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Posted by D. Sherman on Wednesday, February 13, 2008 at 11:30:08 :
In Reply to: Re: Average age of Power Wagon enthusiasts posted by Steve Elliot on Wednesday, February 13, 2008 at 10:37:21 :
I'm 48. Don't know if that's old or young. I feel old when the young guys say, "Cool old truck!" and they're referring to my 67 Chevy 1/2-ton. I remember when my grandpa bought that truck new from Marson's Garage in Molalla, Oregon. At the time, I thought it looked very modern and streamlined compared to his old '57 Chevy pickup. At least around here, the youngsters really like the FFPWs, even if they've never seen one before. But I agree they're getting too scarce and too expensive for your average 20 year old. Those guys are usually fixing up their Toyota pickups. One good old-fashioned hard-working kid I know got a beater Mazda pickup cheap and has been putting a huge amount of time and effort into fixing it up. I can't imagine putting all that work into a Mazda.
I have a theory that the most valuable old vehicles, outside of the museum pieces, are the ones that were new when the people who are now reaching the wealthiest years of their lives were children. People like to restore what they remember from their childhood. During the years when some class of vehicles are in their peak of desirability, people scour the countryside, buying every one they can find and restoring even the worst basket cases. After the peak of interest in that type of vehicle passes, the prices of even the restored ones decline or at least don't rise as fast as inflation. There may be no more original unrestored barn finds left, but you can buy one that somebody else has done all the work on pretty reasonably. Look at pre-1930 automobiles. Unless they're real show-winners, they're not all that expensive considering how old they are and how much work somebody put into them. In 2040, when the 50-year-olds are lovingly restoring a 1985 Datsun pickup just like their grandpa had, FFPWs might be about like Model A's are today -- a historical novelty but not anything anybody has any emotional connection to, and therefor not anything that's worth a whole lot of money. Of course by 2040 there may not even be any gasoline, in which case there's not much point to restoring any truck.
All in all, young men who are mechanically inclined seem to appreciate any "cool old truck", but the problem is that there are very few these days who have any interest in working on anything, probably because we've already lost the great mechanical generation and even their dads (if they even have a dad, since most are being raised by single moms) never get their hands dirty. Once we have a whole society where working on machinery at home is rare, I don't know how we'll ever go back, especially when the clean-handed majority supports things like zoning codes that prohibit working on vehicles at home or keeping non-running vehicles, and laws like the new EPA regs banning the sale of auto paint to non-professionals. I guess their vision for our future economy is that we'll all make so much money in the "service industry" writing computer programs, shuffling insurance and mortgage paperwork, waiting tables and stocking shelves, and producing entertainment, that we'll just be happy to pay the Chinese to make stuff for us and the Mexicans to fix it. Meanwhile, those who used to have some faint desire to actually make something can watch some TV show where other people in some fantasy garage make things.
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