The next round of future classics......?

Like said about the Saxo, but I'd put the 106 up there instead XSI is all but gone and Rallye's are starting to command strong money again.

An S1 106 is becoming a rarer sight.

the way I see it the future 'classics' are what we call retro at the moment, 80's and early 90's stuff.

Future retro imo is stuff like:




etc

My guess,



Phase 1 172 Renault Sport Clio,

Quite limited numbers from new,

Titanium Silver, 934 in the UK
Pearl Black, 117 in the UK
Odyssey Blue, 116 in the UK
Iceburg Silver, 99 in the UK
Flame Red, 60 in the UK
Sunflower Yellow, 31 in the UK

Wonder how many are left now 12yrs later?

This.

I'm 47, so I can remember most of the stuff you young whipper-snappers enthuse over so much when it was the same, anodyne bin-fodder that most modern cars SEEM to be at the minute. Classic car shows 25 years ago were full of men in brown trousers saying "Pah. Today's stuff will never be classic. Imagine walking down rows of bloody Montegos, Cavaliers and Sierras".

'Plus ca change....plus c'est la meme chose'*

I'm just looking forward to 2042, my care assistant fluffing up my pillows, screwing on another colostomy bag and placing this month's copy of 'Practical Classics' on my dinner-tray, then opening it and seeing a Buyer's Guide to the Perodua Nippa and adverts for the Hyundai Atoz Drivers Guild.


*'The more things change, the more they stay the same' for non French-speakers.

They don't call 'em 'shopping trolleys' for no reason.

So you're really saying that there were massive aesthetic differences between a Mk2 cortina, hillman minx, datsun 510, fc victor etc.

Spot on matt.

Like the Austin A35 that has been mentioned which was designed to be a car that used hardly any fuel whilst transporting a family (would have to be younger kids though really cause I can't fit in back of my A35) It could be any small car that people have grown up with so think Peugeot 106, Citroen Saxo, Vauxhall Corsa, Renault Clio.

And then you have things like Hillman Avengers, my dad had one after the A35 when I asked him what he thought of his Avenger that he had in the 80's once he said it was absoloutley rubbish. But yet we have people who look after them as their classic.

So yeah my prediction are the cars people used as cheap runabouts will be the next gen classics. But people will want to upgrade them to look like their sporting models.
So Where it has been:
Hillman Avenger -> Tiger
VW Golf Mk2 -> GTi
Austin/Morris Mini -> Mini Cooper

And in the future we will see things such as:
Peugeot 106 -> GTI
VW Golf MK5/6 -> GTI
BMW 3 Series -> M3
Audi A4 -> RS4
I'm sure you get what I mean.

And then other cars I reckon will become classics.
Apart from the current teenager cars like the 106 and Clio, I reckon cars like the Saab 9-3/9-5 will become future classics because of the fact that they are seen as 'different' and they were the last models of Saab.
Add to the list sports cars like the BMW Z4, not supercars just a 2 seater and a 3 litre straight-6... a bit like a Austin Healey?
Ford Focus... dare I say it but the modern Ford Cortina?

And I'm going to try my best to keep a VW Fox for a long time if I can buy it back one day but only if its a particular Red VW Fox 1.2 as it was kinda my first car (first I was insured on). Rubbish car, but so was the Austin A35 and one of those is in my garage... my dads first car...

Eh? Manufacturers fitted EFI because it was required to make Cats work, not the other way round. It resulted in a generation of cars that required a full order of magnitude less maintenance than the generation that came before.

And they rusted less, not more. People seem to forget that in the early-90s over half of all cars were scrapped BEFORE they were 10 years old (mostly due to rot) - I'd imagine that figure now to be well under 25%, although I've not seen figures. That means that cars from the late 90s rot less than car from the late 70s. Imagine that!

FWIW, I've seen a scruffy mid-90s Punto cut in half at a scrap yard, and the insides of the sills were MINT (in ~2006). Try that with any 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s FIAT (or BL, or Rootes, or Ford) at 10-15 years old, and cry as the layers come off like those of an onion, revealing scary quantities of rust. There have been people posting on this forum about their Dad's Mates having their Mk4 Cortina's sills and inner wings plated up at 6 years old. Other than Ford KAs (and maybe Fiestas - althought they don't have the same reputation as the KA) and mid-to-late-90s Mercs, what recent cars need that sort of attention at 6 years old?

Admittedly, cars of this era (with ECUs) are perhaps more complex to maintain now than the previous generation (with carbs and dizzies) as the electronics start to fail, but in the era they were a complete revalation - and they are probably easier to keep running now than the cars that followed in the 00s as the immobiliser tends to be simpler and the cars lack CANbus. Bear in mind that the designed-in lifespan of car components is ~8 years, and they are quite remarkable.

IMO, the 90s represented the peak of competant, affordable-to-run, easy-to-maintain cars. Earlier cars rot and use lots of fuel, while later cars have too much in the way of integrated electronics. That's not to say that cars from the 90s are amazing - for the most part they are spectacularly bland, to my mind at least.