Drive your cars. They are just cars.

Stumbled across this video a little while ago.



I don't necessarily think auctions are completely at fault for how unobtainable many cars have become. However, they set trends that both public dealerships and private sellers have chosen to follow, and the result has been a staggering change in the valuation of cool cars.

What used to be obtainable for the person with a reasonable job and money habits, is now nearly completely out of reach for everyone except the very wealthy. Even really cool cars that aren't unusually special, such as 360s, F430s, Gallardos, and the like seem to be becoming exceedingly difficult to a) find for sale in the first place, and b) find a "driver's" example that isn't ridiculously expensive for what it is.

I still remember one of the first Ferraris I ever saw in person. I must have been around 10 years old, and was running errands or something with my mom, when a rosso corsa F430 with a gated manual pulled into the shopping center and parked a few spaces away. The F430 hadn't been in production for terribly long at that point, but it completely blew me away and has been one of my all time dream cars ever since. Sadly, I have seen the gated F430 market go completely berserk in the last few years, and owners of these cars become increasingly hesitant to drive their cars, lest they lose a dollar of value by pulling the car cover off and taking it out of the climate-controlled garage.

We need to remember why we even buy these cars in the first place. I realize that running costs on an F430 are naturally going to be higher than my GTI, but it saddens me when I finally stumble across an example for sale....only to see that it has spent nearly all of its life tucked away in a garage, never driven except maybe to the local car show once a month.

If young people are exposed to fun cars, at a price that is reasonably attainable, I think many of them will see the joys of owning a fun car. But if everything with an ounce of fun in it gets bid up into oblivion, and gets bought up by "collectors" who like the feeling of owning - but not driving - their fun cars, there won't be anything left to fuel the next generation of car enthusiasts. And I think there has already been a noticeable decline in enthusiasm for cars over the past decade or so; it will only get worse as dream cars fade into more and more distant dreams.