The future is looking bleak for enthusiast and legacy cars, and the scene as we know it.
Previously, having received news that COE for the 1st bidding of August 2025 has once again (nearly) increased in price across the board with the sole exception of Cat D for motorcycles dropping.
While a record high for 2025, it hasn’t been the worst point in time for car owners to be renewing or buying cars.
In 2023, the actual peak was achieved in the 2nd bidding exercise in October 2023, with premiums extending into the sunny skies at S$150,001 for Category B COE and S$158,004 for Category E.
The disconcerting fact doesn’t lie fully in the prices, but how the amount has stayed largely consistent past pandemic times. Beyond 2021, the premiums just kept climbing and has culminated into a sure death for COE cars.
It might not as bad as I’m making it out – or it really is, because that’s still enough for whole new cars – but with such a high barrier to enter cars, how will it work out for the next generation carrying the torch?
The phrase “victim of COE” is far from a new concept and has claimed thousands of cars over the decades since the system was introduced. It has its merits and all, but its a unique situation that has costed Singapore much of its motoring heritage – not that the majority population really cares.
The auto journalist side of things cannot really help but take it in like everyone else; there’s hardly a reason to pay any mind to it and is better to just move on. They hardly pay (literally) attention to the classic side of things since it doesn’t net the same return as the sale of a new car, so the enthusiasm really only sticks to the owners.
Overseas friends now just see Singapore’s existing car culture to be comparably lacking – most aren’t really interested to know what the country has now, and waning is interest in what used to exist. “You aren’t that interesting” they say, where they are partially right.
The classic-plate scene is thriving, the only way to preserve the old scene made up of new imports or once-black plated examples, now given a boring extension to its life that involves being parked up for 320 days per year.
And that COE cost is already reflected onto new buyers. In the 2010s, the Fast & Furious cast were already shocked that a Toyota Corolla costed S$100,000. Now, its a S$200,000 asset.
Enthusiast cars now sit in the S$13,000 yearly depreciation range when they were at a time already considered expensive at S$6-8,000 yearly. Cars are not being renewed, or not being sold into the right owners, whose dealerships that renewed rather scrap the cars to save their back, or inflate their prices to where only a tiny few of the population can buy into.
There’s no mistaking the fact that the enthusiast scene’s peak was all too long ago. Past many event closures, location closures, high-profile deaths and offences, question mark of laws signed, claw against privacy, increasingly conservative society and a stubborn scrambling for money with existing COE – it will never come back. Even if everyone did a complete 180 and started supporting the medium (which they will never), it won’t bring back scrapped cars, old flames and remanufacturing. What’s done has been done here.
So its really getting to the end. 2024 was the last “good” year as the last 5-year COE cars got scrapped, and as 2026 and beyond crosses, it will take until 2030 for the last of the scene to be killed off. And it is a great hope that those strong enough to pursue their passion, once and for all, will get out of this increasingly dull place and follow their dreams.
~Guest writer Ji
Read more: Fuel for Thought: Parents, view my reflection on my early car-life
