It’s easy to value a car when it’s unregistered and brand new on the show room floor! You just look at the price tag on the windscreen and pay the man to drive it away. But once you drive out the showroom door and off into the sunset, the value of that same car is now completely subjective, and the more you drive and the older it becomes, the wider the valuation gap becomes.

Sure there are multiple websites in existence that ask you a load of questions about the car like the make, model, year, and kilometres, purely so they can provide you with a price range or current value based on the national averages, but even these are often skewed based on whether their measure is the asking price or the price it actually sold for. These sites also don’t take into account the amount of cars that don’t sell purely because they are too expensive for the age and the condition.

To make matters worse, unlike a house, you could spend $10,000 on replacing all the suspension, brakes, and exhaust on a used car worth $5,000 second hand, only to find that when you go to sell it the value of the car is still only $5,000. How can this be though? Why if I spend $50,000 on an extension for a house does it increase the value of the house by almost the same amount, if not more, yet this equation does not work on cars? Simple……the invention that heralded a brand new age in transport for the planet all those years ago is now simply a commodity like a mobile phone, computer, or an ink cartridge in a printer. You use it and when it’s been used you throw it away and get another one.

Using the old value adage of supply and demand, there are simply now so many cars around that they are just so cheap to buy. Why would I buy a used car for $20k from a car lot on a main road from a car salesman wearing brown pants and white shoes, when I can buy a brand new car for less money that comes with 5 years / unlimited kilometers warranty? Last year in Australia we again sold over one million new cars but the statistic you never really hear mentioned is that the industry standard is also that 6 cars out every 10 new cars sold have a trade in as part of the deal. This means that for the one million new cars sold in 2010, there were also another 600,000 used cars which were added to the market. With figures like this it’s no wonder cars devalue quicker than most things you can buy these days.

Take the brand new car you drive off the show room floor. The national average shows a new car devalues by 17% once you own it and that you can add another 1% for every 1,000 kilometres you add to the clock. Thus, a new car worth $50,000 off the showroom floor that has 10,000 kilometres on the speedo by the end of the first twelve months, is now already only worth $36,500 as a trade in.

“WHAT”, I can hear you say, “but I’ve kept my car in perfect pristine condition and had it’s first service on exactly the right day”.

Completely and absolutely irrelevant to a car dealer. The car is now last years model with 10k on the clock, and if you traded it now they’d put it on the lot for 90 days at $42,995 drive away expecting to get $41,000 from either a passer by or someone who sees the carsales.com.au advert. If they don’t sell it in 90 days they would dump it to a wholesaler for $38k who in turn would either take it to the auctions where people always think they’re getting a ‘bargain’ for $39k as a quick turn around, try selling it quickly on eBay, or may flip it to a dirt floor car yard for $500 more than they paid just to get it off their hands. Welcome to the car industry!

Models of cars often follow the same valuation path as their real life counterpart. Take a current model Commodore, these devalue by at least 50% in the first three years, and the models of these cars suffer the same fate. This is why people collect them purely for collecting purposes and not for their resale value. This is also the reason you see ‘brand new’ old stock for sale of current model Commodores given away at greatly reduced prices purely because the true model car collectors simply are not interested in them and model shops can’t sell them.

Just like real cars, model car valuations take in to account the quality of the model, the number produced, the condition of the packaging etc, and the relevance of the real car. Models of older cars however usually increase in value just like the real cars with some models fetching up to 10 times their original sale price. The new Top Gear Wrecking Yard Sale is a great source of these models and with over two dozen models for sale there’s bound to be something in there for everyone. The models themselves are OK but usually it’s the packaging that’s some times ripped or broken. This is the only reason they are discounted so the value of the model on the open market itself is more than likely unchanged.

I talk often here about days gone past and the models of yesteryear and one other thing that I believe is gone for good as a result of the car industry today is the days of new cars appreciating in value. Take the Ford Falcon GTHO Phase III! $5,300 when new on the showroom floor yet today you can spend upwards of $600k on one with the highest public record of one for sale being $750,000 at auction. That’s a mark up from it’s original sale price of  a lazy 7,075%! I can’t think of any car on the road today that will be worth 7% more than it’s purchase price 40 years after it’s release, let alone 7000% like the GTHO. Can you?

Have station wagons really become that unfashionable that no one wants them anymore? Is the thought of driving a family touring wagon really that uncool? Why have national sales of station wagons fallen so low over the last decade that the majority of brands simply don’t sell them here any more? Maybe the answer is simply related to peer group pressure and our never ending need to be socially acceptable, or does it go deeper.

