Most “investment cars” aren’t actually investable

Been digging into this space pretty heavily recently and honestly… a lot of what gets labeled “investment grade” feels questionable.

What I keep seeing:

• cars with no real provenance being priced like they have it
• restored cars marketed as “better than original”
• dealers leaning hard on production numbers alone

But when you actually try to move these cars later, it’s a different story.

The ones that seem to hold up tend to be:

• boring specs (but correct ones)
• full paper trail
• minimal stories / surprises

Liquidity seems way more important than people admit.

I started putting together a small project around this (basically filtering for cleaner, investment-grade examples — pistonalpha.com if anyone’s curious), and it’s surprisingly hard to find genuinely solid cars.

Curious what others here think —
what actually qualifies as “investment grade” vs just expensive?