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Predicting which cars will achieve classic status five or 10 years from now is a dark and uncertain art.
One of the surest indicators of a nailed-on future classic for many years was motorsport pedigree - think what success on the race track did for the likes of the Porsche 911 2.7 RS and BMW E30 M3 - but in more recent times it’s become less of a factor.
Homologation regulations aren’t what they once were, after all, and manufacturers are no longer obliged to build road-going facsimiles of their competition machines. So which factors do apply?
Scarcity, for one, and reputation for another. If a car is rare and widely reckoned to be one of the best of its type to drive, it’ll probably reach classic status. Beauty is another factor and so too is significance; a car that changed the game in its sector is bound to be held in high regard for years to come.
Every one of the cars we’re highlighting here meets at least one of those criteria, if not two or three. There is a strong possibility that many of them will rise in value over the coming years, but we haven’t let that be our motivating factor. Instead, we’ve concentrated on cars that are great to drive or a pleasure to own. Now is the time to bag yourself a copper-bottomed future classic. We’ve split them into price ranges to make your life easier:
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£3000-£5500
Fiat Panda 100HP (2006-2010)
Whoever would have thought there was a vibrant baby hot hatch hiding away in the cheerfully upright Panda? Sitting a little closer to the road on 15-inch wheels that filled their arches perfectly, the 100HP looks poised and purposeful without being fussy or overwrought. More importantly, though, it’s a right old hoot to drive.
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Fiat Panda 100HP (2006-2010) - interior
Running stiffer springs than a ready salted Panda, the salt and vinegar 100HP does tend to skip and pogo along the road, but with the tyres howling and the 1.4-litre motor singing its song that bouncy ride just seems to make sense. This is a fizzy, energetic sort of car.
The 100HP never sold in huge numbers during its four-year life, which means it has scarcity on its side, which will help values greatly in the future. It certainly looks like prices are on the up here, and the cheapest examples start at around £1500, rising to £5000 for slightly cleaner cars.
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Suzuki Swift Sport (2005-2012)
With its smily face and dinky proportions the Swift Sport is as cute as a puppy wearing a bow. In fact it is disarmingly sweet to look at, which simply makes its propensity for snap lift-off oversteer all the more alarming.
This charming little hatchback will have you off the road if you aren’t paying attention. Of course, that pointy handling balance is exactly what makes it so much fun to pedal along. The 1.6-litre engine is a ripper, if not exactly a powerhouse, and the gearshift short and direct.
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Suzuki Swift Sport (2005-2012) - interior
The Swift Sport starts at around £2000 today; though you’ll be lucky to nick one with fewer than 100,000 miles for that. It’ll be revered in years to come because it was among the last of the old-school hot hatches that delivered their thrills not through sheer performance, but through feisty dynamics.
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Audi TT (1998-2006)
Being not much more than a reclothed VW Golf the Audi TT was never going to set new standards in the coupé sector for outright driving fun. Instead, it changed the coupé game with its ultra-cool and minimalist cabin, as well as its show-stopping Bauhaus exterior design.
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Audi TT (1998-2006) - interior
Tatty, high mileage cars start from £950, while stretching closer to £5000 will afford an immaculate example with the muscular 225bhp 1.8-litre motor.
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Toyota MR2 Mk3 (1999-2007)
For £10000 you can buy the very best Mk3 MR2 there is; but even for £2000, you'll get a solid example, and there are plenty around to suit every budget in between. That gets you one of the most exciting sports cars of its time, too; firmer and sharper than an MX-5, but more usable and easier to live with than an Elise.
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Toyota MR2 Mk3 (1999-2007) - interior
A perfect balance, in other words. Prices can only go one way from here.
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Ford Puma (1997-2002)
It may be a humble Ford Fiesta underneath its sharp, feline bodywork, but the Puma is actually a huge amount of fun to drive thanks to a sweet chassis, incisive steering and eager 1.7-litre engine.
Great swathes of the remaining Puma population are wiped out each year by that most virulent of automotive diseases, rust.
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Ford Puma (1997-2002) - interior
You’ll pick up a nice Puma for as little as £1000 and there is already evidence of low-mileage, rust-free cars, starting to climb in value.
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£3500-£23000
Porsche Boxster 986 (1996-2004)
When the original Boxster arrived in the mid-Nineties many people weren’t sure what to make of it.
For one thing it appeared to be styled with two front ends, and for another, it was so clearly subordinate to Porsche’s flagship sports car, the 911, in every conceivable way that image-conscious buyers didn’t want to be seen anywhere near it.
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Porsche Boxster 986 (1996-2004) - interior
It was their loss, of course, because the Boxster was blindingly good to drive with communicative steering, a poised and perfectly balanced chassis and zesty flat-six engines.
