Eight cars you should have bought 10 years ago

Porsche 911 Carrera 2 (964)

Approximate price in 2010: £15,000

Price now: £50,000-plus

No apologies for featuring another Porsche here – if one model embodies the ‘cars I should have bought when I had the chance’ an air-cooled 911 is it, given the right time to buy one always seems to have been at least a decade before you actually could. Underappreciated for years, the 964’s perfect size and arch overlap between classic 911 vibes and modern usability are now getting the recognition they deserve, though the five-figure bills they can readily throw at owners could easily have wiped out any apparent financial gains on that £15K one bought a decade back. Finding the kind of original Carrera 2 coupe you’d want to own now is something of a bunfight though, not least for the fact they’re being hoovered up by the backdaters to turn into expensive resto mods.

BMW M5 (E34)

Approximate price in 2010: £1,000-plus

Price now: £25,000 and rising

Inspired by the sight of an E34-era M5 we found advertised for £1,000 in a 2011 advert, the idea you could have made money on BMW’s iconic super saloon is something of a myth. That might have been possible with one of the ‘80s originals but the cars that followed have gone through that phase of being cheap to buy but expensive to run, meaning many have had a succession of owners without the cash or inclination to look after them properly. Bringing one back up to standard is an expensive business and M5s have many and varied ways of emptying your wallet; you have to be brave or lucky to take the plunge these days and this may have been one of those cars you’d have been better off owning 10 years ago.

Mazda MX-5 NA

Approximate price in 2010: a few hundred quid

Price now: £5,000 (double that for a really good one)

First-generation Mazda MX-5s (and the many imported Eunos Roadster versions on British roads) are unlikely to go the way of air-cooled 911s any time soon. And are still cheap to buy, all things considered. The 30^th anniversary last year shone a spotlight on just how Mazda nailed it with the original and respect is growing, the pool of ratty but road legal ones you could buy on a shoestring rapidly consumed by rust, rattle-can drift conversions, race car projects and the like. A nice example bought for a song back then and preserved in original condition would now be highly covetable.

Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.5-16 Evo II

Approximate price in 2010: £40,000

Price now: £300,000

Benefit of hindsight and all that but, of all the cars touted as ‘appreciating modern classics’ a decade back, the smart money would have been on limited production ‘90s homologation cars from rally and touring car racing. It doesn’t apply across the board but for certain hero cars (like the Subaru Impreza 22B we mentioned last time) values have gone through the roof as a generation of race fans look to invest in the cars they idolised back in the day. The E30 BMW M3 is regularly touted as a poster child for this phenomenon but the even smarter money would have been on its Mercedes DTM nemesis, of which just 502 were built. Niche in the extreme, this ‘190 in a bodykit’ has finally come of age and good ones now go for six figures. If only…

Datsun 240Z

Approximate price in 2010: Not much

Price now: £20,000 upwards

The growing appreciation for ‘70s Japanese classics is an area canny investors could still bag a return on. ‘Hakosuka’ GT-Rs are now six-figure cars thanks to the Skyline’s iconic status among the gaming generation but the 240Z is also on the rise, especially as a basis for fashionable and desirable resto-mod conversions by specialists like Bradford-based MZR Roadsports. Outside of a small group of fans they’d have been pretty much off the radar a decade back, a propensity for rust killing off many. Growing appreciation means this could well be the air-cooled 911 of the Japanese sportscar world and, if you’d bought one for peanuts back then, you’d be having the last laugh now.

Ferrari F40

Approximate price in 2010: £250,000

Price now: £1m-plus

For all its extreme reputation and the kudos of being the last car launched on Enzo’s watch, the market punished Ferrari for making too many F40s, the 1,311 production run meaning it’ll never reach the heights of rarities like the 250 GTO. That didn’t matter when it launched and, in the fever of the late ‘80s, F40s were bona fide million-dollar cars, at least until the financial crash that followed. They never got cheap but, a decade ago, you could have bought one for a quarter of that, demand now exceeding supply again as enough of the people who grew up with F40 posters on their walls can afford to add one to their real collections.

Honda NSX

Approximate price in 2010: £25,000

Price now: £50,000 and rising fast

Lists like this fixate on the accumulation of financial value and it’s true the NSX of a decade ago would have been a much cheaper car to buy than it would be now. Unlike the 964 mentioned previously, it probably wouldn’t have cost you a fortune to own and run in that time, either. But the true satisfaction in having bought an NSX 10 years back would now come from watching the rest of the world finally wake up to what a fabulous and influential car it really was – and still is. You can put a value on many things. But the satisfaction of being proven right – and having enjoyed a fabulous car in the process – is truly priceless.

Aston Martin Vantage

Approximate price in 2010: Less than £100,000

Price now: £250,000 and up

The Aston Martin of old was very different from the suave and sophisticated brand embodied by the DB9 era and beyond. These were big, brutish upper-class muscle cars with unashamedly macho manners you might think are out of step with modern tastes. But the twin-supercharged Vantages developed from the early ‘90s Virage are now hugely desirable cars, helped by the 600-plus horsepower of the V600 and Le Mans versions and the fact fewer than 300 were ever made. A decade back you’d have been able to land one for less than £100,000. These days the desirable ones are going for double or even four times that.

240Z and Vantage images courtesy of Bonhams.