Media | Articles
Will the Muscle Car Market Ever Fail?
Lemon Twist. Cranberry Red. Grabber Blue. It’s easy to visualize the iconic shades of the muscle car world, and the famous automobiles painted in them. From the beginning, muscle cars dripped image and sold performance, and the best examples—like the Hemi ’Cuda, LS6 Chevelle, Boss 429 Mustang—fuse those two elements together. Regardless of make, model or year, muscle cars from the golden age of the segment in the 1960s and 1970s all aimed to tug at young people’s desires, which has kept them relevant and desirable all these decades later.
Today, the muscle car market is solid. According to Hagerty, of all the cars sold at auction in 2024, 5.3% were muscle cars from the traditional 1964-72 era, accounting for 6.4% ($273M) of the overall total sales that year. The average price was $78K per muscle car, compared to $61K overall. The muscle market has been trending in this way for most of the past two decades, minus the housing crash of ’08, in large part due to buyers’ nostalgia for the era and for the cars.
But nothing lasts forever, right? Over the next 10 years, the old car hobby is poised to make a fundamental transition. Baby Boomers, the generation born from 1946 to 1964 and long the driving force in the collector car market, will inevitably exit the market. When that happens, new buyers will continue to rise. And these buyers have not only had different life experiences; when it comes to muscle cars, these buyers have largely been priced out of these classics for most of their lives.
Then what?
How We Got Here
The Pontiac GTO, launched in 1964, was the muscle car’s pivotal moment. Pontiac expected to sell 5000 units that year. It sold 32,450.
That’s because the GTO was the right car at the right time. It packaged performance, style, and marketing unlike anything that had come before. It was tailor-made a new type of youthful buying demographic—the Baby Boomers—who were just then coming of age and developing into an economic and social dynamo in the United States.
Eyeing the GTO’s obvious success, every major American manufacturer entered the market with its own mid-sized monster constructed to capture imaginations via curb appeal—and buyers drove that success through the end of the decade and slightly beyond. The cars exchanged blows for street dominance right from the showroom floor, in print and on television, and the youth developed brand loyalties and will-own-it-someday goals, born from cruise night memories and stoplight digs. Period advertising promised excitement. The cars delivered. And, given both the high production numbers and wide media exposure of muscle cars in their heyday, they had broad cultural relevance that stretched beyond the realm of hardcore car enthusiasts. It’s not a stretch to say that nearly every single American in those years had some sort of exposure to and awareness of the muscle car.
But by 1973, shifting buyers’ motivations, insurance pricing, emissions concerns and an OPEC fuel crisis signaled the end of the party. The automakers stopped building muscle cars, and the used ones dropped in value over the next decade, going to their second, third or fourth owners for way less than their original MSRPs.
It wasn’t unheard of to score an icon—that Hemi Cuda or LS6 Chevelle—for seriously reasonable money in the later part of the 1970s and early 1980s, at least by today’s standards. “In 1975, I bought a 1963 Thunderbird Landau for $25,” says automotive writer and southern California native John L. Stein. “That car was probably a $3200 car in 1963. It went from $3200 to $25 in 12 years. In the period of century that we’re talking about, depreciation of cars was a given. A friend of mine bought a 1967 GTO HO car for $150. That was a steal. Later, I got an SS 396 El Camino for $600, which I thought was an outrageous amount of money at the time,” he says.
“People were used to cars becoming worthless in a decade or maybe 15 years. That was just the landscape. The difference between us and the generation who came of age in the 1980s when these cars were already collectible and expensive is this: In their time period, these cars went down, down, down, down in value to wrecking-yard level. In the ’80s, the cars did the opposite: They went up, up, up, up, up.”
Building a Market
The window of time from 1975 to 1980 was a pivotal moment in developing the makeup of today’s muscle car market.
A relatively cheap entry price for older muscle cars in these years meant the cars could endear themselves to a whole new group of young buyers in that era. The boom in collector car valuations (like Ferraris, in particular) hadn’t yet materialized, so the cars were just used. And they were still usable, as long as the gas money held out.
The market we now know found its roots there. It grew in the 1990s as Boomers and early Gen X buyers who had experienced the cars in their youth started buying them again, with nostalgia in their hearts.
The key point here was that both the original owners and their direct predecessors were active in the classic car market at that time. That translated into demand and growing valuations for the best of the best muscle cars—and strong money for the rest—and it set that segment of the market up for a long run of success, barring external factors such as the 2008 housing crisis, which disproportionately saw values falling further than other segments in the old car market.
