actually drive them. I bet there’s a pit-of-the-stomach nervous feeling as you first start to drive your, say, Nissan Murano Cross Cab with 11 miles on the clock, as you can feel the value plummeting with every block you drive. But I also bet there’s a point of euphoric glee as you get to a stretch of open road and decide to really open it up, and just think fuck it and watch those long-hidden odometer digits start to roll into place.
I realize it’s sort of an absurd act of hubris for me to even say no thanks, keep your ultra-low-mileage cars, because I don’t have the money you need for something like that anyway, but at the same time there’s a pleasingly liberating feeling to have no desire for something widely considered valuable.
If you have a crazy low-mileage car, I’d both love to hear your reasoning for why you appreciate it and to also, like a devil of driving perched on your shoulder, encourage you to drive the damn thing, value be damned, and just enjoy the car. Sure, you’ll probably be losing thousands and thousands of dollars, but I bet you’ll thank me.
I didn’t even need to read the article. You had me at the title.
If I was crazy rich I’d buy these types of cars just to drive them as a daily for a year and then sell them on with much increased mileage, haha.
Agreed, it’s stupid. I don’t even like to drive old cars for the same reason. As much as I like driving my 94 Toyota Pickup, I can’t (won’t) drive it in the winter due to the road salt. This has become to frustrate me about this vehicle, as it’s #3 in our fleet, and meant to be a backup of the other two. I now want a #4 that I am not scared to drive. And, I’m thinking an NA Miata, but I’d be in the same boat with that as well. I’m a bit jealous of all y’all that don’t have to worry about snow and salt.
I suspect owning one of these is more about ego than the vehicle. “I own this rare thing. That makes me special.”
Yup
These beetles are astonishingly primitive for a 1977 or 1978 new car.
They were astonishingly primitive for a 1938 new car.
I have a low mileage Honda RVF 400. Its the peak of 400cc sports bikes.
I’m trying to keep the miles low, but even popping out to fill the tank turns in to a 50 mile ride on twisty roads. If someone told me it depreciates £1/mile I’d say it’s worth it.
Just over 4 years ago, I acquired a car I “chased” for nearly 15 years. Very few were made and I wanted a specific interior/exterior combo and couldn’t afford when new. During that timeframe, the two prior owners put under 3k miles combined. Less than 250 miles/year! Yet, even with that low mileage, there were still some minor chips and scratches in the paint. They treated it like an investment, and it probably was for them.
Happy to say I’ve more than doubled their mileage since… and sometimes drive more than 250 miles in a single outing! (and plan to continue as long as I’m able.) She sounds as good as she looks, and I do spend time looking… each morning and evening when I arrive home – there she is… waiting for the next adventure. The weekend is just a day away and the weather couldn’t be nicer.
DRIVE YOUR CARS (especially if you ever want them to be usable as cars in the future – letting ’em sit is really bad for them!)
And you never even told us what it was…. not very Autopian of you!
hahah. the mystery…
Pristine low mileage: meh. Pristine high mileage: niiiiice.
The former is no kind of trick. Just let it sit and keep the dust off of it. The latter is a vehicle that has lived a life being loved and fully realizing its raison d’être. That’s a thing of beauty.
I’ll take a 1989 Plymouth Reliant K, in Ice Blue Crystal please, looking like it just rolled off the assembly line and with 175k on the clock over any perfect Ferrari or Porsche, et al., with 16 miles on them. (Countach is the only notable exception to this, but only if it’s got that nutty giant wing and stupid front bumpers on it.)
I totally agree. Cars were made to be driven.
I’ve spent years trying to be more open minded to “collectors” that just accumulate cars and don’t drive them. My FIL is obsessed with “low miles”. It’s probably the first thing I hear about when he tells me about a car he or his friends bought.
I really do try to have an open mind. But I just have a really hard time understanding it. It just seems so sad to be so afraid to use a thing for the very reason it exists. Maybe it’s the engineer in me. Maybe it’s my love of actual driving. I’m not sure I’ll ever understand.
