Say you're 15 or 16 years old and you want to get an old car as your first car. How can you make sure the experience is a good one? The Autoshift Team takes a look at that this week and offers up advice on how to go about it, including what to look for and what to avoid.

Say you're 15 or 16 years old and you want to get an old car as your first car. How can you make sure the experience is a good one? The Autoshift Team takes a look at that this week and offers up advice on how to go about it, including what to look for and what to avoid.

So You Want to Buy Your First (Old) Car

Cranked over in 2025, The Autoshift highlights the best of what’s evolving in the classic and collector-car world. Our job here is to be topical and real, and to bring focus to the collector car community as it’s changing. Why? Because change is a constant!Founders Jim Pickering, Chad Taylor and Chad Allan Tyson all come from an automotive media background — one that took them to auction and concours events from Hot August Nights in Reno to Rétromobile in Paris, with quite a bunch of trips to Monterey Car Week, Arizona Car Week and Amelia Island thrown in between. For years, the focus at a number of these high-end events has been on cars from a certain few generations — from Pre-War through the 1980s — both in the marketplace and beyond. Of course, at the very same time — and at the very same events — participants and players have been crying that “young people just aren’t into cars anymore.”The way we see it, they’re wrong. They’ve just been looking in the wrong places.Yes, change is a constant, but the car world is just as vibrant today as it has ever been. We’re on the cusp of a generational shift — one that will redefine what’s collectible and why, as well as how people interact with those vehicles in ways that resonate with them. We’re here to talk about that, and to give you a better picture of the vehicles, the players and the trends as they exist in today’s world — not as they’re viewed via yesterday’s sentiments.It’s not about new cars and it’s not about old cars. It’s about people and how they interact with the cars that matter to them.

Leisure

Automotive

Cranked over in 2025, The Autoshift highlights the best of what’s evolving in the classic and collector-car world. Our job here is to be topical and real, and to bring focus to the collector car community as it’s changing. Why? Because change is a constant! Founders Jim Pickering, Chad Taylor and Chad Allan Tyson all come from an automotive media background — one that took them to auction and concours events from Hot August Nights in Reno to Rétromobile in Paris, with quite a bunch of trips to Monterey Car Week, Arizona Car Week and Amelia Island thrown in between. For years, the focus at a number of these high-end events has been on cars from a certain few generations — from Pre-War through the 1980s — both in the marketplace and beyond. Of course, at the very same time — and at the very same events — participants and players have been crying that “young people just aren’t into cars anymore.” The way we see it, they’re wrong. They’ve just been looking in the wrong places. Yes, change is a constant, but the car world is just as vibrant today as it has ever been. We’re on the cusp of a generational shift — one that will redefine what’s collectible and why, as well as how people interact with those vehicles in ways that resonate with them. We’re here to talk about that, and to give you a better picture of the vehicles, the players and the trends as they exist in today’s world — not as they’re viewed via yesterday’s sentiments. It’s not about new cars and it’s not about old cars. It’s about people and how they interact with the cars that matter to them.

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So You Want to Buy Your First (Old) Car

So You Want to Buy Your First (Old) Car