Values have generally stayed solid in the years since the post-2008 recovery, mostly as a function of how many of those buyers have remained active in the market. The best cars are still treasured—and they tend to be expensive—as a result.
The Price of Success
Strong pricing has created some consequences. It’s hard to get nostalgic over perfectly polished and highly valuable cars preserved in a sterile, climate-controlled cleanroom. That’s just the kind of environment many muscle cars find themselves in these days.
The prime issue at hand is one of access. If nostalgia powers the market and it’s set in motion when people are younger, how will today’s muscle market transition to a new group of buyers who spent their formative years priced out of the cars?
Further, why would younger people chase their parents’ icons when they have icons of their own? They have JDM and tuner cars, European sports cars and classic trucks, not to mention a crop of modern muscle cars to choose from. The markets on those vehicles have long since started to grow.
Here’s your pearl-clutching moment: Muscle car pricing could easily take a hit as the result of this inevitable demographic transition. If that happens, and Hagerty’s Muscle Car Index has already been trending downward over the past couple of years, these cars will end up being victims of their own success. Values could come down. Maybe a little. Maybe a lot.
But if that happens—and it’s not clear that it will—there is a silver lining.
That silver lining is this: We’ve seen muscle lose value before (in that late ’70s and early ’80s period) but rather than a permanent decline, it was an instrumental shift. Excitement trickled down, and a market eventually blossomed. Today’s market.
Any loss in market value will serve as a new entry point for a different buyer. The path remains the same: Access means use, and use means experience. Experience builds nostalgia, and nostalgia builds value.
“Will there be a slight value drop?” asks Garrett Reed, the man behind the AmericanMuscleHD account on social media. He’s gathered 2.4M followers on Instagram alone by building content in both the original and modern muscle genres. “Potentially. I think it still takes another five to 10 years. The average Baby Boomer age is, what, between 65 and 75?
“I’m curious to know how long the dip’s going to last, but I think you got to wait another at least 10 years before it really happens.”
But, he points out, the cars, and the drive to own them, will continue on.
“The lore has always been there,” says Reed. “It’ll continue to be there, I think. People in their early 40s to my age—I just turned 31—we’ve always known of the cars, whether it be from our uncles, our dads, maybe even our grandparents, or the movies, right? Movies and TV shows, where we’ve always seen the cars. The cars have always been in our line of sight. But they’ve always been out of reach.”
He’s right. Due to the size of the current muscle car market, pop culture has kept the cars relevant, even among youth with more dreams than dollars. Even 2001’s import-focused The Fast and The Furious included a ’68 Dodge Charger as the hero car, and each installment since has included more varied examples of American muscle as co-stars. Over $7B in worldwide box office sales makes it one of the most successful movie franchises in history. As such, a second-gen Charger may be more relevant today as Toretto’s car rather than the General Lee or the bad guy car from Bullitt, but it’s the destination that matters here. Any market dip means more cars will move into reach.
“I think it’s one of those things that once people realize that they can, they get a little bit of pocket change and they can get into it, it’s going to have a resurgence again,” says Reed.
This despite the fact that technology has moved on. Muscle car performance has aged, too. But it’s not just about speed anymore.
“You know, sometimes you don’t want to meet your heroes,” says Reed. “But to that point, you drive it because of the lore, you drive it because of the nostalgia. Yes, everybody and their mom has a Toyota Camry. OK, a Camry could beat a muscle car from 0-60 but it doesn’t have the same aura. A ’70 Challenger pulling up with a cammed 440 or a Hemi? Yeah. Not at all. You’re going to get the looks in a Hemi Challenger or a Big Block Chevelle.
“There’s something to be said about a carbureted Big Block Chevy,” says Reed. “It’s the best thing in the world, the smells, the sounds, the feel, all the things. And that’s what you drive them for. That’s what you own them for.”
Revving Past the Flat Spot
Considering all this, I expect any potential muscle car value drop to be both small and short-lived.
But if we get to that point, it will be a vital step in getting the cars into the hands of new owners—those who may or may not have long dreamed of the moment, and those who are about to learn what drove yesterday’s valuations.
From there, the cars will keep doing what they have always done best: providing a package of bright colors, Coke bottle shapes, raw power and swagger that makes them unique and drives a market.
