Twenty-five dollars bought a running 1963 Ford Thunderbird Landau in 1975. That same car, in comparable driver condition, sold for $8,000 on Hagerty’s own marketplace this year — a 320-times return on a car that plenty of owners in the 1970s would have handed over for the cost of a tank of gas. Hagerty’s own market writing and its live auction results tell the same story again and again: cars American buyers once considered used-up junk are now some of the most stubbornly appreciating assets in the collector world. Here’s what the numbers actually show.
The $25 Thunderbird. Automotive writer John L. Stein bought his 1963 T-Bird Landau for $25 in 1975 after the seller, an elderly man named Harold, let it go rather than deal with it anymore, according to Stein’s own account published on Hagerty Media. It ran on seven cylinders, the vinyl top was shredded, and the odometer had almost certainly rolled over. Stein put in new ignition parts, a repaint and a fresh top, and drove it as a daily starter car. Half a century later, a comparably preserved 1963 Thunderbird coupe changed hands for $8,000 through Hagerty’s own bidding platform — real money for a car nobody wanted when gas lines and rust made big American cruisers feel disposable.
The $150 GTO. A friend of Stein’s paid just $150 for a 1967 Pontiac GTO H.O. car during that same scrap-value stretch, a detail Stein mentions in Hagerty’s own analysis of the muscle car market. Today, unremarkable 1967 GTOs move through Hagerty’s marketplace for real collector money — a hardtop sold for $56,710 this spring, and a four-speed convertible brought $74,900 a month later. That’s not a rare, numbers-matching Ram Air car commanding a premium. That’s the ordinary GTO body style that used to be cheap enough to abandon in a driveway.
The $600 El Camino. Stein himself paid $600 for a Chevrolet El Camino SS with a 396 under the hood, and by his own telling he thought that price was steep at the time. A 396-powered El Camino SS in good condition now routinely clears well into five figures, and documented 454 LS6 versions of the same body style have pushed into six-figure territory, per a separate Yahoo Autos survey of once-cheap collector cars that found the same pattern across a dozen other models — Buick Grand Nationals that sold for around $15,000 in the 1980s now bring $25,000 to $45,000, and 1970s Datsun 240Zs that traded for a few thousand dollars in the 1990s now start at $25,000 and climb past $60,000 for matching-numbers cars.
It wasn’t just T-Birds and GTOs. The same Yahoo Autos survey found square-body Chevrolet C/K pickups that sold for $2,000 to $4,000 through most of the 1990s and 2000s — with even clean examples rarely topping $8,000 — now commanding close to $70,000 in collector-quality trim. The 1981 DeLorean DMC-12, a car so unloved it lost half its $25,000 sticker price within a few years of going out of production, now brings $40,000 to $60,000, with the lowest-mileage survivors clearing $80,000. None of these were rare or expensive when they were simply used cars. They were just old.
Why It Took Fifty Years
None of this happened overnight. Hagerty’s own reporting traces the muscle car segment’s real climb to the 1990s, when Baby Boomers who had grown up with these cars — or wanted the ones they couldn’t afford as teenagers — started buying them back, first as weekend projects and later as investment-grade collectibles. That wave of nostalgia-driven demand is still doing heavy lifting today: Hagerty’s 2024 auction data put muscle cars from the 1964-72 era at an average of $78,000 per car, generating $273 million in total sales and accounting for 6.4% of all auction revenue that year. That’s a generation with real disposable income chasing back the exact cars — and in some cases the exact body styles — they once sold for scrap money as kids, and their bidding has dragged the entire segment upward in the process.
The pattern holds across body styles and price tiers alike. A car that was worth less than a fast-food meal in 1975 can be worth a used economy car’s price today, and a car that cost less than a tank of gas in the muscle-car doldrums of the late 1970s can now sell for the price of a house down payment. The people who kept these cars running through the years nobody wanted them are the ones cashing in now.