Written by Faryal Raza Bhatti, Marketing Manager, Heritage Car Insurance
Last updated 23 September 2026
Ask classic car owners what worries them about the future of the hobby and the answer is not fuel, or legislation, or values. It is whether anyone will still know how to fix these cars. In Heritage’s 2026 Classic Car Report, 51% of the 841 owners surveyed said they were worried there will not be enough skilled mechanics to maintain classic cars in future. A bare majority, and the single largest forward-looking concern in the survey.
Why is this happening now?
The skills that keep a 1960s car running were mainstream trades when these cars were new. Carburettor tuning, points and timing, panel beating, lead loading, trimming, engine machining. Mainstream automotive training dropped them decades ago, because a modern vehicle technician works on sealed electronic systems and diagnostic software and has no professional reason to learn any of it.
The generation that learned those skills in the trade is now approaching or past retirement. So are the owners. 89% of classic owners in our survey are aged 55 or over and 64% are aged 65 or over, with an estimated average owner age of 66 to 67. The FBHVC reached the same conclusion from a different direction: its 2025 National Historic Vehicle Survey found the average owner now in their sixties. The knowledge and the cars are ageing together, and the transfer downwards is running slower than the retirements.
There is a supply chain dimension that gets less attention. Specialist machine shops, platers, trimmers and casting foundries serving this trade are small businesses, frequently built around one or two people. When they shut, the capability goes with them, and nobody replaces it because the volumes never justified a second entrant.
The scale is not trivial. The FBHVC puts the historic vehicle sector at £7.3 billion a year, supporting 34,500 jobs across roughly 2,700 specialist businesses, and counts 1,934,178 historic vehicles on the DVLA database needing continuous attention.
Are the owners part of the answer?
The encouraging finding sits directly beside the worrying one. 44% of owners say maintenance and restoration is one of the things they most enjoy about owning a classic, behind driving and general hobby enjoyment but well ahead of investment.
This is not a hobby where people drop the car at a garage and collect it on Friday. A substantial share of the skill base sits with owners, and that is where much of it passes on: through clubs, forums, shows and the hard-won specifics of a single model.
That is part of why car club membership matters so much. 69% of owners belong to at least one. Clubs work as a distributed technical archive, connecting people who need a job doing with people who have already done it, and sustaining parts networks no commercial supplier would touch.
Ask classic car owners what worries them about the future of the hobby and the answer is not fuel, or legislation, or values. It is whether anyone will still know how to fix these cars. In Heritage’s 2026 Classic Car Report, 51% of the 841 owners surveyed said they were worried there will not be enough skilled mechanics to maintain classic cars in future. A bare majority, and the single largest forward-looking concern in the survey.
Why is this happening now?
The skills that keep a 1960s car running were mainstream trades when these cars were new. Carburettor tuning, points and timing, panel beating, lead loading, trimming, engine machining. Mainstream automotive training dropped them decades ago, because a modern vehicle technician works on sealed electronic systems and diagnostic software and has no professional reason to learn any of it.
The generation that learned those skills in the trade is now approaching or past retirement. So are the owners. 89% of classic owners in our survey are aged 55 or over and 64% are aged 65 or over, with an estimated average owner age of 66 to 67. The FBHVC reached the same conclusion from a different direction: its 2025 National Historic Vehicle Survey found the average owner now in their sixties. The knowledge and the cars are ageing together, and the transfer downwards is running slower than the retirements.
There is a supply chain dimension that gets less attention. Specialist machine shops, platers, trimmers and casting foundries serving this trade are small businesses, frequently built around one or two people. When they shut, the capability goes with them, and nobody replaces it because the volumes never justified a second entrant.
The scale is not trivial. The FBHVC puts the historic vehicle sector at £7.3 billion a year, supporting 34,500 jobs across roughly 2,700 specialist businesses, and counts 1,934,178 historic vehicles on the DVLA database needing continuous attention.