For us old blokes we grew up in a time when you really didn’t have much choice of body style in a car. If you had a family you either bought a sedan or a wagon. There were no ‘people mover’ Tarago’s and certainly no luxury 7 seater four wheel drives. You either bought a Valiant, a Kingswood, or a Falcon with a bench seat across the front, and crammed the family in. Coupes and convertibles were reserved for the single people, and four wheel drives were either for farmers or people who towed boats or caravans.

Then in the late seventies it all started to change with the introduction of cars like the first Range Rovers. These were four wheel drives that still handled the dirt well, but also contained the luxury of a classic British car (along with some of the mechanical joys as well). Leather, radio/cassettes, sun roof, and a great sounding V8 all went towards making these a new alternative to the cars of the day. But while thousands of these cars sold all over the world, the price still put these beasts just out of reach of the average Australian family. Then companies like Nissan and Toyota began to take notice and realise there was a great future for their 4WD vehicles if they followed the Range Rover lead, but also make them slightly more affordable for the average bloke. And so the four wheel drive craze had begun!

The eighties saw many companies begin producing 4WD wagons in all shapes and sizes to compete with the new market interest and while some products didn’t stick like the Lada Niva, other brands went from strength to strength like Suzuki who had always been a poor cousin to the larger brands, but came into their own with the Sierra and Vitara. By the time the nineties rolled around we were four wheel drive mad and off road vehicles now represented over 15% of all new car sales in Australia. At this time there were new issues to address like the fact that 72% of four wheel drives sold in the nineties had a bull bar fitted which was proven to not be kind to human bodies at anything over 30 klm/hr. The nineties also saw the introduction of a new 4WD market. The expensive luxury 4WD’s that cost more than a house in Dubbo, driven by mum’s taking their kids to school in the affluent suburbs of our capital cities, that never came within a decaf Soy Cappuccino of a dirt road, yet the status of driving one that was bigger, more expensive, and blacker than all the others was paramount!

By the year 2000 the four wheel drive was now as common in Australian driveways as football, meat pies, and kangaroos, and cars like the old station wagon had been simply left behind. We can argue that a station wagon is far more practical than a big 4WD, more economical, and often holds a better resale value, but then we can also argue that Beta video drives were technically more advanced than VHS and were used up until recent years by TV stations all over the world. It’s all irrelevant as rightly or wrongly the public believes different so Beta died and VHS went gang busters, and four wheel drives remain while companies begin to remove the wagon as an option in the showroom.

So why are we so different to other markets like Europe? In Europe there is no doubt the 4WD has a presence, but European car companies are still pumping out wagons faster than you can say my wiener schnitzel needs more sauerkraut, with brands like Peugeot and Benz publishing record wagon sales over the last five years. The US still pumps out large family wagons in their common brands of Chevrolet, Ford, and Chrysler, so why not here? Why in Australia have we decided the wagon is no longer a part of our culture? Are we really that confused, or is the answer to the north?

Remember when 200B, Bluebird, 323/626/929, and Corolla wagons were everywhere? Where have all the Japanese wagons gone to? In fact there aren’t that many Japanese brands left who still offer a station wagon in their range here in Australia. So I guess it’s left up to our big three manufacturers being Chrysler, Ford, and Holden to provide us with our station wagon needs. But wait, Ford has announced the end of the Falcon wagon to be replaced by the Ford global car being the Mondeo, the Commodore wagon has lost half it’s storage room and is almost a hatchback, and the Chrysler 300C wagon is ok if you’re into moving large quantities of product but still isn’t a popular choice.

The wagon future is bleak my friends and while the brand new Trax wagons being released on 25th August help us relive a great time in Australian wagon history, there is nothing good about the Australian wagon future ahead.

“Thanks mate, you’re a legend”, is a common Australianism that’s used across the country for the simplest of things. You might have been the guy who brought the beer to the BBQ, maybe you gave a mate a lift, or maybe you simply lent him twenty for a bet on race seven at Randwick. Either way, being called a legend is a good thing especially when you think about the people in the world who share this category with you.

The problem is though as life gets busier and we focus more of our intention towards on-line communications, words like legend and hero have been slightly devalued over the years. No one argues that the blokes who kept climbing that muddy hill in Turkey during WWI were heroes and deserved all the medals they got, but are they really in the same category as the people we send over to swim in a pool who are trying to win a medal for a different race? Who knows, but I do know we never sent hero-grams to Turkey in the same way we were all encouraged to send them to Athens for the Olympics.