Just £5000 will buy you a tidy Boxster today, and at that price you’ll find a car with the 2.7-litre engine that’s far preferable to the slightly asthmatic 2.5. In the fullness of time we’ll look back on the Boxster as the car that saved Porsche and propelled it towards global dominance.
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VW Phaeton (2002-2006)
Anybody with even the faintest sense of the automotive market could have worked out that a Volkswagen luxury car would be a dismal flop. Plenty of people at Volkswagen probably knew it would be as well, but spearheaded by the mercurial Ferdinand Piëch the Phaeton was put into production in 2002 anyway. Sales were heroically slow, but an updated model remained on Volkswagen’s price lists up until 2016.
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VW Phaeton (2002-2006) - interior
The most desirable engines were the 4.2-litre V8 and 6.0-litre W12, both of them petrol, although you’ll search high and low before you find either for sale at any price.
If you get lucky you might unearth a 3.2-litre V6 petrol for less than £2000, but the vast majority at this money are 3-litre V6 diesels. As fine an example of corporate folly as you’ll find anywhere.
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Citroën C6 (2005-2012)
Citroën built its reputation on cars that were strange and non-conformist. For a long time the French company existed in its own little bubble, doing things its own way. The likes of the 2CV, DS, XM, BX and many others were proper oddballs.
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Citroën C6 (2005-2012) - interior
The C6 - yours now for £4000 - was among the very last of the bizarro Citroëns; its range today is nothing like as quirky as it once was.
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BMW Z4 Coupé (2006-2009)
What is it that makes the Z4 Coupé so much more alluring than the roadster? Perhaps it’s a combination of rarity - just nine per cent of Z4s were Coupés - and the sleek, mini-supercar fastback styling.
Viewed from the rear three-quarters the Z4 Coupé remains one of BMW’s prettiest modern designs. Naturally, the Z4M Coupé is an even surer bet for classic status somewhere down the line, but even the leggiest cars command £19,000 or so.
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BMW Z4 Coupé (2006-2009) - interior
The 3.0si may not be a bells-and-whistles M-car and, yes, it does lack 75bhp compared to the Z4M, but when prices start at just £4000, do you really care? Lower mileage cars start at around £11,000 and, notoriously weak rear springs aside, there isn’t too much to look out for. Just make sure you fit; the cabin is comically tight.
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Renault Avantime (2001-2003)
Very few car manufacturers can rival Renault in the noble discipline of building quirky, oddball cars. At least, that was true 15 or 20 years ago when the French company seemed to sign off whatever hair-brained concepts its - presumably very drunk - product planners could dream up.
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Renault Avantime (2001-2003) - interior
The Clio V6, the Vel Satis and the Avantime quasi-MPV would have been killed off by anyone else. £4000 would normally get you a UK Avantime which has seen lots of use, but you'll need to find it first...
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£5000-£10,000:
Subaru Impreza 2000 Turbo (1994-2000)
There is so much to enjoy about this most humble of high performance Subaru Imprezas, notably its punchy turbo performance, warbling boxer soundtrack and that rangey, fluid suspension that works so beautifully on bumpy UK roads.
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Subaru Impreza 2000 Turbo (1994-2000)
The trouble is, you’ll search far and wide before you find a car that hasn’t been messed about with. Indeed, originality is exactly what’ll make the Impreza Turbo a desirable car in years to come.
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Porsche 944 (1982-1991)
At the ripe old age of 39, the Porsche 944 is already well on its way to being a classic, but values are only just beginning to creep upwards. Whereas contemporary 911s can fetch well beyond £60,000 today a 944 can be picked up for just a fraction of that.
In fact, for around £5,000 you’ll find a late-model 944 S - which had the more powerful, 190bhp version of the 2.5-litre four-pot - with not much more than 100,000 miles behind it.
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Porsche 944 (1982-1991) - interior
Values will never set off in pursuit of those stratospheric 911 prices, but they will continue to nudge along. What’s much more important is that the 944 will always be a sweet and rewarding car to drive. Mostly, that’s down to the transaxle layout, which gives the 944 its near-perfect chassis balance.
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Honda Accord Type R (1998-2002)
I'm amazed that Honda's deliciously nutty Accord Type R isn't already attracting prices well north of £10k - but even a nice one will attract little more than £5000. You certainly won't find many other modern four-door saloons with firecracker atmo VTEC engines, yet that offer room for the family.
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Honda Accord Type R (1998-2002) - interior
Superb shift quality, lovely steering, balanced and entertaining handling. And if scarcity's any guide of future classic status, this is one to watch: from a peak of almost 2000 examples at the beginning of the noughties, little more than 500 now remain.
