£20,000 for a Defender

Until recently, I rather fancied an old Land Rover Defender.

They look right. Upright, purposeful, unmistakably British. No unnecessary frippery. A vehicle apparently designed for crossing Salisbury Plain with a sheep in the back rather than taking Arabella to Pilates. And somehow, over the years, they have become terribly desirable.

Then a few days ago I drove one. Five minutes later I was cured.

The seating position is inhumane. You sit with your elbow apparently surplus to Land Rover's design requirements. The steering is less a means of directing the vehicle than a wrestling match with it. The brakes do work, but stopping seems to be regarded as something best planned in advance.

Then there's the noise.

At 70 mph something in the transmission was whining away in a manner which, in virtually any other car, would have had me wondering whether it was the gearbox, differential or some other expensive collection of rotating metal preparing to become stationary metal.

The Defender didn't care. It hurtled along the motorway quite happily at 70, accompanied by the mechanical soundtrack of a vehicle approaching re-entry.

This particular example was worth about £20,000. And that's where it gets interesting, because the Defender hasn't become a better car. It has become a more desirable object and there's a difference.

We seem to have created an entire category of old cars whose prices are increasingly determined not by how good they are, but by whether the right sort of people have decided they're desirable.

Once that process starts, it feeds itself. Prices rise because people want them. People want them because prices are rising. Lifestyle magazines photograph them outside expensive country houses. Specialists start producing beautifully restored examples. Somebody puts tan leather inside one and suddenly an elderly agricultural implement is £60,000.

The same thing has happened to air-cooled Volkswagen campers. Early Minis. Range Rover Classics. Certain old Porsches. Fast Fords which were once simply used cars driven by young men with questionable judgement and an unusually intimate relationship with Halfords.

None has suddenly acquired better suspension or more horsepower. Their cultural meaning has changed.

Meanwhile, some genuinely superb old cars remain relatively affordable because fashion hasn't quite performed the appropriate laying-on of hands.

Take the Mercedes R129 SL. When new it was an enormously expensive, sophisticated piece of engineering. Beautifully built, comfortable, powerful, properly engineered and capable of cruising at motorway speeds without making you wonder whether the differential is trying to communicate with you. For years you could buy one for less than an old Defender.

There is nothing wrong with paying for nostalgia, rarity or beauty. I own old vehicles myself, so throwing stones from this particular greenhouse would be unwise. Nor does an old car have to be objectively good to be enjoyable. Sometimes its shortcomings are precisely what make it interesting.

But somewhere along the line we have confused desirable with good, and once enough people make that mistake simultaneously, the market puts a price on it.

Some old cars become expensive because they're exceptionally good. Others become exceptionally desirable because they've become expensive.

Having finally driven an old Defender, I now know which category I'd put that in. I wouldn't touch one with a bargepole.