There’s still some hope for us oldsters (or our disinterested heirs) who’re going to be needing to unload our muscle cars and trade them for walkers before much longer – yay! 😉
Yeah, when the time comes maybe I’ll downsize to a mobility scooter…LS powered, of course.
Now yer talkin’! 😎
I like the cut of your jib sir! Perhaps a new business venture on the horizon😎
LS everything! But if you want reliability 2JZ everything.
You must be really young….learn how to drive a classic with a carb!….and have fun.
Very Well SAID Mr.David SIR!😆😆😆
Look the market will go up and down as each Gen will find their own interest in these cars.
Also today there anre so many uninteresting cars.
What is going to replace many of these cars a Hyundai?
Spot on. 95% of today’s cars are boring, generic and look the same. My guess is that there won’t be a market for average priced Hyundais, Kias, Chevys etc. Remember that the vast majority of muscle and pony cars were mid-priced vehicles – affordable. Today’s vehicles have nothing that makes them memorable. Efficient? Yes. Nothing to make them memorable 10 -30 years from now.
Ya, but some of the 10% is pretty rad. I sold my ‘classic’ and bought a 2021 WRX Limited. Most fun car I have driven in my 50 years of driving….
Yes fun new car. One of few left.
As it gets used up and older it may or may not be easily restored like the more simple cars of the past.
It used to be every model has a performance model. They were easy to build with just an engine swap and rear axle.
Today there few cool cars and few performance models. Many are overly complicated and expensive.
I often wonder years from now how many C7 vettes will be restored or saved. They may be hard to get electronic for them.
I’m still trying to buy headers for my Tesla S !
That’s funny but perhaps a F1 sound track.
I have a set of muffler bearings for those headers.
I agree. I have a 1969 Pontiac Firebird 400/4speed with AC that sold originally for just over $2,850. In today’s dollars that’s a hair under $25,000. I don’t believe you can get a car similarly placed in today’s market for new cars, for $25,000. Makes me wish I had a time machine to travel back and buy a few of those iconic cars and stash them away for the future ‘me’.
That’s because nobody is building a car today with nothing but manual drum brakes, A/C, a heater and an AM Radio. There is a reason modern cars are more expensive. A new Subaru BRZ costs $33k, will blow away your ‘Bird on a track (with only 228hp) and has enormous creature comforts and safety features to boot. Pretty good bargain.
You’re comparing apples and oranges. He doesn’t want to race the BRZ. Pointless comparison.
I was just reading saying the market for 62 to 74 yrs of different models will keep the market prices still or maybe get Higher I have 69 cornett 383 4 speed # And 68 383 RR auto I Have insurance with Hagerty great people who work for your company .
Coronet……..
Due to the driving experience of the stock muscle cars like a friend’s 65 GTO without power steering and drum brakes, these cars are destined to be resto moded by the younger buyers.
No different than what we did to Model A’s and 40’s “fat fenders” just a few decades ago… We were “Resto modding” before we knew the term. And as I’m seeing the trend now, a well done resto-mod is selling for more than a majority of their “number match”/originals… again, just like we saw with StreetRods prices vs their originals.
I’m going to give my extended range Tesla Plaid to my grandson and in sixty years maybe he can get it towed to a car show. Because you sure as he’ll won’t be able to afford a new battery for it.
DANNOGT
As a between the boomer -gen x age 64 muscle cars were over when I got my license what hs kid could afford 5 mpg my dream hs car 1977 Camaro Z28 or K5 blazer than came the 1980s .fox body mustang s mk 2 Supra on my wish list as for 60s muscle cars like but have no desire to own
As a Gen X-er and owner of a car electronics shop, I’m seeing the slow but sure sun-setting of the classic 60s/70s muscle cars as we know it. By and large, the Boomers are finding it less enjoyable (or even possible) to drive and maintain their prized possessions. And finding the right mechanic and the right parts has become more difficult as well. The younger generations still think these cars are cool works of art, but that doesn’t mean they want to OWN them. Hence, the market will eventually lost steam as they run out of buyers.
As others have said, the next generation finds more joy in picking up and modding a JDM import or drifting around the streets in a bug-eyed Subie. The market and our passion continues to evolve, no matter what, and I will continue to enjoy watching it and being a part of it 🙂
To me a big part of owning these cars is doing the work on them and hunting the parts myself. I’m 66 years old and I love my 1967 Plymouth GTX!!!! (The same goes for all my Antique motorcycles)
“But, he points out, the cars, and the drive to own them, will continue on.”
