This weeks Classic Irish bargains that I'm not buying

selectamatic wrote: »

Very true it's finding the current crop of appreciating cars that one should be putting all their efforts into! Sierra's are on a solid march up the price range in Ireland at the minute, although clean base models are still pretty cheap in the uk

I think what helped the Sierra was that it wasn't favoured that much by the Banger racers, although it's a while since I've seen one.

A car that is starting to appreciate now is the Fiat Coupe 20v Turbo. Can still be bought for a few thousand. A surefire future classic.

Ireland has never had a very strong classic car scene, or certainly not as strong as other countries. Reasons for this were mostly economic, where having a classic car was a luxury that most people couldn't afford. Affording your first car here was hard enough 20 years ago, so most people never started a strong brand identity in their late teens to twenties like in other countries. The first car you owned was inevitably a dog and you moved on to something else ASAP.

We also never had a strong indigenous motor industry, we assembled cars but never had out own brand. Incidentally one of the strongest classic car scenes seems to be Ford in the Cork area, an area where people of a certain generation will have a stronger affiliation to the brand than here.

Classic cars became popular 10-15 years ago when we had plenty of disposable income but as the recession kicked in the luxury of a classic wore off and many sales were through necessity rather than choice.

Due to having RHD the market for cars is really only limited to the UK for the majority of cars, though there are exceptions. Bring in an exchange rate that at the moment makes it very very attractive for UK buyers and you have a perfect storm as to why a lot of Irish classics are being exported.

It's therefore a bit more complicated than just saying that we don't appreciate classics or that we don't want to spend good money on one. Sure, there's plenty of people looking for a pre 1980 bucket that they don't have to NCT but there's plenty of us who are willing to invest money in them as well.

If things start to pick up properly in the future economically then there'll be more people driving classics. I also think that people born in the 80's and 90's will be looking for the boy racer cars of the 2000's in a few years and that a proper classic car scene will develop around them. They were the first real generation of Irish people to have serious disposable income when they were in their teens or early 20's, so I'd expect to see a scene around classic E36's, modified VW's and Ricers (amongst others) developing here in a few years.