Notes on the market, on cars, and on judgment.

For most of the last two decades, "investment car" meant something built before 1975 — chrome, carburetors, a name your father recognized. That assumption no longer holds. The cars we are watching appreciate fastest right now were mostly built in the 1990s and 2000s: the final generation of supercars built without significant electronic intervention, where a manual gearbox and a naturally aspirated engine were simply how a serious car was built, not a marketing point.

The Porsche Carrera GT is as clear an example as exists. Porsche built 1,270 of them between 2003 and 2006, each with a 605-horsepower, naturally aspirated V10 derived from an abandoned Le Mans prototype program. Values now sit above €1.5 million and continue to climb. The car is not appreciating because it is old. It is appreciating because nothing built since works quite the same way, and nothing built since will — a manual, naturally aspirated V10 supercar is now a closed chapter in automotive history, not a current product category.

The deeper pattern is generational, and it arrives before the price does. The buyers driving this market grew up with these cars on posters, not their grandfathers'. As they reach the wealth to act on that attachment, the cars of their own formative years move first — and the cars that defined the generation before them correct, simply for lack of an equivalent base of demand. We watch this dynamic closely, because it tells us less about any single car and more about where the next decade of demand is actually heading.