Buy What You Love, Pay What You Should
Blogs
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400 Miles in a Porsche Turbo
Our 2001 Porsche 911 Turbo arrived a week ago, and as soon as I was able to wrestle it away from my 23-year-old daughter Alex, I started scouting out reasons to take a road trip. An email announcing “Deadly by Nature: Venom and Poison” caught my eye. It was a new exhibit at the…
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Jim’s Blog: Time to Buy or Time to Sell?
Scottsdale 2015 is in the books, and with $291.3m in sales out of this year’s six auctions, it was a record-breaker. We’ll have complete results in the next issue of ACC, which were working on building right now. In general, more cars came to auction, and those cars brought bigger overall totals in Arizona this…
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Should Your Child Drive Your Collector Car?
Kids crash cars. They crash new cars and old cars. They will crash anything they drive. But how do we expect young kids to grow up with a love for our cranky old cars if we make them wait until they are 25 years old to drive them? By then, if they’ve already had nine…
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The Arizona Whirlwind
Arizona in January is one of my busiest weeks of the year. The What’s My Car Worth? production crew shoots multiple episodes. I emcee the Arizona Concours d’Elegance. We put on Insider’s Seminars at Gooding & Company and Barrett-Jackson. We host a consignment tour at RM. And we run a week-long subscriptions booth at Gooding. It hardly…
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Jim’s Blog: Firing Up a New Year
The auction year rumbles to life this week, with Barrett-Jackson, Russo and Steele, RM, Gooding, Bonhams, and Silver all hosting auctions in sunny Arizona. The Arizona stats speak for themselves. Typically, we see about 2,800 cars cross the auction blocks in the Grand Canyon State, and last year, 2,300 of them sold for a combined…
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Scottsdale – Tales of a 540K, Corvette L88s and Frank Lloyd Wright
I’m sitting in Bruce Covill’s 1972 Ferrari 365 GTC/4. It’s my mobile office as I write this blog while on the Arizona Concours d’Elegance Tour. (Covill’s company Cyberitas Technologies, developed the mobile app for the concours, available here.) We’ve just finished a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West. This marathon began with shooting cars…
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Two Collector Car New Year’s Resolutions
2014 is winding down, and it’s been quite a 12 months for SCM and me. On the magazine side, our page count is up significantly over 2013. We have more subscribers, more advertisers and higher newsstand sales. We’re distributing in bookstores in England, Australia and other countries for the first time, and the results have…
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Jim’s Blog: The Best Buys of 2014
The new year is here, and before we get caught up in the whirlwind of Arizona auctions that starts in just a few days, it’s time to take a look back at some of the best deals of 2014. If you’ve spent any time reading ACC’s market reports, I’m sure you’ve found a car or…
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What My Cars Want for Christmas
I thought I had my key Christmas gifts all wrapped up. Seven-year-old Bradley is getting a Sphero 2.0 that he can race around the house. Alex will get a visit to trendy clothier Mario’s, with carte blanche in her selection, as long as it costs less than the overdrive rebuild on the 1964 Volvo 1800S.…
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Jim’s Blog: What’s The Best Christmas Gift for a Car Guy?
Christmas is almost here, and with it comes the gifts of socks, sweaters, gloves, and probably more desserts than you should really be eating. But if you’re a car guy, you’re probably not that interested in those socks, sweaters, or gloves. (Unless they’re Nomex racing socks, a car design sweater, or heavy-duty work gloves.) I…