If you stop and think about it, a lot has happened within the classic car world during the past dozen months.
Consider:
- The Keno Brothers, lifetime car guys but more famous outside the automotive community for their role on PBS’s Antiques Roadshow, launched their own collector car auction company.
- After winning so many best-of-show trophies, Joseph Cassini started a new concours d’elegance, and at a venue better known for electricity than for its use of gasoline or steam.
- After being closed for more than a year, the Petersen Automotive Museum reopened.
- And so did the Skydome at the National Corvette Museum, where a sinkhole swallowed eight cars in 2014.
- George Barris and Margaret Dunning were among those in the classic car community who passed on during 2015.
- Sotheby’s, a publicly held fine art and antiques auction house, took a 25 percent equity in RM Auctions.
And the list goes on. Starting tomorrow, the staff here at Classic Car News will share our annual countdown of what we consider to be the top 10 collector car stories of the year 2015. But before we launch that series, we wanted to review some of the stories that we followed but that didn’t quite make our top-10 list:
- The amazing collection of concept and production cars designed by the likes of Michelotti, Scaglione, Giugiaro, Gandini and others while they worked for Italian coachbuilder Bertone were sold as part of the company’s bankruptcy.
- The growth of online bidding at classic car auctions emerged as a serious option during 2015. Online bidding was a factor in the Keno Brothers’ launching their company, while Berlin-based Auctionata built its business around Internet bidding.
- Hagerty, the world’s largest insurer of classic cars, also tracks the value of those cars, and in 2015 launched the Hagerty Market Rating, which each month uses 15 proprietary data points to take the pulse of the classic car marketplace and, unbound by HIPAA (the rules that keep your medical records private), shares that information with the entire community.
- Cross-country drives in classic cars received a boost when the Historic Vehicle Association duplicated Edsel Ford’s 1915 drive from Detroit to San Francisco in a Model T. The Le May museum has announced that near the end of this month, it will take three 1960s vintage cars from its collection and drive them from Tacoma through whatever weather that winter offers to Detroit for the North American International Auto Show.
We also note that on January 1, 2016, we will publish a list of those automotive luminaries who were gone but not forgotten during the previous year.
