With governments setting hard targets for the sale of zero-emission vehicles, and consumer interest in EVs growing, the writing seems to be on the wall for the gas-powered, internal-combustion engine. Within a couple of decades, almost all of our daily driving will be zero-emission, powered by batteries or hydrogen. But what about antique and hobby cars?
Whether street hot rods, classic cars in various stages of restoration, collector cars, summer-only convertibles or track-day specials, they’re the cars we rarely drive but plan to hang on to for years, even decades. What happens to them and will gasoline remain affordable or even available?
“Canadians can still continue to drive the vehicles they own today and there are no plans to phase out older vehicles,” says Environment and Climate Change Canada spokesperson Cecelia Parsons. She confirmed the focus is on reducing emissions from new vehicles and says, “given the average life span of a vehicle and the impact of federal vehicle regulations and the impact of carbon pricing on fuel prices, we expect that [gas-powered] light-duty vehicles will substantially decline in use over time.”
Hagerty, a company whose core business is providing insurance for “enthusiast vehicles,” estimates there are about 43 million such vehicles in the United States. If there is a similar percentage of enthusiast vehicles in Canada, that would suggest about three million here.
Despite the sheer number of vehicles, “we also know that enthusiasts use their vehicles sparingly. … Many vehicles are driven less than 1,000 miles [1,600 kilometres] per year,” says Hagerty founder and chief executive officer McKeel Hagerty. They’re also driven mostly in the warmer months when fuel economy is better.
On the other hand, “many [older cars] are not especially fuel-efficient, especially the muscle cars,” says Gideon Forman, a transportation policy analyst for the David Suzuki Foundation, a Vancouver-based non-profit that promotes environmental protection and sustainability. “That’s a concern if there are lots of them. We do need to stop burning gasoline. I don’t want to punish collectors, I understand the difficulty here, but they are a concern.”
Jack Gibbons, chair of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, is more optimistic. “The carbon emissions of antique cars that are only driven on Sundays in the summer are too trivial to worry about. We need to be focusing on persuading people to go electric when they purchase their next new car or pickup truck.”
As for the future availability of gasoline, Carol Montreuil, vice-president of Eastern Canada and economics for the Canadian Fuels Alliance, says it won’t be until around 2050 that the daily-driver gas-powered fleet is gone from the roads. “Long story short, our products are going to be around for some time.
“Eventually, some time after 2050 …. liquid petroleum products will be replaced with something else,” he says. “We don’t have to be Nobel Prize economists to figure that if our products are not used any more, eventually there will be very few refineries left.”
One potential option is biofuels or synthetic fuels. For example, Porsche – which notes that 70 per cent of all the cars it has ever built are still on the road – is working with partners to produce a synthetic eFuel that is almost completely carbon-neutral in its production. A pilot plant is initially being built north of Punta Arenas in Chilean Patagonia, which is expected to produce around 130,000 litres of eFuels in 2022. The capacity will then be expanded in two stages to around 55 million litres by 2024 and to around 550 million litres by 2026. The German car maker owned by Volkswagen recently announced a US$75-million investment in Highly Innovative Fuels Global, a manufacturer headquartered in the U.S. with operations in Chile.
“At the end of the day, necessity is the mother of invention and if there is a need and enough volume, someone, somewhere, will produce the fuels,” says Montreuil.
Another trend that’s already started is converting old cars to electric. GM and Ford have added electric options to their lines of aftermarket crate engines that cater to “modders” and street rodders; and a growing cottage industry of companies is converting customers’ cars or selling kits to DIYers.
“People have been repowering cars forever,” Hagerty says. “Our view is that an EV conversion, done right, which allows a car to be driven, or even encourages it to be driven more, is a good thing.”
For purists, the importance of originality will rule this out, though that concern can be mitigated if the conversion is easily reversible.
Alternatively, Hagerty suggests, we may see carbon-offset programs for enthusiasts.
Nobody sees gas-powered cars ever being outright banned from the road. But even if they were, higher-end collectibles would still be a solid investment, says Peter Klutt, founder and CEO of Legendary Motorcar Co., a restorer and dealer in Georgetown, Ont. “Collector cars have become a legitimate art form and legitimate asset class, and those aren’t going to go away,” he says. “It’s a safe place to put money that has a serial number [that is] not volatile like Bitcoin.”
Klutt added that even brand-new exotics are being resold for big premiums “still in the wrapper and never having been used. They look at it as an art form rather than something driven, or if driven, only very sparingly in a rally.”
More likely, in the absence of an outright ban, the increasing rarity of gas-powered cars will make them more desirable, Klutt says, in the same way as “to a lesser degree, we’ve seen that standard transmissions have gone the way of the dinosaur and all that has done is drive up the price of cars that still have them.”
For those who can afford it, he points to the growing popularity of country-club style tracks where owners can exercise their cars away from public roads that are becoming increasingly inhospitable to driving just for the joy of it.
According to Hagerty, at least one potential threat to the enthusiast-car movement – the supposed indifference of younger people to cars and driving – is not yet materializing.
“Our team produces or sponsors more than 2,500 enthusiast events every year and we see, first-hand, how car love is being passed from one generation to the next. In 2021, for the first time ever, the majority of new Hagerty members were Gen X and millennials. The younger generation is stepping up and into the space.”
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