Okay, thinking aloud here about vw 'scene tax

Cheap 924's .. probably not for long... they are the hotness, already I've seen them add £500 or so to their average price in the past 6 months.

It's not just VW's though and I know which camp I'd rather buy into:

£65,000 for a 1969 car

...or save £30,000 and have another 1969 car lot more style (IMHO)

I'm not saying I'd buy either (even if I could afford to) but it just shows that huge prices for what used to be 'ordinary' cars isn't just exclusive to the world of VW's.

I know the Twincam Escort wasn't exactly the same as a 1.1L, but it wasn't a Porsche 911 either. Not by a long way. I'm not going to go into the factors of how and why such cars command so much money (we all know that really) but it's quite an eye opener to see some of the more 'ordinary' or 'mainstream' cars fetching prices well above and beyond the more 'desirable' or 'aspirational' brands.

It isn't just limited to the rarer, older VW stuff though. Even your bog-standard Golf, with intergalactic mileage and more rust than a beached trawler, seems to fetch a relatively daft price when compared to its contemporaries. Particularly if it's a diesel.

The one I'm really surprised hasn't gone mental quite yet is the MkII GTI. It'll happen soon I'm sure, but I suspect its ubiquity next to MkI GTIs has something to do with it.

Golfs are still fairly attainable for 20-somethings to buy, run and insure etc. My Golf GTI Mk2 is the first I've had had on my own policy, its £750 a year to insure (No NCB, 2 years experience as a named driver), it gets 35mpg and parts from GSF off the shelf. A similar aged 924 is at least 2 times the price to insure but not sure about the other factors. What are spares priced at etc?

At the end of the day though, its supply and demand. If the demand is more than cars available, prices go up...

That Escort has to have been For Sale for at least two or three years though with the price bouncing between £60,000-£70,000 for that time, a sign perhaps that while the owner values it at that it doesn't necessarily mean its worth that to someone with that kind of cash, whereas a similar era Porsche will sell at whatever price you put on it depending on the spec.

As for the 924, for a long time people who wanted a Porsche didn't want to touch them because they were seen as inferior to other Porsche's and people who were looking for something cheap and sporty probably didn't even think to look for Porsche's of any form, hence they became fodder. However, when something becomes seriously cheap (and is over a certain age) people start to notice the glut of £500 cars appearing in the classifieds. After that it only takes one or two people to bite the bullet and before you know it word of mouth has begun and prices begin to rise, just as they are now.

The Golf on the other hand has never lost its popularity, particularly the early ones. They've always been seen as the Hatchback with a bit more class and have inherited their Air-Cooled ancestors image of cool, hence they've always been in demand. Demand means values stay decent and age means more fall victim to the ravages of time, so demand exceeds supply, which is great for sellers but no so much for buyers.

I genuinely don't understand cool. Or scene, for that matter. It all baffles me. I understand the human need to associate with like-minded others (obviously, cos I'm here, lol) but wanting to be exactly the same as those others makes me shudder. It's always struck me as a severe contradiction in terms in the modifying world that people mod their cars to be an expression of their personality... but only if they can imitate someone else who's done it before. So what does that actually say about their personality, then, lol. It's very rare to find someone who's willing to make their car, how they want it and damn the hoots of derision from the spectators. And it's probably no coincidence that those self-same cars finally appear on the "scene" *spits* and are the talk of the show/year/social networking site of your choice. Bear witness that beige 924 making Car of the Year, and well done them.

Group buys fill me with horror, why would you want the exact same bit of tinsel on your car as twenty or fifty other people all at the same time? As to what makes a car iconic and collectible (almost) in it's own lifetime, paradoxically it seems to be ubiquity rather than rarity in may cases. For example, when I was a kid, we always had Beetles. Not because they were cool, quite the opposite. It's because they were the object of derision to the point they were about the cheapest car you could buy and we didn't have any money. I look back on them with fondness (all those pre-seatbelt days out wedged lengthways into the parcel cubby above the engine, behind the backseat, because I was smallest and the proper seats were taken. Health and Safety freaks look away now. At least it was warm) but I never imagined for one moment they'd become cool. Neither did my school mates who's dads drove Cortina Ghias or whatever. But now they are and good ones are priced accordingly. I think one of the main reasons they become cool is because there were enough of them to survive and enough people feel fondly about them for it to become an affordable dream to re-visit their youth. In the case of the Lotus twin-cam linked above, it seems that only true cognoscenti... geeks, if you like... will even know what they're looking at or why the rarity commands such a price point. Rarity is both a help and a hindrance, sometimes.

This goes for my own area of interest, rotary Mazdas. To the best of our knowledge, there are something like five or six saveable RX-4s (running but in need of much work) in the UK, and were one to come up for sale it would command a decent price. But nothing like the price one of the rearest cars in this country would arguably deserve. Why is that? Fear of the unknown, it's a model that was under almost everyone's radar back in the day so there's no nostalgic draw, weird engine with terrible reputation. Everything's against it, despite you have more chance of pulling up at the lights next to an Enzo than an RX-4. There simply weren't enough sold originally for anyone to care about them or desire them. I think some of these problems apply to the 924 in the OP; those puerile pub bore jibes of "discontinued VW van engine" have largely done for them, coupled with Porsche apparently not having the first idea whether they actually wanted to support their own range of 924, 944 and 928 themselves. When the model range changes completely with the chairman, it's hard to have much customer confidence about the product. Much like Millwall, lol

As for MkI Golfs, well, I had one of them many moons ago and it's one of two VWs that traumatised me enough to make me vow to never own another as long as I live. I genuinely don't understand their appeal or desirability and I'd rather poo in my hands and clap that drive one ever again. Maybe I just shouldn't have owned one before they were cool and then I might have been willing to tolerate how appalling it was in every respect Thank God we're all different.


None of this rambling waffle makes too much of a point, but that's my 2ps worth. To end on a bizarre point, this car www.carandclassic.co.uk/car/C290229 has been for sale for absolutely years, not surprisingly. Even at the point when FDs were at the peak of their desirability and price in the UK, this was around 17 grand overpriced. Now in these days of being able to get a good sorted one with all the mods for 6 grand, it's so far out of touch it almost isn't funny. Add to this some of the inaccuracies, miss-information and outright untruths in the ad and you wonder why the vendor is willing to waste two years of listing fees on it. But then, there's always a mug... errr... I mean buyer who's willing to pay any price, sooner or later, if they have correct mix of ignorance, gullibility, money and desire to be different. At any cost. It doesn't make the car especially valuable or desirable in its own right, though

Supply & demand is the reason.

I usually skip past lengthy posts, but I like that, luckyseven. I'm in much agreement.
I cant comment on VW worthiness or otherwise mind, having never driven any VW!