So why do we do it? Why do we reduce the title to a lesser meaning? Are we really that insecure as a nation that we need to cling to anything that gives us a glimmer of recognition on the world stage? The dictionary says a legend amongst other things is, “An extremely famous or notorious person in a particular field, who becomes the benchmark for new people in that field”.

Lets take a look at the two people in the Top Gear Legends Series as an example! No one argues whether or not Sir Jack Brabham or Mick Doohan were legends in their field based on the above criteria and it is pretty much irrelevant to most people what they drove or rode. This is not about Ford or Holden, Honda or Kawasaki, it’s about the person themselves and what they achieved on these machines. Sir Jack had already won many races but then took that success to the next level by building his own race car and winning the drivers championship and the manufacturers title in the same year. After the initial success of Wayne Gardner, Mick put Australia on the map when it came to the World 500cc Motorbike Championships by winning a record five consecutive seasons. No one talks about the fact he did it on a Honda, no one under 30 these days even knows what a Repco BT19 is, but they know who these guys are! They may not know what they’re specifically famous for, but they’ve heard the names before and know they’re famous for something. That’s what makes them a legend! People will talk about those successes for years to come until one day, someone wins six consecutive 500cc titles and becomes the new legend in that arena.

People have asked me who the next Legend is going to be? I’ve had hundreds of suggestions from people saying, “You should do Peter Brock or Dick Johnson or someone like that”! Well lets look at Brocky for a second! Is he a legend? Holden fans would say of course he is, Ford fans may too, but is he in the same league as a Brabham or a Doohan. His record of Bathurst wins is unbeaten, he’s driven multiple brands of cars at multiple events in multiple countries (Who can forget the 24 hour race in Spa with Brock, Moffat, and Grice in the VK?), so yes I guess you could say he is a legend, but as he unfortunately isn’t alive to sign the Signature Series in the Legends range, then we wont be releasing a Brock Legends model.

Either way, our next Legend will need to be someone who isn’t questioned about their legend status, someone who everybody irrelevant of class, manufacturer, or sex agrees is a legend in the true sense of the word. To do anything less would only devalue the title even more…

Picking a name for anything new is always hard. Does the name reflect the item, will people remember it, does it roll off the tonque etc, are all good questions to ask when going through the process. Naming our children for some is easy as we follow tradition or religion, name them after a famous person, or as is common these days, make one up! Band names are often harder to pick as whilst questions like does the name reflect the music style, is it in line with the age of the audience, and will it sound cool are all considered, it’s the buying public that have the last say. Would The Beatles have been as successful if they were called The Bottles, The Beagles, or even John Lennon & The Beatles? What if Coke was called Joke, would it still be, “The Real Thing”? It’s all relevant and our world could be a very different place if we were spending lazy Sunday afternoons listening to ‘The Boggles’ sing “Hard Days Work”, whilst sipping on a ‘Scotch & Joke’.

Paint names for the auto industry however seem immune to these rules as over the years there have been some very interesting names for paint colours of cars which we as the buying public seem to completley accept as quite normal. ‘Bondi Bleach’, ‘Gundagai Grey’, ‘Purr-Pull’, ‘Katherine Beige’ etc, are all colours used in the production of Australian cars over the years. But how did they come about? Who was the person who sat in their office back at Leyland design HQ and decided, “You know what? This new green colour for the P76 is going to be called, “Hairy Lime”! More importantly, who were the people around them who must have been saying, “Yeah, thats a great name for a colour”?

I’m not for one minute saying it’s an easy thing to do. Afterall, there have been literally thousands of different colours over the years, some are only a few shades apart, but all different none the less, and having a name for each colour certainly is more marketable than having a simple paint code. Image at a BBQ with your mates discussing new cars. “I like the look of that new Falcon in T31 Blue just quietly!”
“Really?”, says a mate, “I prefer X39 Blue myself as it has a better look in the sun!” Furthermore, in some cases, identical paint colours have been known to have different names over the years as fashion changes.

Race tracks and motor racing in general have always been a popular source of colour names with the old sales addage of “Race on Sunday, Sell on Monday” having been with us since the earliest days of motor racing. “Silverstone Black” is a Jaguar colour used in the seventies named after the colour of the very successful Jag team that raced there, and Aston Martin is based on a race track with the moniker coming about after the success of Lionel Martin in hill climb racing up Aston Hill in Buckinhghamshire in England. In later years there have been some limited edition Aston Martins with names such as the Aston Martin N400 and the N420, not named after the engine size or horse power, but named after codes of specific corners in the legendary Nurburgring circuit in Europe.

