My dad was born in 1960, a child of the muscle car era. Despite the decade-plus I’ve spent trying to articulate the Gran Turismo hero cars of my youth and their appeal, his love of old Detroit iron persists. This, from a man who spent the last year wringing out a 1999 Mercedes SL 500 at track days and time trials.
[Editor’s Note: Jack Swansey holds a degree in anthropology with a focus on car culture, and he is the world’s leading ethnographic authority (by default, if you must know) on NASCAR fandom. His love of the automobile fuels him to discover what cars mean to the people who own, drive, and love them.]
Dad called me recently to recount his latest adventure: taking to the high banks and sharp chicanes of Charlotte Motor Speedway’s ROVAL.
“I was doing great,” he told me. “I passed a Corvette, then one of those Hondas with the center-exit exhaust. And then I looked in the rearview and saw… that. At first, I couldn’t tell what it was. Then it blew past me like I was standing still.”
After his session concluded, he tracked down the mystery car: a 1972 Chevelle that an intrepid enthusiast had seemingly pulled from some field in the Carolinas almost directly onto the race track. However, beneath the Chevelle’s mismatched rust-and-primer bodywork lurked a brand-new rear end and motorsport-grade steering, suspension, and brakes.
The owner told my dad he was considering having the Chevy repainted. The guy figured he might better fit in among the Porsche-driving SCCA members he’d been curb-stomping out on the asphalt. My dad offered one word in response:
“Don’t.”
Patina, despite even the best efforts, is a difficult thing to define. But you’ll know it when you see it. It’s the warm-smelling leather of some 1940s Plymouth, its exterior finish faded to a dull luster. It’s the rusting bedside of a hard-working “OBS” Ford F-150 from the mid-1990s. Patina is a graceful attribute, one worthy of respect. It is earned. You may aspire to it for your own vehicle, but the notion of faking it just for the aesthetic misses the whole point.
Rather than joining the chorus arguing for or against patina, I (as an automotive anthropologist) am interested in knowing the why of it all. Why are grizzled hot rod enthusiasts and artsy twenty-something Instagrammers alike drawn to vehicles that wear scars of oxidation and time, despite a mainstream consumer culture that values the latest and greatest? What does patina mean?
Don’t worry, fellow automotiva academics. I’ve come prepared with citations.
Historian and archaeologist Shannon Lee Dawdy quite literally wrote the book on the topic, researching Patina: A Profane Archaeology in New Orleans in the years immediately before and after Hurricane Katrina. She writes:
“Two desires coexist: for the youthful, replaceable commodity and for the old, well-worn object … most new commodities lose resale value as soon as they are purchases, but eventually… an object that begins as a generic and replaceable commodity transforms into an idiosyncratic possession with little shared worth, and later into a collectively valued treasure.”
The value of a brand-new car is obvious to everyone. Newness represents the pinnacle of an era’s performance, efficiency, and safety. A new vehicle is an object physically untouched by the ravages of time or careless previous owner(s). Peace of mind is something you can buy: a car that definitely won’t be dented, faded, or broken. And if it does break, it’s under warranty. To many, it’s the safest, most rational decision if you can spare the coin.
Imagine an example. Some day in 1999, a person walked into a Mercedes-Benz dealership with a check for $85,000 and drove out in their brand-new SL 500. They may have requested black paint, a light gray interior, and a few options. But if the exact same car existed on the lot across town, they’d have been equally happy to take it home, or any of the hundreds of cars that Mercedes built to those specifications. A new Mercedes SL is a new Mercedes SL is a new Mercedes SL.
But to the market, the moment a signature appeared on a dotted line, that particular SL 500 lost a great deal of its value—about 30 percent of it. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, and you can’t un-use a German luxury car. That’s depreciation, people. With each passing month and mile, each change in ownership, new fluid leak, and additional worn spot on the upholstery, this particular SL’s market value dropped further. By the time its third owner signed the title in 2021, it was worth just $6000.
