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The original was posted on /r/cars by /u/caterham09 on 2025-05-16 22:32:45+00:00.
As car enthusiasts, we're always looking for ways to justify the purchase of a new ride. This is unfortunately often at odds with common financial sense, as a car is typically one of the worst "Investments" a person can make with their money. Recently I've seen this idea of people "driving their 401K" more and more, with the idea that if you buy something collectable, and take care of it, that you'll be able to more or less ignore the expected depreciation of a vehicle. It's something that often speaks to an enthusiast who wants justification in spending money on a depreciating asset. Well I decided to look into that a little bit and wanted to share my findings here for anyone who might be interested.
Before we get into it though I'd like to preface this with a statement. I am not saying that anyone expects their vehicles to appreciate in value, or ever be a good investment. What I am looking at is just how "collectible" cars perform as an investment asset and their viability as a fun way to invest your money for expected lower returns.
With that out of the way, let's look at how I collected the data and why I used what I used as data points. I combed through previous bring a trailer sales over the past~2 years on collectors cars and recorded what the vehicle actually sold for recently. I wanted to pick cars that met 3 major criteria.
It needed to be a high end car that would generally be considered collectible. (I Also purposefully picked cars I knew had held their value or were sought after in some way)
The car needed to be at least 10 years old. This was done in order to make sure the car went through its normal depreciation cycle already. Basically made sure the car wasn't still depreciating and had already lost the bulk of it's value
It needed to be a car that had the original window sticker present. I could easily look up MSRP, but that never factors in options so I wanted to make sure whatever car I looked at had an original non-inflation adjusted sticker price. This meant most cars chosen were from the 2000s
There were a couple other rules I stuck to just for consistency's sake. I didn't look at sales outside of America, because I know that can skew values. I also didn't pick any cars with more than very basic modifications, as again that could skew the results. Lastly, I also ignored cars that did not meet the reserve, as this didn't classify as a sale. I looked at the last 5 sales for each car that met these criteria, and averaged out the year over year return that an original owner could have expected from this vehicle.
The cars I tracked are as follows.
| Make | Model | Notes |
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| Ford | GT | Gen 1 |
| Ferrari | 599 | |
| Ferrari | F430 | Both automatic and manual versions were tracked |
| Lamborghini | Gallardo | |
| Porsche | 911 GT3 | 996 |
| Chevrolet | Corvette | ZR1 |
| Dodge | Viper | ZB2 |
| Acura | NSX | NA1 |
| Audi | R8 | V10, Both automatic and manual versions were tracked |
| Ferrari | 458 | |
| Lexus | LFA | |
| Aston Martin | V8 Vantage | Both automatic and manual versions were tracked |
I also tracked a small selection of cars that I wouldn't consider to be highly collectible, at least not compared to the previous list, but are still enthusiast cars. The list is as follows.
| Make | Model | Notes |
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| Ford | Mustang | GT500, S197 |
| Chevrolet | Camaro | ZL1, 5th gen |
| Honda | S2000 | |
| Porsche | 911 | 997 |
| Mercedes | C63 AMG | W204 |
| Nissan | GTR | |
| BMW | M3 | E90 |
I originally had the GTR on the first list, but it was surprisingly hard to find examples selling with the original window sticker, so there weren't enough data points. This made me less comfortable about including it with the bigger list. Additionally, I added the Aston Martin as a comparison tool. Since I knew it to be a car that depreciated heavily, I wanted to include it as a datapoint more for reference than anything.
With all that out of the way, let's look at how well (or how poorly) these cars held their value. Keep in mind the ROI is calculated as a percentage of the original price. So anything over 100% is worth more than the original price, and anything below 100% is worth less.
