IN DEFENCE OF THE SHITBOX

There is a particular kind of car that makes absolutely no financial sense. It isn't rare enough to be an investment, fast enough to impress anyone or new enough to be reliable. On paper, there is almost certainly something better you could own.

And yet somebody has spent the last fifteen years making sure this particular one survives.

We like those cars. Not because they're shit, but because somebody gives a shit about them.

THE WRONG CAR, DONE RIGHT

Car culture has always had a slightly strange relationship with value. The expensive stuff naturally gets attention. New cars, rare cars, fast cars, things with production numbers and auction estimates attached to them. There's nothing wrong with any of that either. Expensive cars can be brilliant, rare cars can be fascinating and we'd happily lose an afternoon looking around something completely unobtainable.

Price just isn't a particularly reliable measure of how interesting a car is.

Put a brand-new supercar next to a Golf somebody has owned since they were 19 and there's a decent chance we're going to ask about the Golf first. Not because the Golf is somehow better, but because there's probably a story attached to it.

Maybe they've spent three years looking for the right wheels, rebuilt the engine on their driveway and had the paint done twice. Maybe there's some stupid factory option fitted that nobody else notices, or a part that hasn't been available from Volkswagen since 2007 that took them six months to find. Maybe they sold it once, regretted it immediately, bought it back and have promised themselves they'll never make that mistake again.

The car itself might be worth five grand. The interesting bit is everything that's happened around it.

THE LIFER

Every corner of car culture seems to have one. The person who has owned the same car for so long that separating the two would feel slightly strange.

They've watched trends arrive, disappear and occasionally come back again. Their car has probably been too low, then slightly less low. It's had three sets of wheels, two interiors, an engine rebuild and spent at least one winter sitting on axle stands while somebody insisted it would definitely be ready for spring.

There have been opportunities to sell it and almost certainly reasons to sell it. They haven't.

Apparently this isn't particularly unusual either. Research published by Aviva in 2025 found that 13% of UK car owners would rather repair their old car than replace it even when the repair costs more than buying another one. Almost a quarter still think about their first car, while some households reported keeping a car for 16 years or more.

It's completely irrational, but we understand it entirely.

VALUE IS A FUNNY THING

There comes a point with an old car where the normal maths stops working. A warning light appears, something starts knocking or your MOT tester makes the face, and suddenly you're considering spending £1,200 repairing a car worth £3,000.

Someone will inevitably ask why you don't just get rid of it.

That's a perfectly reasonable question if the only job of a car is to provide transportation as efficiently as possible. Enthusiast cars don't really work like that, though. The £1,200 isn't necessarily being spent because the car is worth repairing. It's being spent because you want that particular car to continue existing.

Those are different things.

Britain is increasingly full of older cars too. At the end of 2025, the average licensed car in the UK was 10 years old, while industry figures put a record 45.7% of the car fleet at more than a decade old. Most of those obviously aren't enthusiast cars, but keeping something old running certainly isn't an obscure hobby anymore.

We're all getting quite good at not throwing cars away.

ORDINARY BECOMES INTERESTING

Something strange happens to ordinary cars as they disappear from the road.

Think about the stuff that was absolutely everywhere twenty years ago. Not the poster cars or limited-production specials, but the things your neighbour had, your mate's mum drove or you learned to drive in. Nobody particularly cared about preserving them because nobody could imagine a world in which they'd become unusual.

Then one day you see a completely standard example coming the other way and realise you can't remember the last time you saw one.

That's one of the brilliant things about ordinary cars. Time eventually makes them interesting, and sometimes all it takes is one stubborn person deciding theirs isn't going anywhere.

There doesn't even need to be anything objectively special about it. In some cases that's precisely the appeal. A perfectly preserved base-model Peugeot can tell you far more about what Britain's roads actually looked like thirty years ago than the exotic stuff everyone knew to save.

IT DOESN'T NEED TO BE IRONIC

This isn't about buying the worst possible car and pretending it's cool.

There's a slightly exhausting corner of car culture where owning something objectively terrible becomes the entire joke, and that's not really what we're talking about. We're interested in care and intent.

The person preserving an immaculate base-model hatchback can be interesting. So can someone building a ridiculous modified estate, obsessing over the exact factory specification of an old Porsche or driving the absolute shit out of a brand-new GT3.

The price doesn't matter in either direction, and neither does whether we'd personally make the same choices.

What's interesting is that somebody cared enough to make them.

Over time those decisions accumulate. Wheels, paint, upholstery, maintenance, modifications, things added and things deliberately left alone. Eventually you stop looking at an example of a particular model and start looking at somebody's car.

That's much more interesting.

CARS COLLECT PARTS OF OUR LIVES

Keep a car long enough and it inevitably becomes associated with everything that happened while you owned it. Jobs, houses, relationships, road trips, friends, children, dogs and countless completely ordinary days all become attached to the same object.

That's probably part of why people become so irrational about keeping them. In Aviva's research, 19% of respondents said their car reminded them of important moments in their lives.

It also explains why telling somebody to replace an old car with something newer and objectively better can completely miss the point. You're looking at the object and its current market value. They're looking at fifteen years of their own life.

Cars are particularly good at this because we don't simply own them. We do things in them. We take them places, load them with our stuff, sit in traffic in them, break down in them and occasionally drive them hundreds of miles for no particularly sensible reason.

Eventually the memories become harder to separate from the machine.

PERFECT ISN'T REQUIRED

Perhaps this is one of the bits of car culture we like most. You don't need to arrive with the finished thing, because we're not entirely convinced the finished thing exists.

There is always another part to find, another noise to investigate or another idea that can absolutely wait until next winter. Some of the most interesting cars we've known have spent most of their lives being slightly wrong.

That might be healthier than treating cars like objects that need to reach some internet-approved final form before they're worth sharing.

Bring the stone chips, the questionable paint and the wheel you've kerbed. Bring the interior that still needs finishing and the car you've been telling everyone you'll respray for the last six years.

Just use the thing.

GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THE CAR YOU HAVE

That's probably the whole argument.

We don't have a problem with expensive cars, and we don't think cheap cars are automatically more interesting. There will always be something faster, newer, rarer or more valuable than whatever is currently sitting on your driveway.

It doesn't really matter.

What matters is what you've done with yours, where you've taken it, why you've kept it and who you've met because of it.

You don't need the best car in the room. You don't even need the best version of your own car.

Give a shit about the one you have.

Look after it, put some miles on it, make it your own and, if common sense says you should probably have got rid of it years ago, maybe keep the stupid thing alive anyway.