Though our Benz scenario is surely not what Dawdy imagined when she penned her words, that German drop-top came to its new owner (and the owner’s anthropologist son) as what she would call an “idiosyncratic possession with little shared worth.” For our purposes, it was a 150,000-mile example of a car that wasn’t all that special to begin with.
But in spending hours in and around it—replacing the busted hydraulic cylinders in the top mechanism, tightening the sloppy steering box, and swapping out high-performance brake pads and fluid—it became not just an R129-generation Mercedes SL, but our family’s. Our love for the car (and each other) imbued the Benz with sentimental value that far exceeds its worth on paper.
Only time will tell if my dad’s SL 500 starts to appreciate, turning the corner from an idiosyncratic treasure to one “collectively understood” by car culture at large.
But the case is far clearer for the track-rat Chevelle.
Were the Chevy an all-original, low-mileage, mint-condition car, it would fetch a good chunk of change. (As much as $40,000 on average, for a concours-condition SS.) Certain collectors desire examples of their dream cars as close as possible to the way they rolled off the factory floor. Barely used. Mostly untouched. Basically new, if not for the fact that they’re so old.
Market forces—the laws of supply and demand—mean that auction-block queens can be treated as assets, smartly bought low and sold high, and traded to create wealth for their owners. This is how commodities behave.
That rat-rod Chevelle would have far more market value were its owner to pay for a frame-off restoration. Done properly, it might even make back the investment, though that’s usually unlikely. But this is commodity thinking. And if you’re reading this, you might consider reducing that bitchin’ Chevy to mere dollars and cents to be downright offensive.
Dawdy, again, has the answer. She explains, “[we] value things for the way they transcend their own commodification.”
Yes, all the cars we care about were once consumer goods, sold by some large corporation to turn a profit for its shareholders. From that economic perspective, a car loses its value with use. But from a human perspective, it’s only through use that a car is imbued with the sentimental value that makes it mean something more.
Sun damage, oxidization, cracked upholstery, bumper stickers for candidates who lost the White House before I was born… patina is powerful because it presents visual evidence that a car has existed in the real world. It has been used: owned, parked, driven, fixed… loved, maybe. Hated, some days. You don’t need to talk to the owner or even to be a car enthusiast to see from a single glance that a car with patina has something you can’t fake: time. A story.
I don’t like rusty looking cars for myself but I can appreciate the “patina” others would soldier on with.
I’m 40, and ever since I can remember I was always drawn more to the original and patina’d vehicles at shows. I almost never stop at the mint condition ones. I even distressed and wrecked my hotwheels, and built model cars to look rusty and wrecked.
I particularly like the picture of the “bullnose” Ford since that is my current obsession. I enjoy driving around in my two bullnose Fords with some patina, and a 68 Chevelle 4 door with pretty heavy patina, and folks seem to enjoy seeing them also. Thanks for the article.
In general, patina can be a good thing; a true “survivor” car or truck is worthy of admiration and preservation. But like with anything, there can be too much of a good thing. Much of the “barn find” mania, and the deliberately patina’d “rat rod” craze, I never got that. To each his own I guess. Our hobby is a big tent.
Wabi Sabi –Japanese mindset around accepting age and imperfection.
Kintsugi –Japanese pottery repair technique that can turn philosophy… celebration of the damage and the repair, not trying to hide it but also keeping the item usable and beautiful in a flawed, new way.
Fake patina is its own subject, but for real patina, I think most of the dislike for patina comes from viewing cars as status symbols – or at least viewing patina-ed cars as anti status symbols. I think in a lot of peoples’ minds, if your things look tattered and worn, it is an indication that you do not have your house in order.
For people who like (real) patina, I think that falls out into two groups. Group A like the car, understand there is no return in restoring it, and accept the patina. Group B sees the patina as a sign of a resurrected survivor. Anyone with appropriately deep pockets can have a car fully restored. Only certain people can regularly drive a well-worn survivor.