A strange thing happens to cars when they reach 40 years of age, in the UK at least. They instantly become more valuable, due to a combination of official recognition of their status, along with an end of the requirement to tax and MOT them.
The rolling 40-year rule for tax-exempt “historic” vehicles means if your post-January 1 1984 car was built before January 1 1985, or registered before January 8 1985, you can look forward to applying to have its taxation class changed to “historic” on the V5 registration document. That means you will no longer need to pay vehicle excise duty (VED, or road tax) from April 1 2025. (Full details at gov.uk/historic-vehicles)
Several standout cars released in 1984 are already acknowledged as bona fide classics, the official recognition merely being the icing on the cake for owners. But not all have enjoyed buoyant values, so if you’d bought one of the cars featured here and hung onto it, you could now be looking at a significant profit.
For younger readers, the mid-1980s were the height of the “yuppie” (short for young, upwardly-mobile professional) years. If the thrusting youngsters working in London’s financial centre could afford it – and sometimes if they couldn’t – they would buy an ostentatious Ferrari, Porsche or Aston Martin. Tier-below thrusters bought a fast Ford – an Escort XR3i or RS Turbo – or anything with a GTI badge. It was all about status, a “look at me, I’m loaded” era exemplified by Harry Enfield’s “Loadsamoney” comedy character.
High-end cars were recognised by some as being investments, fastidiously cared for to this day; but some became liabilities when third or fourth owners liked the prestige badge but not the service bills that came with it. Values crashed.
Those “fast Fords”, such as the aforementioned Escorts, in original condition are now rare considering the volumes in which they were built: but back in the day they were cheap, thrashed, modified, stolen and generally abused – and then scrapped.
Richard Stafford is the head of research for cars at auctioneer Bonhams. Prime 1984 value comeback cars he’d like to find in garages and storage include the Toyota Corolla GT AE86 and BMW E30, which were, he says, “dirt cheap for years”. Not any longer.
Some high-end cars, he says, saw spectacular falls into the doldrums: Ferrari’s 400i plummeted from a new price of £50,000 to as low as £5,000 in the late 1990s, while the Jaguar XJS dropped to £2,000 or less (new, about £20,000), but they have recently been regaining value.
Meanwhile, Paul Cheetham of H&H Classic Auctions says yuppie-era 1984 Porsche 944s are about to come into their own; £13,000 new in 1984, but living in the shadow of the more famous 911, prices fell to less than half that for several years. “But they’re on the start of the curve up,” he says.
A left-field car gaining official “historic” status would be the DeLorean DMC-12, star of the Back to the Future series of films. A 1984 left-hand-drive example costing £30,000 could barely be given away 10 years later, but by 2012 values had hit £20,000. “Now they are north of £50,000,” says Cheetham.
These are some of the maybe-lucky buys during their doldrums, or cars with which owners persisted – and are now fast-appreciating assets.