So you buy a new car…. You think it will be a future high-end classic car.
You put it in storage to save it for 50 years.
What you will have to do is put the car up on blocks…. let all the air pressure out of the tires… remove the battery… remove ALL liquids from the vehicle—- Antifreeze, oil, brake fluid, gas and maybe any grease…..
Now to store it it will have to be in a totally sealed room. COMPLETELY sealed AND thermographically from outside influences.
You will need to pull a vacuum on the room… full vacuum for a few days to make sure all moisture is out of the room….. Then pressurize it with pure nitrogen.
You might…MIGHT… end up with a usable car in 50 years.
Hopefully there will be a battery that’d fit it and oil and gas that it’d be compatible with.
You’ll have to make sure there is a note telling that all the Antifreeze, oil, brake fluid, gas and grease has to be put back.
A car dealer did this in Tulsa. I think in the 50s. Put a new car…1957 Plymouth… in a concrete fault under ground.
When it was time to dig it up… they found the vault was not sealed as well as they wanted.
Water seeped in carrying dirt/mud filling the vault.
It was a muddy mess of rusted deteriorating car.
If you do seal a car in a vault? Make sure it’s ABOVE ground and probably coated in plastic.
Dirt….. due to micro-organisms….. is designed to decompose anything that is in it.
This is Kiki.
She is my 1960 bond minicar Mk F.
Apart from routine maintenance and fixing things as they went wrong she has never been restored, the only paint job she has ever had is to fix a dent in the bonnet (hood) which is why if you look closely it is missing.
She is 65 years old this year. If she was a person she would be coming up to retirement.
She would have cost around £379 new and similar cars are fetching around £8,000 today.
In real terms this would not really be a massive increase in value as a car like this, if you could legally build them, would cost about £8,000 to buy.
The point is, to preserve a car in pristine condition would probably cost as much as it would to buy the car new meaning that in real terms you would lose money on the deal.
Meanwhile between us we also have a 22 year old Landrover discovery and a 17 year old Toyota Avensis, both of which drive like new. The Landrover is in pristine condition but the Avensis has a couple of scratches because unlike the Landrover it does nearly 60,000 miles per year. Both cars could be restored to ex-works condition with a budget of a couple of grand at the most.
Older classics would not be worth restoring as a commercial venture but most are done by enthusiasts who do it for the enjoyment of restoring cars and usually sell them at a loss. Evne that holy grail of classic cars, the E Type Jag would be worth less than it costs to restore.
So what about storage? Other answers have gone into elaborate storage slutions, including a hermetically sealed vault and a US dealer even stored a car underground for some strange reason. It would actually be simple very simple:
Just use a barn or a normal garage. Give it a thorough clean. You wouldn’t want any mud left on the car at all and then about four layers of polish. Empty all fluids and remove the battery. Remove the wheels and coat the rims with grease and then pack them in polythene in a crate putting the car up on jack stands. Then I would underseal the insides of the wheel arches and underseal the chassis. I might remove the exhaust to to facilitate the undersealing then store it away seperately, especially if the vehicle had been driven at all.
I might be tempted to cover the car with polythene too.
Then once a year I would do a thorough examination on the car, check for vermin infestations and any signs at all of rust. This way in 2075 there would be a zero mileage car in pristine condition doing the rounds in classic car shows and it is funny to think that one day a 2025 Kia or a Hyundai will be classics!
