0lder 911 owners - are you guys insane?

Knurled wrote:

Giant Purple Snorklewacker wrote: . A Hemi 'Cuda is a classic example of a ordinary POS from the 60s but damn if there aren't idiots paying half a million for them. Atleast a 911 needs to be an RSR with racing history to fetch anywhere near that nut.

Hemi 'Cudas are not ordinary POSes. Production numbers were never high, especially the 'Cudas which only got the Hemi at the tail end of the musclecar ere when high insurance rates were keeping people from buying them. "It 's HOW MUCH? Ehh... I'll just get a 340." Plus the Hemis didn't have warranties. When you have numbers like 18 made that year, 11 4-speed and 7 automatic, and they are broken down by color (and there's a one-of-one pink Hemi 'Cuda out there, IIRC the world's most valuable)... numbers make more sense now? Anything "Hemi" between '64 and '71 is silly-valuable because of the rarity, the mystique, and the documentation. They're not mass-production vehicles.

I've driven several hemi cars across the Mecum auction block, and only one of them was honestly "rare" That was a 1 of 3 white, hemi, 4sp, '70 superbird......salt flat test car......

Didn't sell at 205k.....I believe the owner drove it home as well.....

Edit: And for the record, I've only taken 2 hemi cars across the block out of about 20, that were not pieces of crap.....normally don't run right, fast idle, only one brake works, etc.....

gamby wrote: Meh--a lot of that is Barrett-Jackson-style "forced rarity".

Mopar guys are just like that. Hemi cars had a mystique and expense around them long before that circus show. In the mid-70s when the service parts were being obsoleted, there were people who were taking second mortgages and dumping their retirement savings into buying the stuff up.

Heh. I remember a 'Cuda pulled in to the cruise in, owner popped the hood, revealing an Elephant. Five minutes later a guy walks up, looks under the hood, looks at the VIN, and triumphantly says "Hah! It's not a real Hemi, this is a 383 car." Dumbfounded, I said "Well, yeah it's not a real Hemi car, he's driving it on the street. And anyway, that's a real Hemi engine."

When they get down to "only two in this color", "only one with a donut spare", it's a case of trying to make something more exclusive.

No, it's when they get down to "original plug wires", "original battery / not a service part", "still has the distributor tag"... You oughta see the Mopar magazines sometime. 4-page color spreads of obscure things like how the hoses were originally routed, what the ID tags looked like, which way the shock mounting nuts are supposed to be, etc.

Empirically, a Hemi car is exclusive. That said, when they were first sold, was it more of a case that no one was buying them and that's why so few were made???

Yep. Expensive, no warranty, expensive to insure, theft magnet...

Otto Maddox wrote: In reply to Knurled: So it is a really rare ordinary POS.

Kinda like how a 911 is a slightly more rare form of a VW beetle?