I attended Preview Day last Sunday at the Barrett-Jackson Car Auction. According to my Fitbit, we walked at total of five miles as we examined many of the thousands of cars in the carnivallike atmosphere of the massive WestWorld of Scottsdale campus. My favorite vehicle was a Unimog formerly owned by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Originally built in 1977 for industrial/agricultural purposes, Arnold had it restored, modified, and upgraded in 2012. I remember when he got it. He did not keep it for long nor drive it much. A subsequent collector sold the truck this week for $220,000 with only 2,674 miles on the odometer.
My second favorite vehicle was a 1956 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing Coupe. It sold for a whopping $3,410,000! Not all cars at Barrett-Jackson are hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Actually, most of the cars are within reach of Middle America. Barrett-Jackson makes it easy to get a line of credit and a bidder’s badge so everyone can play a rich man’s game.
As I admired myriad vehicles, I could not help but think of running costs. Consider how much a guy like Jay Leno spends to restore, store, insure, and maintain his cars. Well, guys like him can afford all that without a painful impact on their finances. For the average Joe, however, who walks away from Barrett-Jackson with the keys to a cool car, he’d better brace himself for running costs. Otherwise, he might return a few years later as a seller looking to mitigate losses rather than as a starry-eyed buyer looking to fulfill a dream.
Automobile running costs were triggered in my mind at Barrett-Jackson this year because in 2023 we got walloped with them. We spent $15,500 on running costs inclusive of registration, insurance, and maintenance on two vehicles. $12,500 of that was spent on maintaining my twenty-two year old truck. For 2024, our insurance rate increased 20%, and I already have several thousand dollars of maintenance coming up. Ugh.
I have every service record for my truck dating back to 2002 when it left the Magna Steyer factory in Graz, Austria where it was hand-built. At some point, I’m going to tally up the total service costs. That’ll be interesting. I’m curious about the total cost, and moreover, the average annual cost smoothed out over a couple decades. I recently made a spreadsheet of dollar amounts we have put into maintaining and upgrading our house over roughly the same time frame. I found that to be enlightening, but that is another story!
With Love,
P. Gustav Mueller, author of The Present