Australians’ love affair with classic cars is alive and well with collectable automobiles being declared the favourite ‘passion investment’ for Australia’s wealthy.
According to ‘Knight Frank’s 2024 Wealth Report Attitudes Survey’, classic cars are the top passion investment for Australian ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs), with 61 per cent choosing them ahead of art (58 per cent) and wine (48 per cent).
"This isn’t just a trend, we’ve seen this passion over the last eight to 10 years consistently at our auctions; it’s a statement of Australia’s motoring history,” chief operations officer for Lloyds Auctions, Lee Hames, said.
While art led global luxury asset growth in 2023, Australians have shown that when it comes to their passion, nothing beats the roar of a V8 and the smell of petrol.
“Knight Frank’s data confirms what we see every month: Australians don’t just love these cars; they see them as the most meaningful assets to purchase,” Hames said.
Lloyds Auctions offered a line-up of Australian classic cars in its annual Grand Carmada auction last weekend, proving just how strong the appetite is for Aussie automotive icons.
One of the headline acts was the very last Holden Clubsport off the production line – a 2017 HSV Clubsport R8 VF 30th Anniversary edition with just 753 kilometres on the clock. It was fresh from the factory and never displayed in a dealership.
“This is more than a car, it’s the full stop on a chapter of Australian motoring history,” Hames said.
“With extremely low kilometres and untouched in original condition, this is a collector’s dream, a factory-fresh time capsule that embodies Holden’s performance legacy.”
In 2021, Lloyds made national headlines by selling the ‘last ever’ Holden built in Australia for a striking $750,000.
Many of the cars featured in the auction once sold new from anywhere between $4,000 to $6,000 off the showroom floor, but bidding surged into the hundreds of thousands, with some lots fetching close to seven figures. It’s a dramatic illustration of how tastes, scarcity and collectability have transformed Aussie classics into high-value assets.
Some of the iconic vehicles up for auction last weekend included:
- A matching-numbers Ford Falcon Phase 2, carrying the torch for the eternal Holden–Ford rivalry (Phase III Falcons have achieved $1.5M+ in previous Lloyds auctions).
- The record-breaking Bathurst Monaro that sold for over $300,000 in 2017, now tipped to set a new benchmark eight years later.
- A genuine matching number Torana A9X already at a $170,000 bid price which has seen it kept as part of a private collection for over 30 years and 1 of only 405 A9X’s ever produced.