| Make | Model | Annualized Return | ROI |
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| Ford | GT | 5.93% | 294.37% |
| Ferrari | 599 | -4.21% | 47.15% |
| Ferrari | F430 (automatic) | -3.22% | 58.04% |
| Ferrari | F430 (manual) | 2.59% | 157.80% |
| Lamborghini | Gallardo | -2.66% | 79.08% |
| Porsche | 911 GT3 | 0.39% | 111.41% |
| Chevrolet | Corvette ZR1 | -1.57% | 80.73% |
| Dodge | Viper | -.034% | 97.92% |
| Acura | NSX | 1.13% | 149.68% |
| Audi | R8 (automatic) | -6.70% | 49.61% |
| Audi | R8 (manual) | -0.15% | 98.20% |
| Ferrari | 458 | -1.05% | 89.23% |
| Lexus | LFA | 6.96% | 227.73% |
| Aston Martin | V8 Vantage (automatic) | -7.85% | 28.87% |
| Aston Martin | V8 Vantage (manual) | -5.76% | 39.87% |
And for the 2nd set of cars the results were as follows
| Make | Model | Annualized Return | ROI |
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| Ford | Mustang | -2.31% | 69.41% |
| Chevrolet | Camaro | -4.04% | 64.08% |
| Honda | S2000 | 0.39% | 110.23% |
| Porsche | 911 | -2.09% | 75.30% |
| Mercedes | C63 AMG | -4.81% | 67.08% |
| Nissan | GTR | -2.08% | 77.88% |
| BMW | M3 | -4.19% | 55.36% |
Now how do we interperet this data? Obvoiusly it would be impossible to normalize this for any specific milage as there just isnt enough data to do that with cars of this value. The big reason I took the most recent examples of each car that sold was to get an "average" of how a typical owner would treat the car over its 25-30 year lifespan. That said a vast majority of these cars had very low mileage, and basically nothing from the first list cracked 20k miles, so the conditions of each car were largely the same. That said, it's easy to see that there were a few standout models in terms of both appreciation and depreciation.
Let's talk the good first. The two vehicles which were far and away the best investment were the Ford GT and the Lexus LFA. This is a really interesting result (though not surprising) mainly because these two cars are very different in a lot of ways. First is rarity, as Ford actually made a significant amount of the original GT (at least compared to the rest of the field), with a little over 4000 units being sold. While the Lexus was limited to only 500 total units, and 463 nurburging units (though none of those were tracked here). The 2nd major difference was initial impressions. The Ford was pretty much beloved by all enthusiasts and journalists at the time of release and it seemed to maintain that trajectory all the way into 2025. The Lexus on the other hand was met with pretty lukewarm approval and failed to really takeoff until years after production ended.
I bring this up because it highlights one of the main conclusions I came to here. That is, that it's impossible to truly tell what automobile is a "good" investment. The two cars here with the best return (and the only two that could even be considered investments really) were viewed very differently and had very different trajectories in terms of value. This tells me that for the most part, you won't really be able to ever call a vehicle a solid investment with any degree of certainty. Keep in mind too that this field of cars is more or less the best cars you could have purchased in the last 15-20 years in terms of collectibility, so the fact that only 2 of them did well means that normal cars are almost certainly going to do worse.
It's also important to point out the true stinkers here on this list of supercars. The Audi R8 V10 automatic lost an average of nearly 7% per year since it was purchased. The Manual held it's value more or less, but automatic owners took a huge bath on that purchase. Another surprising one to me was the Ferraris, The 599 and 430 Auto are not looked at very favorably by the secondary market, being worth ~50% of its original list price today.
An individual car I wanted to highlight was one particular F430 6-speed that appreciated far less than the other 4 that were tracked despite selling for the most money of any F430 I found. It Had only 480 total miles in it's 17 year life, but was sold with a $115,000 crocodile leather package that the original owner failed to see any real return on investment on. They would have been better off ironically, to buy a regular F430 6-speed and drive it a normal amount.
A couple of the more "normal cars" I thought that were worth talking about were the Honda S2000, and the E90 M3. The S2000 came out as something of a working man's hero in this analysis. The examples I found were easily the highest milage cars here, and yet they still returned a positive ROI. One in particular with 71,000 miles still sold for almost 78% of its original sticker price.
The E90 M3 on the other hand, despite being a well regarded drivers car, was notably less valuable than it's main competition in the W204 C63. I'm sure this is due to the bearing issue being so prevalent, but it was worth noting as it's something that would be impossible to know when buying a car new or gently used.
In conclusion, I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that cars aren't exactly great investments. The point of this post isn't to declare something obvious. The real point here is just to show that even the absolute pinnacle of cars, are going to be a big money sink for even the ul...
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