Barret-Jackson auctioned one off last winter with 192miles on it and it brought 40K + buyers premium. owner never enjoyed the car. He paid 15K for it, could have sold it the day he bought it in '78 for 25K. He should have sold it for 25K and invested it. 25K invested in '78 would be worth about 400K today. Just something to think about. Drive it like you stole it is the way to go

 

Sent you a PM

 

The problem with most low mile "collector" cars is that the value is in the low mileage, not particualrly the car.
Buying it means you really can't drive it. Unless you really got to have one of these and have it in storage, the only value you have will be depreciating as soon as you buy it.

 

I was at Barret Jackson in Scottsdale...three PC vettes sold...one was around $47 K...another at $26 K or so..can't remember the third...also,a 78 Silver Anniv sold for $20 K...paint was just so so and stripes were painted on...

Pics...

 

These low mileage pace cars were a dime-a-dozen 10 years ago.

I can remember a guy selling one a fews years ago and it included all of the original fluids in jars just in case some Bloomington judge was checking for proper viscosity levels!

If you ever get a chance to talk to the original owner of one of these cars, do yourself a favor and strike up a conversation with them. You will find it quite interesting and probably just shake your head at their motives.

I can only imagine if you started driving one of these cars daily. The seals are probably all shot to hell.

 

Back in the late 70's when the older vettes were really starting to come up in value, a lot of people thought that if they bought a pace car and locked it up, 20 or 30 years later it would be worth a lot of money.

It's kind of like what happened in the toy collecting industry with the Star Wars toys ... if you had any of those old 1970's star wars toys in their original packaging they would be worth a lot of money. So back in 1993 when Lucas started coming out with Star Wars toys again people bought them to collect thinking they would be worth something. The problem is the new toys were mass produced and a ton of people, seeing what the old ones were worth, started buying them. Today you can buy them on eBay for not much more than they were in the store in 1993. Too many made and too many people collecting them = no value. Same thing happened with the 78 pace car.

Combine that with the fact that there just aren't a lot of people who want the 78 pace car and basically you have a car that's selling for nothing more than the inflation-adjusted original price. The look would be great for a full time track car, but they aren't fast ... and in order to make them fast you would have to destroy the originality that's been preserved for 30 years. Who wants to do that when you could buy one with a blown motor for dirt cheap and redo it?

 

2600 is kind of high mileage for a pace car. I think that knocks the value down quite a bit. For $30k I would expect under 50 miles. This guy must have done some actual net forward driving to accumulate that many miles. Most pacecar owners carry their cars around or drive them only in reverse.

 

These C3 "collector" cars aren't worth much more than any other C3 because there are just too many of them that are still in good shape. The operative phrase here is, "...supply and demand...". There is a large supply and a small demand and that = so-so buck$. That large supply is not going to go away soon; and these will never command much money.

 

I might disagree with some of that ... The right low-mileage car to the right buyer is in demand, and since the supply of sub-500 mile perfect originals is pretty low, buyers will pay a premium. Out of respect for the new owner of my '82 Collector Edition (454 miles), I won't say what he spent. But I will tell you that it starts with a "4" in the number. That's considerably more money than most any other C3.

Mike