Top 10 Best Classic Cars to Buy in 2017

Hagerty’s 2017 list of the best classic cars to buy leaned hard on 1980s models, and even early-2000s cars, as smart future investments, a call backed by real appreciation data rather than nostalgia. The same year, a $70 million Australian museum opened, the History Channel greenlit a series on a 57-year-old car museum, and a 650-horsepower Camaro ZL1 squared off against a Hellcat. Read on to find out what all of it says about where classic car values were headed.

Every January, one insurance company’s list of cars worth buying moves markets in a hobby most people assume runs purely on nostalgia. When Hagerty, the company that insures more classic cars than almost anyone else in the country, published its picks for the best classic cars to buy in 2017, the list didn’t lean on decades-old icons everyone already recognized. It leaned somewhere stranger: cars from the 1980s, and in a few cases, cars barely old enough to legally be called classics at all. What does an insurance company actually know that the rest of the collector market hadn’t figured out yet?

Why an Insurance Company Gets to Call the Shots

Hagerty didn’t earn its influence over the classic car market by accident. As one of the largest insurers of collector vehicles in the country, the company tracks actual sale prices, auction results, and claims data across hundreds of thousands of policies, giving it a data set most auction houses and magazines can only guess at. Its annual buying list isn’t a nostalgia exercise, it’s built from real appreciation trends, and that’s exactly why the 2017 picks leaned so heavily toward 1980s cars that traditional collectors had spent years dismissing as too modern to matter. According to Hagerty’s analysis, even cars from the early 2000s were starting to show early signs of future collector value, a signal that the definition of “classic” was shifting faster than the hobby’s older guard wanted to admit.

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A $70 Million Collection Built by an Auto Group Fortune

While Hagerty was busy reshaping what counts as a smart buy, Australia’s Gosford Classic Car Museum was quietly proving what happens when someone with real capital decides to collect at scale. Owner Tony Denny, who landed at No. 179 on the 2015 BRW Rich List with a fortune of roughly $320 million built from selling his Europe-based AAA Motor Group, opened the museum at West Gosford housing more than 400 of the world’s finest cars, valued at nearly $70 million combined. It’s the kind of collection that turns a regional car museum into a genuine tourist destination, and it stands as a reminder that the same appreciation trends Hagerty tracks in dollars and percentages eventually show up as entire buildings full of steel and chrome.

A Museum Old Enough to Get Its Own TV Series

Collector interest doesn’t only show up in auction prices, sometimes it shows up in a production deal. The History Channel greenlit a new series called “Volo, House of Cars,” built around the Volo Auto Museum, a facility that by 2017 had spent 57 years hunting down and preserving rare vehicles. The first six episodes, focused on the museum’s day-to-day operations and its history of tracking down cars other collectors had given up on, were slated to debut that spring. For a museum most casual car fans had never heard of, landing a network television deal was its own kind of confirmation that public appetite for classic car culture was growing well beyond the auction block and the swap meet.

650 Horsepower Answers an Old Argument

Not every story making classic car news in this period was about the past. The 650-horsepower 2017 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 had just hit dealer lots, and tuner John Hennessey wasted no time pitting it against the reigning muscle car horsepower champion, the Dodge Challenger Hellcat, in a straightforward roll-on drag race. It’s the same rivalry that’s defined the muscle car segment since the 1960s, replayed with modern horsepower numbers that would have been unthinkable from a factory car a decade earlier. For anyone following Hagerty’s argument that today’s performance cars are tomorrow’s classics, a factory-backed 650-horsepower Camaro going head-to-head with a supercharged Hellcat is exactly the kind of moment future buyers will look back on.

What a Garage Fire in New Jersey Says About Risk

Not every piece of classic car news that year was good news. In Vineland, New Jersey, Howard Williams Jr. watched high winds whip flames through his multi-bay garage, destroying the structure and the several antique cars stored inside. It’s a sobering counterpoint to Hagerty’s investment-grade framing of the hobby: these aren’t just appreciating assets on a spreadsheet, they’re physical objects sitting in wooden garages and barns, vulnerable to exactly the kind of disaster that took Williams’s collection in a single afternoon. It’s also a quiet argument for why proper collector car insurance, the kind Hagerty built its entire business around, matters as much as picking the right car to buy in the first place.

The 1980s Cars Nobody Expected to Matter

What made Hagerty’s 2017 list genuinely notable wasn’t the presence of well-known 1960s muscle cars, it was how many 1980s models made the cut. For years, cars from that decade sat in an awkward gap: too modern to be nostalgic, too old to be considered current, and largely ignored by serious collectors chasing earlier iron. Hagerty’s data told a different story, showing real appreciation building underneath cars that plenty of buyers could still remember seeing new in dealer showrooms. That shift matters because it previewed a pattern that’s only accelerated since: as each generation of buyers enters the collector market with more disposable income, the cars they grew up wanting become the next wave of “classics,” regardless of how the previous generation of collectors felt about it.

Reading the Market Before It Moves

Taken together, the museum openings, the TV deals, the horsepower wars, and even the fires all point to the same underlying reality Hagerty’s list was built to capture: classic car culture in 2017 was expanding in every direction at once, pulling in new decades, new buyers, and new money. The company’s picks weren’t a prediction so much as a snapshot of where the smart money was already moving, months before mainstream auction results caught up and confirmed it. For anyone deciding what to park in their own garage, the lesson wasn’t which specific ten cars made the list, it was recognizing that the definition of “classic” keeps moving, and the buyers who notice first are the ones who benefit most. Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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