“It seems like every show that I go to, it’s starting to get a younger crowd, a more diverse crowd,” says Bradley Brownell, a co-founder of Radwood who’s now director of the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum in Cleveland. ![]() Even auction sales of the oldest, most expensive classics are up, and increasingly popular with buyers under 50, according to Bonhams. Last year online auction platform Bring a Trailer-half of whose users are 44 or younger, according to a company spokesperson-reported a record $1.3 billion in sales of classic cars. These days popular hangouts such as Lower Manhattan’s Café Leon Dore are pulsing with Alfa Romeo and Porsche groupies, while coffee meetups from Malibu to Montauk are drawing teen and twentysomething car fans who spend their free time playing Gran Turismo and watching Netflix’s docu-series Formula 1: Drive to Survive. Hagerty believes consolidating the industry under its banner will keep America’s car culture alive, even though it’s not all that clear the culture needs saving. “They now essentially own the supply chain from the product to the sales machinery to the service business.” (A spokesperson for Hagerty says Matthews is not involved in Best in Show or Best in Class decisions, and all results are overseen and verified by a third-party accountant.) Pierre, a longtime car enthusiast based in Edmonton, Alberta. “This development gives Hagerty a huge lever with which to influence, if not outright control, a huge piece of the market,” says Daniel St. In 2020, Nigel Matthews, who was already a Hagerty global brand ambassador, became ICJAG chairman. Concours judges evaluate things such as how close to original a car is, its overall condition and quality, and whether, for instance, the engine must start as criteria for winning-aspects often enforced arbitrarily and to different degrees, depending on the show. It also helps fund the International Chief Judge Advisory Group (ICJAG), which sets the judging standards at a given event. With access to valuable information about specific vehicles, Hagerty can identify, insure, store and even set values at its own auctions. In recent years it began publishing Hagerty Drivers Club, a bimonthly magazine, and Radius, a quarterly distributed to top collectors.īut critics say the company’s new grip on the industry goes beyond symbiosis-it now has an unprecedented advantage. It also operates DriveShare, a peer-to-peer classic car rental service it bought and relaunched in 2017, and runs an online classifieds section for 753,000 paying members. ![]() It’s purchased a handful of auto-related tech companies, including the creator of a motor sports event management system and a tech provider, Speed Digital. It’s opened car storage clubs in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and five other cities. It’s acquired half a dozen major car events nationwide, such as the intimate Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance in Florida and the exclusive California Mille rally. In the past two years it’s tried to trade in its humble image for something much more audacious-that of a conglomerate that owns every aspect of the collectible car universe, including auctions, brand experiences, data, events, logistics, media and storage. ![]() The company, founded in 1984 by McKeel’s parents, has long insured classic cars and provided market data on their fluctuating values. Recently, Hagerty-the man and the brand-has been on a tear.
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