My ex-wife’s grandparents are like 95 years old. They stopped driving many, many years ago. They have a 2004 Chevy Malibu in perfect condition. 26k miles. It’s such a tremendously boring car and it belong in the Completely Ordinary Car Museum.
We just inherited a pristine 2013 Altima with 30k miles. hooray?
This isn’t about ultra low mileage, but it’s similar. I may have told this story here before, but here goes. I was blessed as a teenager. My grandmother bought me a 1980 Cobra Turbo at 16. The car spent a bit of time in the shop, so in late 1985 she offered to buy me something else. The dealership had a 1985 Mustang GT they got back on a voluntary repo. It had 1400 miles on it, and was pretty much a base level GT – nothing special. I drove that car for the first year and put about 10,000 miles on it.
I also worked at a gas station garage at the time and got used to car culture. Guys would pick up winter beaters and make them barely road legal for the salt months while parking their better cars for the winter. I bought a Fury for $50 and put the GT in the garage for the winter.
When spring came, I was reluctant to get it back in full time service. It was cool to have a car that was basically clean all the time and could be driven on nice days as such, so I kept doing the beater thing. Eventually, this change became permanent, and I’d put maybe 1,000 miles on the GT in a year. I was heading to college and didn’t want to risk having the car on campus, so it stayed there. When I graduated and moved out (locally), the car stayed in the garage – I’d go home for visitations and weekend drives on occasion. All the while, the years rolled on but the odometer crawled, and soon I had a pristine GT that still looked and smelled like new while others of the same vintage were beaten to a pulp.
I got married, bought a house and we had kids. The GT stayed in the garage. By this time, it was 1999 and between all the financial responsibilites of adulthood, it didn’t make sense to hold on to a car that I didn’t really drive. I could have dalied it at that point, but did it make sense to put car seats in the back of it and use it for daycare drop off? Nope. At this point, the car had just over 20,000 miles on it. Ultimately, I sold it to a guy outside of Dallas who was about my age and wanted to feel young again – he had an ’85 at one point but it was in much worse condition. I think that he owned it for about two years before he contacted me and let me know that he sold it to a guy in South Carolina. Like me, he had fallen prey to being a slave to the odometer.
Sorry about the long post, but the moral of the story is this; The car was wonderful and it was really cool to have something that stayed in as-new condition over the years – but the price was that I wound up doing all that saving for someone else’s benefit. If I ever am in the position again, either with a new or classic, I will drive and enjoy it. Life is too short.
Then again, I have my 2021 mazda 6 in our garage right now – it has 12,000 on it and rarely gets driven in rain….
1973 VW Super Beetle with 30K miles, the amount of things I had to fix to make it reliable again
A)Fuel lines replaced with ethanol resistant lines
B)Fuel filter replaced since it was the original
C)Tires are due for replacement since they are from 1999
D)Lot of rubber replaced since it was dry
E)The heat wasnt that good, the pipes were sealed with the plugs they use for shipping, they probably didn’t drive it on the winter at all.
There are still minor things to fix but I cannot imagine a car with less miles, all the amount of work that will need to make it drivable.
Have a 78 Beetle Cab in the garage with 65k on it, and many of those same things are going to need to be done. So, there it sits until I get around to it.
You are thinking like a poor, caring about “value”. If I had Jay Leno money, I would buy every one of these and DRIVE THE WHEELS OFF THEM.
One of the cutesy little signs my mother used to display at shows: “If you see this car on a trailer, call 911. It’s stolen.” Pristine, no mileage examples may win awards, may be worth more money, don’t care. Drive the damn cars.
That’s a lot of scratches in the frunk cardboard for 84 miles on that Super Beetle!
I used to buy cheap “granddad” cars with low mileage, for the “new old stock” retro feeling in the interior and the lovely absence of boy racer details like wrong big wheels and loudspeaker holes. But something mechanical always went wrong when you started to use them again regularly after a long standstill.
Yuuup.
The worst cars I’ve had, in the sense of stuff that needed to be replaced shortly after purchase, have always been the ones with unusually low mileage for their age.
