We keep hearing about it, but now even The Wall Street Journal has confirmed it. There is a shift taking place in the collector market, and some people are gravitating toward late-model (and by late-model, I mean 30-year-old 1990s and 40-year-old 1980s) vehicles to preserve and showcase. RADwood has been riding this wave for about a decade, and the momentum continues.
RADwood Los Angeles 2026
Earlier this year, I was contacted via Instagram by a reporter from The Wall Street Journal named Ellie Davis. She said, “I’m working on a story on people who collect not-so-old or ‘normal’ cars as classics. I’d love to speak with you to learn more about your collection!”
Ellie and I connected by phone the next day, and I spilled my guts, so to speak, about how and why I decided to become a collector of otherwise-unpopular cars from a few decades ago.
RADwood Los Angeles 2026
Ellie’s story was published online on August 16 and in print on August 17 in the newspaper’s Business section.
I won’t spell it all out, but the takeaway was that collector insurance companies like Hagerty are avoiding using the words “classic” or “collector” altogether. Instead, the company evaluates trends on what kinds of cars people are asking to insure. “The typical collector is someone who might pay around $25,000 for a car of nostalgic value,” a Hagerty representative said. The Today Show picked up on the story, too.
My personal claim to fame was just a short but heartfelt quote about how the car collecting hobby revolves around nostalgia: “The cars you obsess over at 17, you’ll buy when you’re 40.” That’s something Donald Osborne said to me in 2022 when I was in Burbank for a taping of Jay Leno’s Garage. And he was absolutely right, for me and for many others. My 1989 Honda Prelude is a car that I bought specifically for its time-traveling capabilities — even without a flux capacitor.
What does it all mean for the more mainstream classic cars, like the Chevrolet Bel Air, the Ford Mustang, or the Pontiac GTO? Well, none of us has a crystal ball to be able to predict the future. Clearly, the established collector market is still very much alive and well, if this year’s Monterey Car Week 2026 (at $756 million in auction sales) is any indication. And we expect to see more strong numbers at the upcoming Barrett-Jackson auction in Las Vegas.
But keep your eyes on some of the lesser-known “collector” cars getting attention from younger buyers. They might just be driving the Ford Taurus market up.