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Land Rover Defender (1982-2016)
A Defender is as sure a place to put your money as bricks and mortar. It’s one of those cult cars that seems to command much higher values than rational common sense suggests it should.
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Land Rover Defender (1982-2016) - interior
Defenders are slow and noisy and uncomfortable and hopelessly old fashioned, but they’re adored nonetheless and, accordingly, values are rising. Expect to pay upwards of £7000 for a Defender 90 and even more for the burly 130.
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£11,000-£21,000
Mercedes SL55 AMG (2002-2008)
It is very easy to be sniffy about the SL. It’s much less a sports car and more a laid back cruiser, after all, but the full AMG treatment did unearth a hidden wild side.
The SL55 AMG’s near-500bhp supercharged V8 also happens to sound like a low flying Spitfire, which goes a long way to vanquishing the SL’s well-groomed boulevardier image.
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Mercedes SL55 AMG (2002-2008) - interior
With a folding hardtop roof and Active Body Control suspension the SL55 is by no means a simple car. In fact, perished seals on earlier models mean the roof can allow water to leak into the boot, while the trick suspension can go wrong and chuck up nasty bills.
Those sorts of issues have suppressed SL55 values and they may even prevent them from climbing in years to come. The thunderous soundtrack will keep your mind off all of that, though.
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Volvo 850 T5-R Estate (1995-1996)
The sight of a boxy, square-edged Volvo 850 estate leaping across kerbs on a race track was so strange and incongruous that it remains one of touring car racing’s most iconic motifs.
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Volvo 850 T5-R Estate (1995-1996) - interior
The road-going 850 T5-R will always be a sought after model simply for that association, even though the mechanical similarity between the two cars was close to negligible; the T5-R, after all, was no homologation special.
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Ford Focus RS Mk1 (2002-2003)
The original Focus RS arguably changed the hot hatch game more than any other car before or since. It was the first car of its type to be engineered with the same precision, attention to detail and track-proven hardware as a sports car.
In fact, the Focus RS reset our expectations for the sector: if a modern-day hot hatch isn’t engineered to the same exacting standards, we write it off immediately.
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Ford Focus RS Mk1 (2002-2003) - interior
As well as being great to look at the Focus RS is thrilling to drive, albeit in a white-knuckle sort of way. The punchy turbocharged performance and tightly-wound Quaife limited-slip differential give it huge performance, but a ragged edge, too.
Factory-specification cars will one day shoot up in value, just as the more common Escort RS Cosworth has done. Today, a clean example costs £24,000.
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Alfa Romeo 164 Q4 (1993-1998)
Styled by Pininfarina - apparently with judicious use of rulers and set squares - the 164 was Italy’s answer to the BMW 5 Series.
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Alfa Romeo 164 Q4 (1993-1998) - interior
The V6-powered, four-wheel drive Q4 version that arrived in 1993 wasn’t exactly a rival to the 311bhp M5 of the time, but with 229bhp the Alfa was no slouch.
The car is extremely rare these days, as such there is only one available for sale in UK at £9,995.
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BMW E39 M5 (1998-2003)
In this price bracket, you're looking at an E39 M5 approaching, possibly exceeding, 100,000 miles, but that needn't put you off. A rebuilt VANOS variable valve timing system and rock-solid service history should see you straight.
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BMW E39 M5 (1998-2003) - interior
Then you can look forward to enjoying arguably the best M5 of the lot – manual ’box, 400bhp V8 and a chassis that's almost as happy to play B-road stormer as it is grand tourer. Don't let the understated coachwork fool you into thinking this isn't a massively characterful super-saloon.
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Missed the boat - sorry, but you're too late for this lot:
During the last five or six years, classic car values have shot up like ash spewed from a volcano. At the top end of the market, multi-millionaires are buying up seven-figure classics as investments, while cars that were once within reach of us mere mortals are now eye-wateringly expensive. For these five cars, you’ve missed the boat.
BMW M3 CSL E46 (2003)
At £58,500 the M3 CSL seemed painfully expensive when it was new and in the years immediately after its 2003 launch values dropped to around £25,000. Today, a leggy car is worth £75,000 and concours condition examples sell for twice that.
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Porsche 911 2.7 RS (1973)
Air-cooled 911s have posted astonishing increases in value. The most celebrated 911 of them all, the 1973 2.7 RS, has risen in value ten-fold in 15 years and is now worth at least £600,000, if not closer to £1m.
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Ford Escort RS Cosworth (1992-1996)
Having dropped as low as £10,000 several years ago the turbocharged Cossie has since rocketed in value. You’ll be looking at around £52,000 for an entry-level car, while to secure the very best examples you'll need a staggering £60,000.
