Horse 2857 - Never Bought, Never Sold, Never Driven

 As someone working in an accounting firm, I get to see a fairly largish range of expenses, as well as receipts for the buying and selling of motor cars. However, there is a really weird blind spot where not much happens; so you don't get to see the consequences. There is a really weird category of motor cars which are virtually silent when it comes to appearing in people's accounts. These are the cars which are never bought, never sold, never driven, and do not incur much by way of maintenance and repair expenses.

Mr Banana (not his real name) is a property developer who lives on the lower northern beaches of Sydney. Mr Banana has an SUV which is his daily driver, his wife has a smaller SUV which is her daily driver, and the younger of his two daughters who lives at home has the family's old BMW 3er; which is pretty beat up and isn't worth very much. He has fourth car which doesn't do very much of anything at all; it is a Peugeot RCZ.

- Cars like this live sad lives in dark garages.

Since I have an interest in motor cars, I was asked what he should do with his Peugeot RCZ. I told him that if he likes it enough to keep it then he should keep it and if he doesn't like it enough to keep then he should sell it. He was confused by my answer because as he explained, he thought that it would make a good investment.

Firstly, the market for cars to actually become a good investment is so long that unless you are committed to the prospect of never ever driving your cheap new car, then you can almost but not entirely forget it. The timeframe for a cheap new car to become a really valuable investment piece, is at least 30 years. Almost all cars that have fetched ridiculous prices at auctions, have been 30-50 years old.

Secondly, the Peugeot RCZ is one of those strange points of automotive data, that is never bought, never sold, and never driven. Partly that is a consequence of that first point and partly because it is too nice to drive as a daily driver. 

Out on the roads, you will definitely see more expensive cars than the Peugeot RCZ. There are plenty of Porsche Cayennes, BMW Xers, Range Rovers and Lexii. Again, this has to do with the SUVification of everything and forty years ago these kinds of cars would have been likely to have been wagons and sedans before SUVs came along and replaced everything. The primary purpose of these cars is their perceived usefulness even though a wagon would in most cases be more useful and be nicer to drive. SUVs exist purely for their perceived utility and not for their coolness. Proper off-road enthusiasts buy proper off-road vehicles; which means that the entire market for SUVs is for people who have a family and who might want to drive on a gravel road once a year, if that. There's nothing wrong with that but it isn't cool, it isn't exciting, and that means that they are treated like the utilitarian pieces that they are perceived to be.

The vast majority of cars are working assets that get used and then cease working. People buy a car because they have a need to cart themselves, their tools, their stuff, their sprogs, and their groceries around. Very few cars are bought for the sole purpose of being a fun machine. The cars that are bought with the express purpose of being a fun machine, are almost exclusively bought by the top pentile of people on the economic spectrum or by car enthusiasts who have a fair amount of money to play with.

Herein lies the reasons why cars like the Peugeot RCZ are never bought, never sold, and never driven. You generally don't find them in car yards because they either get traded in enthusiasts' circles and are therefore only the subject of private sales. As they are never bought, they are also never sold because in order to have a market which operates, you need buyers and sellers who meet at a price. Cars like this are almost never driven because they aren't used as daily drivers and while the idea of using them on track days seems appealing, the kinds of people who buy them are invariably too busy to use them that way. Cars like the Peugeot RCZ are kind of like purchasing a gym membership: the idea is there but the execution is rarely there to accompany it. 

Curiously if you move up the economic spectrum, cars like the Porsche 911 actually are used on a regular basis because they are likely to be someone's only car. People who own that kind of car as a daily driver are also more likely to own other high performance cars like Ferraris and McLarens, and those kinds of cars have a similar kind of turnover to cheaper cars like the Peugeot RCZ.

The Peugeot RCZ sits in the same category as older Corvettes, the Audi R8, and Lexus. They're all quite worthy GT cars but they're not cheap enough to be hurled around in anger, and they're not expensive enough to live pampered lives as concourse queens. 

There is of course the obvious solution to this and that is to just accept that you're not going to make any money from motor cars as an investment. If that is then the framing device through which you look at your motor car, then what you are now looking at is a fun machine which is being wasted.

If I had a Peugeot RCZ, then I still wouldn't use it as a daily driver but you can be sure that within five years, it will have been over heaps and heaps of roads. I'm assuming that if you have that kind of money, then staying in cheap hotels is not an issue for you. There are vast ribbons of black top in this wide brown land; it would be a shame to let that go to waste. It would still be the kind of car that is never bought and never sold but it would be driven.