Mankind’s advancement from shifting essential materials with wooden wheels to simply shifting gears in a steel vehicle is often overlooked. Cars are ubiquitous commodities, integral components of rapidly advancing societies. Some are even pieces of art, iconographic symbols of cultural heritage.
There is something intrinsically satisfying about sitting in a tightly confined cockpit, leather-wrapped and forged from walnut, with an array of dials and switches at your fingertips. I marvel to myself at such sheer craftsmanship as I hop out of a 1965 E-Type Jaguar, and catch a strong waft of aristocracy as the door clunks shut. “I’d quite like one of these.”, I say as I turn to Caspar, the vehicle broker who was kind enough to walk and talk me through Hexagon Classics’ supreme fleet of prestige cars.
Dreamy interior: Aston Martin DB6 Pretty Green: Aston Martin DB6
“this desire for mechanical pleasure driving car cultures up and down the country. “
The particular car in question is undoubtedly one of the finest E-Type examples in the world; it’s all original, right-hand drive and has just over ten-thousand miles to its name. At a fiver under £250,000 though, it’s not exactly a bargain. Or is it? See, the classic car market is as prosperous as ever before. “Vehicles like these are simply relics in the eyes of their owners. All of our clients spending six figures on a car have several others anyway, so when they purchase a classic, it’s usually stored away and rarely driven.” Caspar is a proper petrolhead. He recalls the thrills of driving his father-in-law’s Jaguar, similar to the aforementioned E-Type, incidentally, oozing with exuberance.
It’s this desire for mechanical pleasure driving car cultures up and down the country. Typically, for a car to constitute as a ‘classic’, it must be no younger than twenty years. As of late 2019, there are more than 13.8 million cars on UK roads first registered before the end of 1999.
With that in mind, where does that leave the benign cars of yesteryears? The dodgy Fiats, iconic Cortinas, maybe your dad’s old Volvo, a box on wheels, with exposed sponge from the upholstery. Motoring nuances form memories that stick with you forever. As a six-year-old I was riding shotgun with my Dad in his window-cleaning Transit, having just left for work. It was a sunny morning so I wound open the sunroof whilst my Dad put his hazards on and nipped into a shop. He hit the brakes as we approached a junction at the bottom of a hill and instantly a small tsunami of lukewarm soapy water had drenched us both. Who was I to know he put the buckets between the ladder rungs?
Capital Punishment
Without doubt, London’s air pollution levels are perilously high; a study from King’s College in 2015 concluded that nearly 9,500 premature deaths are directly and indirectly caused by nitrogen dioxide (N02) and particulate matter (PM2.5) each year. In order to curb such a crisis, Transport for London introduced the Low Emission Zone in 2008 and ULEZ in 2019, deterring vehicles from entering the 8.1 square mile zone and charging those which do not meet the appropriate emissions standards.
Where does that leave then, the car connoisseurs cruising around in their combustion engine classics? As much as I long to know how that feels, I needed a seasoned motorist to wag chins with and weigh in on the auto industry’s all-electric destiny. I visited London’s Classic Car Club, venturing to Hoxton where I met with Paul. He explained how his company operated: providing a posh car rental service, in essence.
“Not everyone can afford to buy a classic car outright. We provide our exclusive members with a choice of cars from the fleet. […] they buy packages of points to spend on days enjoying the open road”. As for the implications of London’s legislative assault on carbon, “there’s none for me. If I’m driving one of my oldies I don’t pay a penny”. Unbeknown to me before Paul’s explanation, cars older than forty years are totally exempt from LEZ/ULEZ rules and the congestion charge. TfL calls it the ‘historic vehicle’ tax class, and it operates on a 40-year rolling system.
This policy could be met with ambivalence; it’s an incentive for a small minority of driving purists to preserve their passion; on the other hand, the masses are all for climate-oriented reform.
The environmental onus is on manufacturers to gradually cease the production of combustion powered vehicles. In pursuit of some more intel on electric vehicles, I called the Tesla Motors centre in Chiswick and falsely registered my interest in buying one of their zero emissions, six-hundred horsepower ‘Model X’s. Prior to rightly questioning the legitimacy of my enquiry, the assistant pointed out how owners can use Tesla’s ‘Superchargers’ – “you can charge up to 170 miles of driving range in half an hour.” Impressive stuff. The major drawback though is the significant lack of these superchargers, and standard-level electric charging stations, too. Until the infrastructure is plentiful enough to support the government’s pledge for all new vehicles to be carbon free by 2040, it’s highly unlikely petrol and diesel-powered vehicles are going anywhere anytime soon.
The gradual shift towards sustainable transport is inevitable, meaning the value of these classics, both sentimentally and financially, will only increase with time.
All images by Isaac Robinson, unless otherwise stated.