My current bedtime read is a great book by Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.
It’s a fascinating story, predicting how humans may evolve over the next century and beyond. One of Harari’s suggestions is that the pursuit of happiness will soon be a key driver of human development.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, our CEO McKeel Hagerty has just launched an initiative to ‘save motoring’. His concept is that autonomous cars will be the death of driving as we know it, and we should do everything we can to support our hobby.
Then an email from Hagerty’s team at the Scottsdale auctions dropped into my inbox. Last weekend, in the middle of the Arizona desert, a total of $247.8m of classic vehicles changed hands.
At first glance these three events are not interconnected, but the more I thought about them, the more they made sense when you put them all together in the context of our world today. I’m no economist, but it seems that nobody really has a clue what is going to happen next. Elections, growth forecasts, even the size of the polar ice caps – so many recent predictions have turned out to be a load of old rubbish.
Yet in the middle of this global uncertainty, a quarter of a billion dollars was spent in one auction weekend on luxury items. Nobody needs a classic car, like they do a washing machine, a house, or an estate car to do the school run. But while other investment portfolios are rising and falling like waves on the sea, people are still buying classic vehicles, and their values go on rising steadily.