We've had a lot of new wheels around the house lately, but the newest ones aren't attached to Danger Girl's Corvette or my ZX-14R; they're attached to a BMX bike. Readers of a certain age will remember the original Haro BMX bikes from the mid-Eighties. Well, they've done a series of reissues that look just like the ones sold from 1983 to 1987, except they're built to modern standards of durability. They're also a bit bigger, which is helpful for middle-aged riders who can't fold themselves into the pretzel-style position required for a six-foot-two man to ride an Eighties BMX.

That last part was a key part of my purchase decision. I didn't want to spend a thousand dollars or more on a bike that I couldn't use, no matter how nice it would look in my office. So far I've been to a skatepark a grand total of twice in a month. Given that I used to ride every night after work until 10PM or so, this ain't much. But it's critical for me to have the option to go ride it when I want to.

Most of the investment-grade collector cars out there never leave their parking spot. When they do leave, it's for a carefully-curated snow-globe environment like Amelia Island or the Monterey Historics. But if you were to tell their owners that they were not permitted to drive them on a public road, under any circumstances, how do you think they'd react? And how would that change the way they feel about those cars?

I don't spend a lot of time worrying about autonomous cars and the day that I won't be permitted to drive a regular gasoline-powered Viper or 911 or Hyundai Accent on the public roads. Chances are that we've got another 20 years or so of solid usability for self-driven vehicles powered by fossil-fuel combustion. By the time the autonomous apocalypse swallows us entirely, I'll be of an age when many people give up driving themselves anyway. Not my problem.

But I suspect that I would feel differently if I owned a substantial stock of vehicles that were being kept for collector- or investment-related purposes. At that point, I'd be concerned about my retirement and whether or not anybody's going to want to buy a '73 Carrera RS that has no possible purpose other than as a 2400-pound paperweight.

Chances are, we've got another 20 years or so of vehicles powered by fossil-fuel combustion.

You might think I'm making too much of this. After all, it will probably be possible to extract and refine some amount of fossil fuel until the end of human history. Also, given enough effort and energy, it's possible to make gasoline from corn, garbage, or plain tap water. If you're willing to pay $50 a gallon in today's money for 93 octane, there will always be a way to get it. And if you can afford to pay a few million bucks for a Porsche 962 or Yenko Camaro, the cost of fuel is the least worrisome item on your balance sheet. Can't you just hire out a racetrack and enjoy your car in private, before having the autonomous transport truck pick it up and take it back to your warehouse?

I'm afraid that it might not be that simple. When the man on the street has no ability whatsoever to purchase a traditional car, the political pressure against anybody having one is going to swell like one of Wagner's middle passages, and it's going to come from everywhere. History shows that human beings are remarkably unconcerned about preserving the rights and privileges of other people when those same rights and privileges are not available to them. We could be in the world of Rush's "Red Barchetta" pretty dammed quickly.

What about the racetracks? You think that the politically-active people of central California are going to permit Laguna Seca to exist after autonomous-vehicle legislation turns it into a private playground for the insanely rich? Nah. Somebody's going to point out that you could make a great set of mountain bike trails out of that land, and that mountain bikes are much better for the environment than original aluminum-bodied Shelby 427 Cobras are.

But even if none of that stuff happens—even if the racetracks stay open and the crafty folks at SEMA get the government to legislate some sort of permanent off-road-only exemption for collector vehicles—you're still facing a central problem: Who is going to buy your collector car when you need to sell it? A hundred years from now, what percentage of successful middle-aged people will have any interest whatsoever in collecting vehicles that were obsolete decades before their birth?

We're already seeing a precursor of this phenomenon with pre-war vehicles. I recently had a friend whose mother died and left him a perfectly restored 1932 Dodge. She'd put 60 grand into the car. The best offer he got for it was about $10,000. If he'd wanted to trade it straight-up for a 15-year-old Honda Accord, I'm not sure he'd get any takers. There's not much market for a car that can't keep up with modern traffic and which requires a lot of care to keep going. But he considered himself lucky to sell it at $10,000 because he concluded, rightly, that it would be worth even less if he kept it a few years.

Don't get me wrong. The Porsche 917K that won LeMans will always be worth real money to someone, as will historically-significant examples of hugely important names like Corvette, Mustang, or Ferrari. But the bulk of the collector-car iceberg isn't established-provenance champion racers in a billionaire's heated underground enclosure; it's semi-valuable stuff living behind the third door of some retired drywall contractor's Florida garage. The moment those guys can't take their Roadrunners or Berlinetta Boxers out on a Friday night—even if that's something they haven't gotten around to doing in years—the value of those vehicles will drop to slightly above scrap.

Which brings me to my air-cooled 911. I'm saving it for my son, who is eight and a half years away from getting his license. Should I sell it and put the money in an account for him? Or should I do the romantic thing and keep it ready for the moment that he can drive to prom night? What if he winds up not caring about it at all? What if, when he comes to me 30 years from now to talk about my estate planning, what really piques his interest is the stack of old and dusty, but very much legal and usable, bicycles in the basement?

Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column,, runs twice a week.

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