Valuable for the same reason why a 30 year-old toy in its original packaging is far more valuable than one that’s been removed from it even if that toy is also pristine and well cared-for, let alone one that’s been played with and enjoyed and shows its age.
It’s the allure of wanting to own a brand new example of something you just can’t get brand new anymore. Of wanting to be practically the first owner of something that’s never been messed with, even if it’s actually passed through multiple hands that never messed with it. For some this is about recapturing youthful dreams, of wandering into a store/dealership and seeing the thing all shiny and new, fresh from the factory.
I see this a lot in the LEGO community, with sealed copies of sets from the 80s commanding astronomical prices nowadays because for some people it’s just not the same to buy a decent used copy – generally laden with the scratches and discoloration of age – rather than see it first in its original box, unopened, never played with or even assembled and thus flawless. And people do in fact open and assemble those to this day, knowing full well that it ruins the value, because they want to relive/experience the joy of another era through this diminishing resource no matter the cost or the fact that sealed copies only get rarer.
But most always stop themselves from opening the box. Their joy simply comes from owning a rare thing, like a museum piece, or “investing” in something rare at least. And there it sits, forever taunting them, forever crying out to be assembled and enjoyed as it was created to be, and never being given that chance.
But yeah, cars are kind of a stupid thing to do this with, given that they do deteriorate whether you drive them or not, regardless of the conditions they’re stored in. Better to drive them regularly and keep all the seals from drying out and cracking, even if it’s only for short trips around the block, or for a spin on your private race track since these low-mileage cars tend to be bought by the uber-wealthy. It’s the maintenance, not the mileage, that counts. A meticulously maintained, mint-condition, 200,000 mile all-original car is much more impressive than one that’s only ever sat, and can even be just as accurate and factory-original.
I myself drive a car that’s becoming collectible at over 30 years old, but with over 200,000 miles on it, and I’m not worried at all. It’s been well-maintained and still runs like new. If I keep up with regular maintenance, it’ll run for another 200,000 miles easily. We need to get over this idea that lower mileage = better, when all it really means is the car has been neglected. Normalize taking care of our crap and we’ll be shocked how long it lasts. I hope this little thing reaches a million miles someday, there’s no reason it can’t do so and still look pretty when it gets there!
I was going to chime in with another similar collectable that sucks away at my money in addition to cars, and that is toy trains from the 1940s-60s, there are still out there sets, engines, cars, ect that are in their factory boxes from 195-whatever and have never been out of their box since the day they rolled out of the factory where they were built. There’s a joke among collectors as to how for many items the boxes are worth more than the trains that are i them.
And same reason there are some who just want that thing from back then that has never been opened or played with or handled by anyone else since it was made.
Yep. In 1976 I attended the Buick Club of America national meet in Flint. There I met a guy who had a 1951 (IIRC) Buick that had like 54 miles on it. Usual story – guy drove it home from the dealer and died.
I was enthralled. How cool it must be to have that. Nope he told me. “It’s a millstone” I can’t drive it..have to trailer it everywhere. Every mile diminishes the value.
I can appreciate the ultra low mileage cars, but doesn’t mean I would do that. If anything, I like the other end of the spectrum where there are higher miles. Means the car is getting driven and enjoyed like it should have been. I get more enjoyment reading about some car hitting a million miles versus examples like these that have 26 miles
And usually the million-mile cars look just as pristine as the 26-mile cars. That kind of mileage only happens when the owner is committed to making it happen, and they only commit when they just like the vehicle enough to take care of it for a long, long time.
One of my favorite cars I ever saw at a car show was a 1969 Shelby GT500 with over 100,000 miles on it, still driven by the original owner, who bought it before being shipped off to Vietnam and made sure to drive it regularly once he got back, taking good care of it but enjoying it as a car nonetheless. It was still all-original, never restored, and showing some dents and scratches, but full of stories from being used and enjoyed. That guy was fun to talk to.
