Buying a car with the express intent of keeping the miles low is perhaps the single worst investment anyone can make. Collector cars have not proven to appreciate significantly, and regular daily-driver-grade NPC-ass traffic cars like this 2009 Dodge Challenger SRT-8 definitely aren’t worth the space they take up in your garage while you’re not driving it. Someone purchased this car brand new in 2009 for $42,640, and across three different owners, it has been insured, stored, and kept up for 16 years. Now it’s your turn.
If the buyer had instead invested that money in a typical S&P 500 account, that Dodge Challenger’s worth of cash would now have a value of around $400,000.
There’s no long-term investment money to be made on a modern car from any mainstream automaker. You’re going to lose out every time when you factor in the extra costs that keeping a car requires, and you’ll lose tenfold when you consider the opportunity cost of your spent capital. This car was such a silly “investment” for someone because they not only didn’t make any money on it, they didn’t get to enjoy driving it, and they didn’t even have something pretty to look at. Why bother?
More to the point, what are you going to do with a fifteen-year-old car that you can’t even drive? According to the seller, this car wears its original tires, the original battery has never been replaced, and the gasoline was not drained from the system for storage (but don’t worry, it’s been stabilized). What a joke, this car is a pile of problems waiting to happen if you wanted to add any miles to the odometer, and downright unsafe for the streets on these old-ass tires.
If you’re a big fan of throwing good money after bad, you could go bid on this one-mile monstrosity on Bring A Trailer today. As of this writing the auction has been bid up to $19,009 with six days left, and only a fool would spend a dollar more. I really wish you wouldn’t.