Auctions Continue To Create A World That Doesn't Exsist

So, in case you missed it cars that many of us grew up seeing every day are now made of pure gold. Either gold or unobtanium. Either way they are EXPENSIVE. Well, depending on where you look they are. See, there is a massive disconnect between reality and what television or "TV" might have us believe. Not sure what I am talking about, please let me expound.

When you think of the awesome Detroit steel of the 60s and 70s it raises the hair on the back of your neck. They are big and mean, fast and loud. They are in a word AWESOME. They had wicked names like firebird and mustang and cougar and chevelle... names that evoked passion and desire for bad mistakes and burning tires. Growing up with them they always hovered in the affordable range. I am pretty sure you got a 65 mustang free with a fill up and a large slirpee for a while in the mid-eighties. Detroit made about 78 billion of these bad ass cars so they were always plentiful. The ones that didn't wrap themselves around a telephone pole that is.

Fast forward to the twenty-teens, a time when the 1% walks with impunity and reality television shapes what we think is reality. Dark times man, dark dark times. Sure, it started simple enough. Watching dudes work on stuff and make cool restoration projects. Then we got introduced to "flippers" or low level scavengers that are buying junk and as the old saying goes... polishing a turd. Fair enough, that has been going on forever but what hasn't gone on forever is television creating unrealistic prices. I was watching a super hyped "superbowl of auto auctions" the other week where a richey rich who had been buying up all of hotrod history for a million years decided it was time to flaunt his status and sell everything so we could all bask in his "i am way better than you" cult status. SO, other richey rich types showed up in droves to prove THEY could be that cool and rich too. As a result us common jerks got to watch mustangs sell for hundreds of thousands.

By the time it was over said richey could actually build his own world and live in a different galaxy made entirely of gold. Now, I am not just writing to rail against rich folks... I mean I will but that is not why I am here TODAY. The effect of reality TV creating this superbowl of car pricing is the entire baseline for old muscle cars took a dramatic leap upward. Remember like 2 paragraphs ago when I talked of those "flippers"? Yeah, well now those polished turds cost 10 times more than they did a year ago because every slack jawed yokel watched those shows and were like "I got one of those... so it MUST be worth as much as barrett jackson got."

Bad news, it isn't worth that much. The ones that were sold on that sad day were the absolute top of the top cars created or restored by the best of the best and most were 1 off super rare touched by god editions. So for those of us out there looking, we now have a few years more to save our money. After the flippers lose their asses and get no actual bites on the cars they are trying to get gold for the market will re-adjust back to reality. So just like the housing bubble, the gold bubble and every other made up price increase the muscle car bubble will burst. And when it does I will be there to grab up the prize, until then I will watch and wait.

More fads than you can detect with a fad detecting fad machine!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt_zum97kjE

This past weekend I went to a Swap Meet / Car Show held at the world famous Don Garlits Museum. I went with a friend we will call MurderStang. MurderStang is an ACTUAL hotrodder not a wannabe like me so he is always a wealth of information and often has awesome ideas and insight. But I digress, as we walked to and fro looking at all the cars and customs it really struck me how deeply the car culture is struck with fads.

There were a ton of really awesome cars at the show. This show was more about honest hard working driving hotrods. So the field filled with a few trailer queens but for the most part well used cars filled the ranks. That is when i noticed the newest soon to be tired fad... the rat rod. Funny thing about hotrods they are really slaves to what is cool. Some are tried and true timeless classics for sure. Never met a 57 Chevy i didn't like. When you see a lot of different cars in these shows it sticks out when a car was built. 

The billet crazy of the 90s, the zz top fueled color-gasms from the 80s and now the patina drenched rat rod craze. I have nothing against all of these movements in the car world, hell I am a wannabe at this point so I have no room to judge. What does weigh heavy in my tiny pea brain is when I finally do get my hotrod and when I do start building and customizing it how do I avoid creating a fad filled car? I don't have the money to build and rebuild a car. Yes, I realize that hotrods command special handling and obviously driving one on a regular basis will require lots of fixing and re-fixing.

I guess it comes down to building a car that is timeless in design and powerful enough to not get pushed around. For me anyway, others will have way different goals. When I think of the cars I drool over getting they all have my flare but don't go overboard.

