My family

[Mr 5 0]

It's an old story; everybody seems to know someone who had some now-classic and valuable muscle car they practically gave away years ago. Some of that is BS of course, (they only made a limited amount of those really rare big-cube muscle cars) but of course it does happen.

Problem with keeping a car is that (a) it has to be maintained and kept from rust and rot conditions, (b) it has to have something special about it to make it really valuable, and (c) it has to be at least 30 years old.

My LX was bought brand-new by me and is now 12 years old; I plan to keep it a long time but I doubt I'll try to keep it another 25 years as it's one of hundreds of thousands of LX 5.0's that Ford made and until it's about 40 years old it won't be worth big bucks - if then.

Although we all want to hang on to our muscle cars, things happen; marriage, babies, need for a new house down-payment, moving, financial crisis comes up (like illness or job loss), no place to keep it and just plain boredom with looking at the same car for a couple of decades. It happens - and that's why so many people have a great story about 'The Muscle Car That Got Away'.

I hope some of us can hang on to our 'Stangs for many more decades, and I'm sure some will, but not many. It just isn't that easy and not always that profitable to do so. Fun to try, though.