That said, it doesn't mean that G-body values will be going to the stratosphere anytime soon. The old adage of "never buy a car as an investment" seems to hold true with G-bodies.
Recall, that your sale price MUST be approximately 30K or so just to get back the 1980s sticker price with inflation (My 87 442 sticker price would be $34,140.36 today due to inflation- this is a REAL number). Less than that, it's nowhere near considered to be collectible status. So those $40K GNs are simply asking around buying one new back then. It's all perspective. Sure, you may not lose money, but that's not a win in my book. Better than a loss, but that's it. And who knew G-body turbo cars being also-rans 30 years later? I always thought the GNs were going to be the 63 split-window coupe, or the big-block 67 Chevelle SS 4-speeds of the future. But alas, that ain't happened yet. Even GN's aren't made of gold. There's always the exceptions that people point to, and while I totally get that G-bodies are our passion, stepping back and looking at some rough shot-in-the-dark data may put things into some sort of perspective.
This is why if you're going to tie up 18000 (40k today) for 32 years, buy some dividend stocks. If you invested 18K in 1987 instead of buying that turbo.....let's pick a healthy longtime stock worth buying back then...(speaking of gold, if you bought gold in 1987 with your 18k, you'd have about 45K worth of gold today without doing a thing. So gold is actually worth more than most GN's)...back to the stock. Buy a solid stock like IBM in 1987 (pre-crash) at it's high point in May '87 for example at 40 per share and stick it in your 401k. What would you have today?....only $124,143.80. That's if the dividends were reinvested. Still over 3 times the inflation rate. Even so, if you took your 40K and bought a nice GN today, or any other G-body, you'd still have $84,143.80 left over (less due to taxes, so we'll just round that to oh, 30K in taxes to be safe), so probably you still have over 50K left over.
This would be the smart move. Because people invest in stocks because they want to make more money. It's how it's supposed to work. That's the idea. People that invest in cars to make money...that's some hard *ss work just to break even, let along strike it rich.
I get the fact that this is just scratching the surface. Because I'm not going to be following this idea myself. The passion overrides logic. I'm going to sink 20K or more in my 85 442 restoration. I already paid 16K for it, plus the interest on 4 year car payments. Basically it ate up my 3K down payment. Then I paid 1985 interest rates!!!!!!! That put the real cost right at $20K for that car when it was all done in 1988 (I did pay it off early).
You can call bullshit if you want, but unless you show me the numbers, G-bodies have yet to be considered "collectible" in general. So far, the only one I've seen approach this is the GNX. And by today's standards, they ain't sh*t anymore. But the low production numbers saved them.
