Buy A Share In A Classic Car If You Can't Afford The Whole Thing

I know it may hurt to hear it, but for some people classic cars are just an investment – no feelings or emotions, just a smart way to earn some cash. And if you happen to be one of those entrepreneurs, but can't afford to spend millions, thousands, or even hundreds of dollars on a retro vehicle, we might have the solution.

Rally Rd, a Manhattan investment firm, is now offering individual investors to buy not only whole cars, but also shares in collectible machines. The company has a smartphone application for iOS, launched late last year, which allows you to buy a stake in a retro car for as little as $38.30. The full prices of the cars available range from $77,000 for a 1977 Lotus Esprit S1 to $495,000 for a 1993 Jaguar XJ220.

"It just wasn't legally and technologically possible to invest in these alternative asset classes previously," Max Niederste-Ostholt, the firm's CFO, explains in an interview to Bloomberg. "We'd all been thinking about it for a long time and thought, when can we get into these asset classes without having a whole warehouse to store cars?"

Rally Rd's app provides detailed information about the vehicles you can invest in, such as mileage, rarity, manufacturing location, and restoration details, where applicable. You then have two options – to invest or not, but the only car on the platform currently available to invest in is a stunning 1995 BMW M3 Lightweight.

Every car the firm offers is divided into 2,000 shares, which are offered to potential investors in a two-stage trading period. The company says it has thousands of shareholders at the moment, and between 15,000 and 20,000 people potentially joining the platform. Rally Rd is currently investing into expanding it with an application for Android and a web-based app.