I'm thinking Veyron drivers are not the D.I.Y. type

Brian said:

This makes an Aero L-39 Albatros look downright sensible. And it’s twice as fast. 

And they have a race series. 

Appleseed said:

Brian said:

This makes an Aero L-39 Albatros look downright sensible. And it’s twice as fast. 

And they have a race series. 

And the running costs make the Bugratti seem like econobox in comparison

Keith Tanner said:

The0retical said:

In reply to STM317 :

If I were going to buy a million dollar car, I'd thrash it like a rented race horse.

Other investments yield better returns than cars.

You’ve not been paying attention to the classic car market, I assume. 

I do on and off, it doesn't interest me that much though.

We're talking some pretty rare instances where cars beat investments of any long period of time.

The Ferrari 250 GTO and 290MM come to mind. The most recent auctions sold for $42.4MM and $22MM respectively.

If invested in June of 1956 (not adjusting for inflation) the $18k to buy the 250 GTO would come out to:

Just short of $7MM in the S&P500

Just short of $8MM in the DJIA

Those appear to be the outliers as they're significantly more expensive than other 1950's and earlier Bugatti's and Ferrari's.

There were only a few 290MM's ever built and something like 48 250 GTO's built. In contrast there were 407 Veyron's sold. Veyron's are practically baseball cards of the 90s, built to be collectable.

The auction prices of the Veyron's also appear to be close to what the base price of the car was when purchased new. So, while owners may have made a few dollars, an index still would have made more over the short period of time.

Other exceptions are the limited production of vehicles like the Ford GT and Porsche 918, where the cars are flipped to other speculators or to those who cannot wait for another batch. It seems like both Ford and Porsche have had enough of that. Ford has both contracts and is talking about additional runs of the vehicles, and Porsche is talking about both adding capacity and simply not selling the cars to those they deem to be serial flippers.

American muscle will likely never reach that point, no matter how rare the engine, interior, exterior combination may be.

I don't have that kind of cash laying around so this is really just sort of a thought exercise. If looking at a dead piece of machinery makes the owner happy, go for it. I wouldn't be rolling the dice on using cars as an investment vehicle though.