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Honda NSX (1990-2005)
Just a few years ago Honda’s answer to the Ferrari 355 looked decidedly undervalued at around £20,000, but today you’ll pay a minimum of £60,000. The ultra-rare and highly sought-after NSX-R, meanwhile, commands more than three times that.
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Peugeot 205 GTi (1984-1994)
For many years Peugeot’s iconic hot hatch traded hands for mere three-figure sums. When enthusiasts who coveted the GTi in their youth eventually found themselves with some disposable income, though, demand skyrocketed and so did values. You’ll pay over £10,000 now for most.
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Ones to watch:
If the cars highlighted are good bets to achieve classic status a few years from now, which cars will do the same in 20 years? That’s even harder to predict, of course, and some might go through a period of being unloved before the market switches on to them. These models will be worth keeping an eye on, though:
Ford Fiesta ST (2013-2017)
Pound for pound the Mk7 Fiesta ST is one of the most enjoyable performance cars of recent years. Its chassis is supremely well-resolved, the controls weighted perfectly and it’s plenty quick enough. One of the hot hatch greats.
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Toyota GT86 (2012-present)
With the compact, rear-wheel drive GT86, Toyota - as well as Subaru with its own version, the BRZ - hit the reset button for the sports coupé sector. The GT86 prioritises fun and engagement over outright performance and is all the better for it.
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Aston Martin V8 Vantage (2005-2017)
The previous V8 Vantage may be the most common Aston Martin ever, but it’s also the last of a breed. When we all commute to work in electric cars we’ll want to keep a normally-aspirated V8 in the garage, though it will not be a cheap experience.
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BMW M3 E92 (2007-2013)
The M3 that came before it, the E46, is beginning to rise in value and you can bet the E92 will do the same thing one day. Its 4.0-litre V8 is such a masterpiece that demand will never falter.
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Nissan GT-R (2008-present)
There aren’t very many cars that can claim to have conquered the world, but the R35 Nissan GT-R certainly did. It’ll go out of production soon and values will steadily drop until, years from now, they’ll begin to climb again.
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Classic car insurance:
Your car doesn’t need to be a pristine 1960s Ferrari for it to qualify for classic car insurance. In fact, the only bars to entry (as a general rule of thumb) are that it should be more than 15 years old and worth at least £15,000.
Classic car insurance policies assume occasional rather than frequent use. They’ll probably impose mileage restrictions, therefore, but as a result they generally work out cheaper than conventional insurance policies.
High street insurers will often have classic car policies of their own, but most owners will be better served by smaller, independent specialists, such as Footman James. It’s important to agree a fair value for the car in question with your insurer so that if the worst should happen there’ll be no quibbling over the size of the payout. After all, it’s far trickier to pin down the value of a rare or unusual classic car than it is a modern motor.
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Owners’ clubs:
The key to buying and running a classic car of any type, age or value is arming yourself with as much knowledge as possible. You’ll want to know exactly what can go wrong with a given car, how to tell if that car is moments away from a catastrophic meltdown and what you need to do to fix it. You’ll find scores of information for any car online, but no amount of Googling will set you up quite like joining an owners’ club.
They’re not just a source of wisdom and expertise, though. Through group buying owners’ clubs very often save their members money on things like tyres and spare parts, and you may even find discounts on insurance. Apart from all of that owners’ clubs also organise meets and trackdays and, when your time with your classic car is up, you’ll probably find it’s the best way to locate a good home for it, too.
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Will SUVs ever be Classics?
The Sports Utility Vehicle is the dominant force in the new car market, but will it yield the classics of the future? At first glance it seems unlikely – for all their qualities, most SUVs lack the character and charisma that are the essence of ‘classic’ status.
That said, the pioneers of the genre are already bona fide classics – and in some cases blue-chip investments. Take the Range Rover (pictured), the founder of a dynasty of road-biased off-roaders: two-doors are the hottest property on the classic market, with minters changing hands for well north of £100k and JLR tackling bespoke rebuilds via its Classic Works scheme.
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Will SUVs ever be Classics?
It will be interesting to see whether the Urus follows in the – very wide – wheeltracks of its Lamborghini forebear, the LM002. Instead of borrowing from a family parts bin, that bonkers machine was Countach-powered and hyper-rare, and now more than £250k.
Back to today, and a straw poll did yield a couple of candidates.
The limited-edition Range Rover SV Coupé (pictured) looked a cert for collectability, but sadly it was axed at the last moment. And we can see Alfisti in 2038 getting hot under the collar about a Stelvio Cloverleaf. As for crossovers, it’s hard to see any of the current crop being truly cherished, but then who guessed we’d look back on the Matra Rancho so fondly 40 years later…
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