Some muscle cars are coming out of car storage, not in Dallas, but in Detroit. Specifically, approximately 250 cars that have been part of the GM Heritage Collection are coming out of auto storage and going under the gavel at this year’s Barrett Jackson auction in Arizona.
GM has decided to keep mum about some of the significant differences between a few of these cars and their production counterparts. As Jeremy Korzeniewski, writing for autoblog, noted in his post, some collectors have hired Mark McPhail the recently retired head of GM Performance Engineering as a consultant to advise them about the GM Heritage Cars.
Having superior information on a car up for bid certainly will give some bidders an edge in determining its true value.
I have to agree with one of the comments that followed the autoblog story. What sense does it make to keep quiet about what makes the GM Heritage cars significant?
Presumably, the point for GM should be to generate as much interest among serious car collectors in the cars up for auction.
Would it not, then, make sense to release very specific information about the place of the car in GM’s history and how they differ from the standard production model?
It might cost a retired GM executive a nice consulting gig, but car blogs would write about the cars, forums would discuss them, and collectors would be much more engaged and much more likely to bid.
As noted in a previous post about the Heritage Collection Cars being auctioned, I think it is quite sad that GM has to sell off cars from its Heritage Collection to stay in business, and it is even sadder that the Congress and our outgoing president think it a good idea to give the failed American auto companies billions of our tax dollars.
I hope that these cars will end up in car museums and in the hands of car collectors and car sharing club owners. Certainly, I’ll tune in to watch the Speed Network coverage of the Barrett Jackson auction.
