Site MapThis 174 Vintage Cars Find Puts 'Storage Wars' To Shame
Barn finds are the best finds for vintage car collectors
Would you be excited to find a vintage car that’s been hidden away for decades? Sure – who wouldn’t? A pristine, vintage car might be the type of thing you can stumble upon maybe only a couple of times in a lifetime, and that’s only if you’re looking. Now, imagine finding hundreds of them, all at once.
If you have a passion for a certain brand, era, or style, and the means to buy and maintain a large number of vehicles, car collecting can be an immensely satisfying hobby. Just type “car collection” into YouTube and you’ll see what the hype is all about, with hundreds of videos popping up of car aficionados showing off their treasure troves. Usually, the cars in these luxury collections are in pristine condition, often with the goal of being paraded around at shows and entered into competitions. But not every collectible car is being meticulously displayed like Cameron’s dad’s Ferrari in Ferris Bueller.
The term barn find typically refers to a classic car that’s been hidden away for a long period of time, but not necessarily abandoned. The owners of barn finds don’t always intend to bury treasure when stashing their cars in a garage, warehouse, or yes, a barn – sometimes a vehicle just proves too costly or difficult to maintain. Multiply that difficulty by 175, and you’ll understand the dilemma of one London collector who recently revealed a massive warehouse full of classic German and British vehicles. All the cars are currently up for sale, with an estimated total value of $1.4 million. And although none of them are in particularly great condition, does it really matter? For a true gearhead, the thrill of purchasing one of these rediscovered gems can make the restoration more than worth it.
The London collection, which was documented recently by Youtuber TheTFJJ, is obviously a notable example of how dramatic barn find discoveries can be. But it’s actually not that uncommon to find so many of these cars in one place, which is a huge part of the reason why barn find enthusiasts are so passionate about hunting them down. Here in the U.S., there have been quite a few impressive barn finds in recent years, like the 140-car collection auctioned off in Kansas last October, which was once owned by Moon Walk bouncy house inventor Bob Regehr. Other large collections have been much more mysterious in origin, like the hoard of over 300 cars revealed last year by the AMMO NYC YouTube channel.
Like in the London warehouse video, AMMO NYC wasn’t able to provide much information about the origins of such an enormous collection. Sometimes that information is just impossible to know, especially in the case of very old barn finds, but sometimes it is withheld to protect the identity of the collector and the location of the collection itself. In London, the collector has chosen to remain anonymous, but has communicated to the press that the cars still run and are only being sold because the warehouse is about to be demolished. So, it sounds like this collector’s loss will be the gain of quite a few lucky barn-find lovers. Take it as a rare opportunity to breathe new life into a lost vintage treasure.
