Are these the 30 best classic cars of all time? – autoweek.com | Car Plazas
That should settle all disputes.
What is the greatest classic car in the world? The debate has raged since the first Ford hit the first Winton. And it’s still raging. But there are now some scientific analyzes to clarify the question. An insurance website in the UK has compiled a list. The oddly-named Confused.com — a financial services platform that primarily compares insurance rates for all sorts of things, including cars — has compiled some stats to help answer the question.
By comparing the rarity, the number of Google searches and the amount of increase in value over the last two years, Confused made it clear: the winner is… the Lamborghini Miura!
Clap clap clap…
Here’s the thought: Lamborghini only made 764 Miuras from 1966 to 1973, so they’re rare. The number of Google searches for “Miura” is 1,461,000 annually. And the value from May 2019 to the “current average value” has increased from $925,000 to $1,850,000 or 100 percent. Feed that into Confused.com’s algorithm and you get a Classic Car Score of 8.58 out of 10, which is the highest score in the study.
Second highest selling car is the Ferrari F40 with 4,081,000 Google searches, 1,311 ever done, and increasing in value from $1,300,000 to $2,600,000 or 100 percent, giving it a score of 8.51.
Third was the Ferrari GTO with 1,545,000 Googles, a total circulation of just 36 and increasing in value from $68,750,000 in May 2019 to $70 million now, or just 1.8 percent more. That’s good for a score of 7.89.
Does this criterion make sense? Does this methodology make sense? Aren’t you amused? Then just start your own top 10 list! The method seems to be crossing some demographics, from wealthy buyers who are probably quite old and can shell out millions for a collector’s car, to very young buyers who aren’t old and don’t have any money at all but have internet access so they google it the cars they love and desire. Balancing these two variables are production figures.
The list goes on for 30 spots – 30 cars that captured the imagination of actual buyers or raised the hopes of the discerning. Some you would never guess would be on a list of the greatest collectible cars in the world, for example the Citroën 2CV. Citroën made 3.8 million of these small air-cooled twins from 1948 to 1990, but the car received almost 800,000 Google searches and its value increased by about a third. This puts the 2CV in 29th place on the list.
Likewise, the Pontiac Firebird — which you probably have one of which has a “parts for sale” sign on your lawn — ranked 27th on Confused.com’s list, which is confusing indeed, especially since Confused.com only lists 697 under “number produced”, which is likely the number imported into the UK. We in the States are swimming in Firebirds, with GM making hundreds of thousands of these things over four generations. But the “bird” has been googled 2.3 million times, the same number of times as the Lamborghini Diablo, which is 24th on the list.
Others near the top make more sense. Number 4 is the AC Cobra, which is on par with the Lamborghini Countach. However, number six is the Datsun 240Z, ahead of the Bugatti EB 110, the latter sharing 7th place with the Lancia Stratos. So you can see that the list is sometimes, but not always, skewed by the number of these cars that actually made their way to the UK. Datsun brought about 160,000 Datsun 240Zs to America alone, but only 543 are shown in the UK, disrupting the logic in that one count. That explains the Plymouth Superbird in 9th place ahead of the Jaguar E-Type, which sits in 10th place with the Nissan Skyline GT-R.
The list goes on: Toyota 2000GT at number 12 on the list, followed by BMW M1, Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, Aston Martin DB5, Ferrari 512 BB, followed by Testarossa, Jag D-Type, Porsche 550, Ferrari 308 and further down to the Plymouth Roadrunner in the 30th
Check out the gallery to see the entire list. It is neither a perfect summation nor an error-free assignment of values. But it’s fun to look around. So look. And start arguing in the comments section below — or better yet, give us your list.
Let the debates begin! Are they actually the greatest classic cars of all time? Or is it a bunch of Bunkum. Let us know what your list would look like in the comments below.