Most Cars Lose Value the Moment You Drive Off the Lot. A Few Classic Cars Do the Opposite
6 min read
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6 min read
A regular car in Indonesia loses 15% to 25% of its value every single year, and an electric one can lose 35% to 60%. That is not a guess, it is the average outcome for almost every car on the road. But walk past a car meet and you will see a 40-year-old Mercedes or a beat-up old Land Cruiser selling for more than it cost new. Both facts are true at once. Classic car appreciation is real, but it belongs to a small, specific slice of old cars, not to "old cars" as a category. Here is what actually separates the two.
A car starts losing value the moment it is driven off the dealer's lot, and that loss keeps going every year after. Kompas reported in January 2025 that a used car in Indonesia typically sheds 15% to 25% of its value a year for its first five years, so that after five years the average car is worth only 35% to 50% of what it cost new. Electric vehicles lose value even faster, commonly 35% to 60% a year, according to OLXmobbi market data cited by Suara.com Otomotif in March 2026. NetWort's own Holdings feature reflects this reality by default: a car logged under the Vehicle manual asset category depreciates at -10% a year unless you change it, a conservative middle estimate for an ordinary petrol car (see NetWort's Vehicle depreciation breakdown by brand for the full range by model).
That is the baseline for essentially every car ever made. Classic car appreciation, where the trend reverses and the car gains value instead, is the exception, and a narrow one.
There is no single legal definition, but the convention most Indonesian dealers and collectors use is a car built more than 20 years ago. Age alone gets a car into the conversation. It does not get it a rising price. Most 20-year-old cars are simply old used cars: harder to find parts for, more expensive to maintain, and worth less than a comparable newer model with better fuel economy and safety features. The cars that actually gain value share a much narrower set of traits: they were rare or important when new, they have a documented history and mostly original parts, and there is an active, well-organized market of collectors bidding on that specific model.
The clearest evidence for how narrow this really is comes from Knight Frank's 2026 Wealth Report, which tracks classic cars as one of ten categories in its Luxury Investment Index. Over the past decade, classic cars returned about +58.9% as an asset class, trailing rare whisky (+191.7%), furniture (+140.9%) and watches (+125.1%), and only slightly ahead of art (+54%). The overall ten-category index slipped a mild -0.4% in 2025, after steeper declines of -2.7% in 2024 and -3.3% in 2023, a stabilizing but still soft market, not a booming one.
Hagerty, the collector-car insurer that publishes the industry's most-watched price index, tells the same story from a different angle. Its Affordable Classics Index, tracking the more accessible end of the market, fell 1% since the end of 2025 and 4% over the past year, continuing a gradual slide from an all-time high in 2024. As of mid-2026 its broader Hagerty Market Rating sat around 58 to 59 out of 100, still well below its 2022 peak. In other words, even inside the "classic car" category, the ordinary end of the market has been losing value too.
What still climbs, hard, is the tiny top tier: rare, historically significant models with pristine documentation. A 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL "Gullwing" sold for $2.53 million at the Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale auction in January 2026. Days later, a 1956 Gullwing that had never been restored, sold at a European auction for roughly €4.4 million (about $5.27 million, or Rp92.8 billion at the Rp17,600/USD rate quoted by BCA's e-rate on 8 September 2026), a premium driven specifically by its unrestored, all-original condition and documented history. That is classic car appreciation at its most extreme, and it is nowhere near representative of what a typical 20-year-old car in a Jakarta garage is worth.
Indonesia does not have a Hagerty-style index tracking specific models' prices year over year, so the data gap here is real and worth stating plainly. What is available are current asking-price snapshots. Listings in 2025 and 2026 put a VW Beetle ("VW Kodok") anywhere from Rp37 million for a rough example up to roughly Rp175 million to Rp200 million for a well-restored one, a Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40 from Rp200 million to over Rp1 billion depending on originality and restoration quality, and a Mercedes-Benz W123 ("Mercy Tiger") from Rp50 million to Rp150 million, according to multiple current listings and dealer guides (Kompas Otomotif, Carmudi, ACC.co.id). A Chevrolet Bel Air was listed around Rp942 million and a Chrysler Imperial Ghia around Rp271 million in the same sweep.
Those are snapshots of what sellers are asking today, not proof that any specific car's price rose from one year to the next. Without repeat-sale data for the Indonesian market the way Hagerty has for the US and European markets, the honest answer is that nobody can currently point to a verified, model-by-model appreciation rate for classic cars in Indonesia. Treat single-listicle claims of blanket price jumps with real skepticism until they cite an actual methodology.
If you own a genuinely rare, well-documented classic, NetWort's Holdings page lets you record it under the Vehicle category and manually override the default -10% depreciation rate with a positive number that reflects what comparable examples are actually selling for, the same way you would track any other manual asset. For most cars, including most 20-year-old ones, the honest move is to leave the default rate alone, or check our brand-by-brand depreciation data for a more accurate negative rate. Before assuming any old car in your garage is a hidden investment, ask whether it has the three things that actually drive classic car appreciation: real rarity, documented originality, and a collector market that is still growing, not just years on the odometer. Our piece on vintage watches as a resale asset walks through the same rarity-versus-nostalgia distinction for a very different kind of collectible.