That’s awesome. A 67 GT500 is still one of my favorite cars. The stories that folks have with high mileage cars typically tend to be pretty awesome too and I have found that they are much more approachable than the average ultra low mileage owner. Obviously this isn’t a rule as there are some great people with cars that have no miles, but my overall feel from personal experiences
Yep, cars with stories and owners that can tell stories are the best. Another of my favorites was a ’67 Pontiac Tempest with the Sprint Six engine, and the owner told me all about how he bonded with his son over old Pontiacs, and how he drove that car to visit his son once and that son, a police officer, pulled him over while he was on the way there and they had a good laugh.
THAT’S why I love going to car shows. It’s not about just looking at cool cars in person, the really cool part is hearing their stories. Even if the car itself doesn’t have many stories yet, the owner probably has a story about why they like it and what all was done to it. Cars are just a fantastic conduit for conversations and making memories 🙂
“Rare” is another collector one that goes too far sometimes, where the interest seems to come just from being able to drill down to some ridiculously low number, rather than any particular merit of that specific combination of options.
I’m happy some cars are preserved by the likes of Jay Leno and museums. Even Jay takes his cars for a spin once in a while, too. Sort of having his cake and eating it too.
I do not have Jay Leno-level wealth, and that’s fine.
Ever since the muscle car boom, everyone and their cousin has jumped on the ‘next big thing’ bandwagon. Which mostly served to defeat the purpose – there will be ‘preserved’ Hellcats for decades. The rare 1971 Hemi ‘Cuda convertible that went for huge bucks was the aberration from a previous era.
Even most muscle cars of that era aren’t worth that much today. There’s a reason why Roadkill could still get cheap-ish ones to fool around with.
If there’s immaculate cars I kind of am interested in, it’s the very well-maintained ordinary ones that got lightly used. The vehicles that got used up as we lived out our lives, but thanks to a diligent owner we can briefly step back in time, if just for a moment.
Mostly, I lump the kind of people who are obsessed with the value of their car in the same category as those who obsess about their home’s value. So focused on preserving something immaculately that they forget that these things are meant for living.
Want an investment? Go buy an S&P 500 index fund. Want to enjoy owning a special car? Enjoy it for the drive. The blabbermouth that can’t shut up about what their house/car is worth is a tedious bore. The guy who tells me about the road trip/project he’s doing/awesome event he did is way more interesting.
The sales manager at the BMW dealer we bought our car from was telling me a customer bought two new M2s one manual one Auto. He has apparently drained all the fluids from the manual one, sealed it in one of those car bags and put it in storage. Because, yes the manual one will be a collectors item, it will be a rare right hand drive manual M2, but it won’t be that rare. He is driving the auto one. What kind of rich psycho does this?! Drive your friggin cars! Also buying a low mileage car to collect means you’ll be scared to drive it, because literally all its value is held up in the fact that it is low mileage, not because its desirable, and the really desirable ones are works of engineering genius not works of art to collect.
“…Ultra-Low Mileage Cars Are The Worst Cars To Collect And I Never Want One…”
Yeah, right. And we should all be Michael Fröhlich. I call bullshit on that one.
I bought a 96 ImpalaSS, late production, last of the line. I drove it sparingly, but it mostly sat in the garage. It bugged me to put miles on it, “was never going to sell it”. In 2019, I finally decided it had to go, it took up too much space in the garage and I didn’t enjoy it. It was old, I’d lost touch with the local club and so I sold it, with 66K on the clock. I got back about 2/3rds of the price I paid for it new.
The car that replaced it is my 2012 BMW that I bought 3rd hand. It had an age appropriate 25K on it in 2015 and now has 105K. I enjoy driving it and have spent a few sheckles on maintenance, but not like some folks who drive theirs less than 1000 mi/yr. Cars are made to drive, not sit. The seals on parked cars dry out and leak, hoses rot and tires still need replacing every 7-10 years. Drive it & enjoy it.
I obtained a 20-year old motorcycle this year with 2,000km on it. The shop that did the inspection for me debated whether the odo had been replaced. I immediately put another 2,000 on it! Still like new!