As a collector myself, it's a real roll-of-the-dice. If you want to buy a new Mustang and keep the miles low, only drive it in sunny weather, do it because you love the car. It's true, only a rare minority of old "desirable" cars ever get ahead of, and beat the rate of inflation, storage overhead, maintainance (you can't just let it "sit"), INSURANCE, and lost revenue due to unrealized investment potential (the old, "if you had taken that $29 grand and done THIS with it instead, you would have had THAT with zero risk" quandary). Secondly, the word "collectible" OBVIOUSLY has a different meaning to different people. Any object that has an enthusiastic following is "collectible". Whether or not it's a profitable venture has NOTHING to do whether it's collectible. Tons of people collect and covet things that don't give them a bountiful return on their investment. That has little to do with their enthusiasm, and desire to collect more. Such is the story of the Mustang. Very collectible, as the 65-73 Mustangs are the most commonly and most plentifully and most popularly restored vehicles on the face of the earth. No other car in the restoration parts industry eclipses the Mustang. And most of that volume is not Bosses and Shelbys and Machs. It's the vastly more plentiful every-day Mustangs. Much less valuable, but nevertheless, restored in blindingly high numbers due to high levels of enthusiasm and fondness for the marque. But you've got to look at relative costs for vehicles that filled the same market void, back then, and now. People who point at "hey, a '65 Mustang fastback 289 only cost $3,000 bucks well-optioned in '65, and TODAY, a low-mile well-cared for and preserved original would cost... ballpark $27,000. WOW, what an investment!!!
. Umm, sorry to burst your bubble, but there's two ways to look at this:
1. By the time you factor in all the inflation, insurance, etc.. you actually lost your a$$, and
2. A brand new Mustang GT costs... around $27K decently equipped.
In other words, nobody got ANYWHERE sitting and preserving on those old cars. Now, if it's a Boss or a Shelby or so-on, those folks are looking good, BUT.... only because in the last 1.5-2 years the values in that market have gone crazy. Prior to that, they were just breaking-even as well. So it took them all those years, AND SOME LUCK from a fickle market (remember when classic Ferrari's exploded, and then in a couple years imploded), to actually look at their cars and be financially ahead. In reality, the folks who really make a good investment on these cars is the ones who bought them up when they're 10-15 years old (70's and early 80's), when their values are flat in-the-basement, and then they sat on them another 10-15 years and are mopping up today, IF, the market decided that they've got the hot thing. It's a huge gamble, a lottery, not one I'd recommend with the '05, not even an SVT version. The 65-73 Mustangs were the first of their kind, and they encompassed the era known as the "muscle car era". There's alot of romance and collectibility tied up in the TIMING and the fact that they were the ORIGINALS. The new '05 is made in the spirit of the originals, but hey, there's been plenty of V8 pony cars made between then and now, it's not a revolution. 2005 is not a year that we'll all look back at and say "MAN, remember when that '05 Mustang came out and SHOOK the WORLD??". Nope, the new Mustang is just a damn nice version of a car that's been around for a long time now. It won't repeat what the originals were, because the originals redefined the auto industry. The new ones are just another new model. Have fun with them, keep the miles off and keep it nice and clean so that you can keep it and hand it down to your kids in like-new condition. That is all GREAT stuff. But don't start planning your retirement around it, that's just a total misunderstanding of what collecting for profit really is about. And today's crazy-high market for muscle cars is fogging peoples vision of what reality really is. It may last, it may crash.