Locally we’ve never really followed this naming process with most of our colours either being named after towns or rivers etc. You could argue that Warwick Yellow on the 327 Monaro’s in the 60′s was as a result of them racing at Warwick Farm in Sydney, but maybe it was named after the town Warwick in QLD, or maybe Warwick was the name of the guy who chose it.

Either way, arguably the most famous colour named after a race track in the world would have to be Monza Red, named after the famous Monza Race Track built in 1923 and still used today for the Italian Grand Prix. The earliest origins of this colour date back to the 30′s when Alfa Romeo 8C open wheelers were racing around the track in early Formula One races. Road versions of these cars were sold to the public highlighting the fact they were painted in ‘Monza Red’ and the buying public went crazy for them. Later, when the team was owned by one Enzo Ferrari, he took the colour to the next level by painting his road versions of Ferrari’s in Monza Red making it one of the most well known colours in the world.

Over the years the name Monza Red has appeared on many marques from road versions of race cars, to normal commuter cars. I saw an advert for a 1984 Nissan Patrol the other day with the owner proudly announcing the vehicle had been resprayed in Monza Red! The colour has become so popular over the years it’s almost like Europe’s version of British Racing Green. Both colours have been produced over many years by multiple manufacturers, all with their own version and shade of the colour. From what I could find there are at least 5 different shades of Monza Red used around the world. The shade however used on the Australian Ford XE Falcon appears true to the original, which is probably why it looks so good! Do we know if an XE actually ever raced at Monza? Probably not, but does it really matter?

Welcome to “TOP BLOG” a great new way to read all about some of the exciting new products and important information about Top Gear and the great range of Australian model cars, buses and trucks that we produce. You are more than welcome to add your comments to each topic. New subjects will appear on a regular basis and we trust that our new TOP BLOG will enhance your collecting pursuits.

Good Collecting,

Robert Hill

Managing Director

Have you ever considered the thought process that goes into the selection of colours when recreating model cars? Here at Trax reaching a final colour choice for a new model is never taken lightly. Some of these main considerations include (and there are others);

• Popularity of the colour with the original car.
• While the colour may look great on a real car, how will it turn out after the journey down to 1/43 scale?
• How easy is it to read for example the chrome silver decorations against the colour especially at 1/43 scale?
• Is the colour a genuine original?
• Have similar colours already been produced for that model?

The list goes on but at the end of the day, colour is subjective and as we have learnt after more than 25 years of continuous model production, the finished result is always in the eye of the beholder. Some models with hot colours have flopped, while some dull metallic colours have sold out like crazy.

Colourful liviries on commercial vehicle always seem to be popular, not only because they give the feel of a completely different model, but collectors really appreciate the extra detail of these models at scale. There are numerous model bus examples of this and likewise in the Trax range the Sandman “Sea Witch” Van and also many of  the  taxi models.

Just like clothing, automotive colours are also a big fashion with choice changing over the years from whites and light shades, to dark shades and the recent obsession with silver and silver variant coloured cars. This is one aspect that makes cars so typical of an era and keeps it interesting. In 20 years time what will people be thinking about the sea of silver on our roads that exists today? Sometimes no matter how perfect a model may be in construction and shape, its look can be limited by the original colours that were available in its day.

Matching original paint colours to our models has come a long way from the days of taking actual “mini paint tin” samples in our luggage when visiting the diecast factories. Today it is almost always done by computer with remarkable accuracy. One frustration though that remains is with metallic paints containing flecks. Remember we are dealing in scale and as hard as we try, the fleck cannot be scaled down in the paint to match the model size of 1/43 scale in a car or 1/76 scale for a bus model.

While Trax generally selects original colours only from the car makers original colour offering for that particular model, there are occassional models released outside of this parameter. Once such example was the Trax Superscale (1/24) Ford XY Falcon GTHO phase 111 that was released back in 2001. Ford enthusiasts were quick to point out that this colour never existed, but indeed it did as a factory special order.

Production numbers of this model were kept low and the end result was a fast sell out with the end result being many satisfied collectors who bought it for its uniqness and love of this rare model.  

What do model collectors think? Does colour transfer to the model format and does colour really maketh the model?