Wheels seem to be the hardest hit when it comes to fads. The first dead give away to when a car was built is the wheels. Second is the paint, man does paint show fads more than anything! I often think if you paint a car solid color and possibly close to a factory color you are safe. If you start putting stripes and ribbon stripes over ghost flames over pinstriping in neon colors well you might want to just start putting money away for the repaint now. That is part of the problem, custom cars are mostly one-off vehicles built by one person for one person. Judging if it is cool or not should not really come into play but obviously it does. And just because something is cool today does not mean it will be tomorrow. Just ask the guys riding the OCC choppers how much street cred they get. For now I will only dream and scheme, dodging fads and hoping for my hotrod to arrive.

Old = Indestructible

In the world of true hotrodding old detroit steel reigns supreme. That is good, and bad... but mostly good.

At this point you might be wondering why the hell is there a picture of a phone up there with a hyper link to a disturbed song called Indestructible. No, I haven’t completely lost my mind. That image represents everything about modern times and how I see the world. At THIS point you might be thinking okay, he obviously HAS lost his mind and just doesn’t know it yet. Bare with me gentle readers and allow me to expand upon my hypothesis.

See, earlier this morning I dropped my modern smart phone. Upon dropping my phone it broke the screen into a million pieces and became unusable in that it didn’t even have a picture anymore. I had to take the battery out of it to make it stop playing the song I was listening to. The song was Dead Kennedys “Trust Your Mechanic” in case you were wondering. Very solid song by a great old school punk band. It made me think of a time before phones were expensive pieces of glass that had the computing power of god and fit into the palm of everyones hands.
For you younger readers phones used to be heavy black things that sat on a stand or sometimes hung on a wall. They were made of space hardened moon lava and could kill a bear in the event of an attack and they never ever ever stopped being a phone. I would hazard a guess if you went out into the desert just beside where Atari buried all those ET cartridges and dug up where good old Ma Bell buried all of those old black phones they would still work. They were bullet proof, they were indestructible.

Does that make them better than current smart phones? No but yes… so maybe. New smart phones are glorious in that they contain all the answers to everything. You need to quickly establish the firing order of an engine you yanked out of a junk yard it is there. You need to find out what some random idiot thinks about what color you painted your anvil it is there. If you want it to be dependable and durable not so much. New technology is built light and smart but it sacrifices a lot to get there. New phones are a fashion statement and a fad, the cool hip phone you shelled out a crap ton of money to buy will be mocked as junk within 4 months. And as stated above, they are flimsy as hell… weak as a new born fawn.

Phones are like hotrods in that if you want to build up a bad ass hunk of detroit iron it might not be as super smart, slick and light as a new fangled computer driven hellcat. BUT, purchasers of the new hellcat or camaro that is a billion horsepower beware! New cars are plastic shells controlled by computer. Computers fail at just about every turn. Just like a new shiny phone people will drool all over them then toss them aside when the NEW AND IMPROVED BEST THING EVER comes out so too will the new cool cars of today. They are junk. New cars are fast sleek beautiful pieces of disposable shit. That is the way of the world now. Cars can’t be fixed, just replaced.

If you are like me and value things that are made of glass and metal and wood then you don’t have much time for the newest gadget filled plastic boring car of today. They are not useless but they are not going to be there through the thick and thin. They are the same as a disposable razor,used up and tossed away. New things are not built to withstand the test of time, they are there to drive consumerism and stupidity. SO, much like the old black phone that you can dial day in and day out from until the end of time (or until they force you to convert) give me an old metal and steel chunk of detroit cool. It won’t be as smart as a new hellcat, it won’t attract car and drivers top rated blah blah blah of the year. Know what it will do, it will go though hell and back without missing a beat with me. That is worth more to me than words can express… it is priceless.

Some Inspirational Pictures from Big Daddy Don Garlits

Click Picture for Inspirational Music

We took a trip to the Famous Don Garlits Museum a few months ago. Rather than overwhelm with a million pictures I will just be dropping a couple in from time to time to inspire and highlight some of the wicked cool collection they have rocking over there. if you have never been there and live in Florida I would suggest it. Here is a link to the Museum - http://www.garlits.com/

- and yes, that is the wannabe hotrodders big melon in the way of the awesome car in the 3rd shot.
just DROOLING!