Unfortunately, in some cases….the drive to drive them is surpassed by the drive to invest and let them sit.
For what it’s worth – I get the same number of unsolicited offers to buy my 68 Cougar XR7 now as I did 3 or 5 years ago. At least once a week someone pulls up and asks to buy the car for way over book value.
I have found it my duty to correct writers on the coincidence of the end of the muscle car era and the OPEC oil embargo jacking up fuel prices. Although they happen at the same time they are not related. The Mustang II is good example to illustrate this point. The 4 cylinder Mustang II was already in the show rooms in the fall of 1973 before the spike in oil prices from the oil embargo in October 1973.
If any thing the rising fuel prices preserved some muscle cars because they were retired early before young drivers got their hands on them and drove them to death.
I would like some car values to go down so that I can pickup something interesting to me. I want to drive a car not store it somewhere.
I feel auctions on TV have inflated prices artificially. Too many cars are sold well over what they really are worth in private sales.
I see real junk out there for way too much.
But there are some that can be had right. Most are not the models on the auctions.
Another reason that seventies muscle cars started going up-up-up is that when us boomers started getting jobs in the late seventies and thought about buying a cool car, we realized that new cars of the day—kinda sucked. That drove demand for the “real muscle cars” higher than it might have been if a new car had been something to aspire to. Of course that changed in the nineties, and younger folks are used to the idea that a new car might be more expensive, but it’s probably better, or at least not worse.
I think the real key to classic car demand reflects the values of each generation as they went through their “formative years.” Several years ago there was a popular video called “What you are is what you were when…” It posits that people assimilate their values between the formative teenage years and early 20s. Many Boomers grew up in a car culture during the 60s and 70s and will likely have an affinity for the early muscle cars. However as has been frequently pointed out in these comments sections, this generation is suffering from attrition and mobility problems. Thus demand for the muscle cars of the 60s and 70s will decline and eventually plateau. I think this will especially affect the cars that have been selling just a few years ago for seven figures.
I think you got it correct. Each generation wants the cars that they grew up with. I am a pre-boomer and never had any interest in muscle cars. The 1955 Jaguar XK 150 was my dream car. I now drive a Porsche 356 Cabriolet. Never understood why fast straight line performance sold cars. As us pre-boomers and boomers continue to age out of the collectible hobby the cars of the next generations will become the new collectibles. Our cars from the 1950s and 1960s will continue to be of interest, however, the market will only support the best of them. The value for the best will to be there, however, the volume will decrease.
I unfortunately believe the demand for these cars will fall as there will be so few after Boomers shuffle off who know how to operate a manual transmission and who in the world is going to maintain them? Will unleaded gas still be available?
Remember the number of even muscle cars with manuals was often below 20% anyway. Plus I am hearing a growing cry to bring back manuals among younger enthusiasts. Too many old guys talk like young people aren’t capable of driving manuals, which is garbage.
As a side note, such as Porsche and Shell are to the manufacturing stage to make synthetic gasoline, which also has the advantage of burning cleaner than petroleum based products. All is not lost.
It’s all a mystery to me. Shoe-horn a big V-8 into a compact car. Primitive braking and suspension. Goes fast in a straight line. That’s it. That’s the entire appeal.
I’m a 70 YO Boomer and I agree with you. Most of the ’60s muscle cars were just the common intermediate cars (Chevelles, LeMans, Satellites) with a big engine, very little changes in styling & the chassis. Not that they looked bad, just not enough difference to justify the 6 figure prices for them. At least the pony cars had the unique looks compared to the muscle cars. I really like the late model performance cars, this is really the golden age.
Seat at a desk and type or play games.Thats all a mystery to me
At the time, Most young guys were interested only in 1/4 mile times, It was only as they matured that the cornerning part came into the thought process. Also, If you are any kind of gear head, You can improve on the suspension and or performance. There are numerous products available to address them. What scares me today is not the capabilities of the cars, but the stupidity of the loose nut behind the wheel. In 1969 when I graduated, we lost a class mate when his ’65 GTO hit a telephone pole going too fast around a corner. In 2022, I just missed seeing a moron hit the gas in a curve with his hell cat and blast into a tree killing himself and three other passengers. The main thing that will kill the 60’s car hobby is price. I can’t justify paying 50,000 for toy. As far as matainence on them. If you can afford to drop stupid money on them, you can afford to pay a mechanic.