What The Heck Will My Kids Collect?

by B.S.Brash

As is my custom, occasionally, I was sitting at a table in my favorite watering hole, Mother’s, quaffing a couple of suds and talking with what few friends I have left. When all of a sudden the conversation turned ugly, Joe, I will call him Joe to protect our friendship, Joe said, “The new cars suck as collectables, I mean in 20-25 years these plastic Easter Eggs will be unfixable and as a result won’t be very good collectables at all”! Joe went on, “With all the dang transistors in everything from the radio to the carbs, how the heck are my kids going to fix them”?

As I set there trying to look thoughtful, he said to me, “BS, you’re supposed to be the expert, what is your opinion”?

I decided that now was a good time to go see a man about a dog, if you get my drift, it also gave me time to come up with an opinion. After my trip to the little boy’s room I returned to a literal fight, two big guys were kicking the tar out of each other, so we decided to adjourn to my garage and continue with the beer and conversation there. This was good because it gave me more time to think on Joe’s question.

What will the collectables be? The Special Edition cars for sure, the cutesy cars like the PT Cruiser, and what else. The new cars are made of so much plastic that it won’t be hard to reproduce the parts for restoration, but what about the electronic dashes and gauges and the engine that needs a computer to tell you what is wrong with it? And the brains of the car, the computer, my gosh man, how the heck are they going to repair that?

I finally came to the conclusion that the collector cars of today will just get more valuable and as for the collector cars of the future, eventually your repairman will be a computer geek, not a mechanic! It would seem that to be a classic collector in the future, you would either have to own a repair computer or belong to a club that owns one!

I never did answer Joe’s question, he into ran old girl friend on the way out of Mother’s and he never made it to my place. But I did see his point!

*Note: You can read other BS Brash articles on www.bsbrash.com - His email address is: BSB@BSBrash.com

Copyright 2006 BS Brash