It pays to keep your wits about you when buying a classic car

To a classic car buff, nothing can beat the sheer joy of owning one for yourself. But is there actually any investment value in them? That’s the question Henry Jeffreys posed in the pages of Spectator Money back in 2016. It’s a difficult one to answer; he discovered that in recent years, classic cars have been so popular that they’ve harmed their own value slightly. As former Top Gear presenter Quentin Willson explained to Jeffreys, there have been ‘too many people getting involved without the requisite knowledge’.

Most people who buy a classic car, however, don’t think about it in terms of its future value – although they probably do factor that into the equation. They buy a car because they love it, and want to enjoy working on it or spending days out in it – not to leave it to moulder in a garage for twenty years.