High-End Classic Cars Outperformed the Stock Market . . . Until Now

As market watchers here at Hagerty, we get a lot of questions related to cars as investments. Our typical answer is that it's best not to look at cars that way. You should buy a car you love and enjoy it, and if you come out ahead or just break even when it comes time to sell, that's just icing on the cake. We track the market and publish a price guide to inform buyers and owners what the objects of their passion are truly worth, to better understand changing tastes and trends in the hobby, and because, well, it's interesting. Besides, when it comes to "investments," putting money into an index fund is a more straightforward and usually much better way to build wealth than flipping cranky old cars.

That said, we found a surprising trend when comparing Hagerty's Blue Chip index of high-end classic cars with the S&P 500 stock index. For much of recent memory, the same amount of money invested in Blue Chip cars yielded a higher return than the stock market. Only in the past few months has this reversed.

The S&P 500, of course, is the stock market index that tracks the performance of 500 of the largest companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. Hagerty's Blue Chip index is one of the 11 collector indexes we publish each quarter, and it averages the values of 25 of the most sought-after collectible automobiles of the postwar era, including the Aston Martin DB5, Ferrari 250 California Spider, Lamborghini Miura, and Mercedes-Benz 300SL.

The starting point for the graph above is 2007, which marks the beginning of the Hagerty Price Guide. The Great Recession followed shortly after, and while Blue Chip cars saw a decline in 2009, their recession-era dip was not as steep as that of the stock market, or indeed for other segments of the car market, like American muscle. Blue Chip cars' appreciation in the early 2010s was also considerably sharper, then values largely flattened out later in the decade as the S&P started to catch up. Following Covid-era shakiness in the early 2020s, the top end of the collector car market struggled during 2024 while the stock market hit record highs. This spring, that initial S&P investment from 17 years ago finally yielded a higher percentage than one in high-end cars.

Again, cars aren't easy investments to get rich, and things aren't as straightforward as the graph makes them seem. With top-shelf classic cars, there are maintenance, storage, and insurance considerations that you just don't have to make with your stock portfolio. Still, it's surprising to see just how far some of our favorite classics have come since we started pricing them way back in the 2000s.