Bring a Trailer — Blog

The 200,000+ miles Type R

As I was browsing the daily Bring a Trailer newsletter yesterday, I noticed a 2001 Acura Integra Type R got sold for a relatively measly $16,000. My first thought was the car must’ve got some miles on it, because clean samples of the legendary Type R machine have ranged from the $30,000s all the way to $70,000s for the absolute best example. Interested, I clicked on the auction, and turns out that particular car has over 200,000 miles on it. That means someone has put that many miles on an Integra Type R, a car more famous for its tendency to get stolen than its fabulous FWD handling prowess.

What an inspiration, and it does bring a smile to my face.

I’ve always advocated for putting miles on our fun cars: they are effectively useless being sat in garages. It’s sad that some people see sports cars as investments, that the best way to preserve a car’s value is to store it and keep it shiny. Therefore I take some schadenfreude glee in seeing the recent trend of Porsche GT cars dipping in value: lots of super low miles, practically brand-nw GT3 and GT2s are being sold on Bring a Trailer for $15,000 to $20,000 in depreciation, instead of the well above MSRP levels they were trading just one year ago.

You thought you were going to make some money on that Cayman GT4, didn’t you Squidward?

Porsche really cratered the secondary market by upping production of GT cars tremendously in recent years, because the brilliant engineers at Weissach want these cars to be driven and used, rather than treated as gold bars to be traded for gains. I have to give the same kudos to McLaren: the company seems bent on making great cars, with zero regard for the resale value of its pass models. Let’s leave the wiping with baby diapers and haggling over the value of options to Ferrari owners. The rest of us will keep on driving.

My own 991 GT3 is about to cross the 30,000 mile mark soon, and I only hope I’ll get to take it through 100,000 miles and beyond.

There might truly be a (coronavirus) emergency soon.

PSA: cars are meant to be driven

I don’t have much of a morning routine, other than laying on the bed for at least an hour (I work a late shift) while browsing on the phone. It begs the question: what did we do before the smartphone was invented? Go back to sleep, probably.

Amongst the places I visit during my hour of sleuthing is the daily Bring a Trailer newsletter. In it is a list of auctions that are set to expire that day, and another list that shows the latest cars put up on the block. I can easily lose many hours looking at each auction page, reading through the descriptions and comments. It’s especially fun when peculiar and interesting cars come up for sale, a great way to learn about models I wouldn’t otherwise have known existed.

Some of the cars up for auction can also be immensely frustrating. Case in point, from yesterday’s newsletter this particular gem of an Acura NSX started accepting bids:

An absolutely pristine 1994 model with only 187 miles on it. Supposedly a super-rich car collector bought it (and many, many other cars) new and stuck it in a climate-controlled warehouse forever. This particular NSX, for all intents and purposes, was never driven.

That is just the worse kind of sadness for a car enthusiast.

I noticeably groaned as soon as I opened the auction page; what a great shame such a legendary car didn’t get driven, and likely won’t ever be driven. Indeed, for those looking for the most sparkling sample of a first-generation NSX, this one is the ticket, but it’s going to be appropriately expensive due to the insanely low mileage count. The buyer of this car isn’t wont to put miles on it because the depreciation will be catastrophic. This NSX is worth so much because of the low miles, so each addition mile put on it will have exponential consequences to its value.

The auction winner will simply stuff the car in his own garage until another point in time in the future, where the car will be sold again for even more money. Car as an investment, nail on chalkboard to my ears.

Ideally, the person who buy this will not care about depreciation and simply drive it until it’s mechanically infeasible. That’s what cars are meant for, and the route I would go if I had the sufficient resources to bid on this NSX.

But then if I were looking to buy an NSX to drive, the smarter play would be to purchase a nice sample with 30K-40K miles: it’d cost significantly less money, and the car will be more mechanically sound. A 25-year old car that have sat since new – with zero service records – is going to require an enormous amount of maintenance done before its viable for the road. Think of all the perished rubber and gaskets that haven’t seen a heat-cycle in decades.

Obviously, how a man uses his cars or spend his money is none of my concern, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be disappointed in seeing cars not being use as its intended function.