Well, here's my uninformed, uneducated OPINION - although I also deal in vintage guitars and the like, so that experience is the basis for my opinions. Let me predicate all this by saying that I, myself, feel that MY 2004 Crossfire is an instant classic (as they ALL are). Build #4416, it's one of the first five thousand built of less than eighty thousand total, world wide (best guess at this time). Yes, I have romanticized it (as we all do), and I enjoy owning and driving the car VERY much... But... It's a car.

No different than any other car, driving it off the lot for the very first time USUALLY hands you your first big drop in value. That's life. If you're thinking of this car as an investment, you're fooling yourself - or, you are ONE POOR investor! That why I bought mine used a month or two ago, a lease return with 36k miles on it. Just broke in good, IHMO. The big first hit has been taken by the previous owner.

As long as the car stays in production, they will continue to devalue at the same rate as other similar cars, ie, sporty-touring two-seaters - excluding, of course, the fact that the "NEW" prices may yet be all over the board from dealers charging over MSRP, to dealers blowing them out at thousands of dollars less. Between this forum and my home-town experience, I've heard it go both ways.

Once production and delivery STOPS, we're probably in for a BIG DROP on the devaluation roller-coaster, so hang on.

I think that it will take NO LESS than ten years after production has stopped for the Crossfire value freefall to hit bottom. Are you ready to start scanning the classified ads in 2018 for that $2500 Crossfire, to refurbish or keep as a "parts donor" for your car?

AT TWENTY years out of production, we will probably see the prices start to come back up... slowly. The big re-value won't come in until the car is forty or fifty years old - like a '55 Chevy on today's market.

Of course, the accuracy of the last two statements is completely dependent on a fickle market that is DEMAND-driven. It's unrealistic to imagine that the car will achieve "desirable classic" status in anything less than AT LEAST twenty years - hey, do you think an '85 Corvette with 120k miles (that's just 5k a year) is a classic, or a clunker? What kind of an investment would that have been?

Yeah, I know, apples and oranges, but you get the drift. It's still a CAR, after all. Will the (we ASSume) low production numbers really do much to help the car hold its value during the first twenty years? I think not...

Now, it's pretty tough to predict how much demand there will actually be for an odd-duck, orphaned sporty-touring two-seater that didn't sell well and probably won't be serviced by either the dealer that sold it (Chrysler) or the company that designed most of it (Mercedes). On the other hand, there should still be parts available from Mercedes, and I predict that there will be a growing underground society of rebel mechanics and hot-rodders, adapting and modifying genuine Mercedes-labeled replacement parts to work in the Crossfire. There DO seem to be a large number of Crossfire "enthusiasts"... we of the faith!

Can you tell that it's my intention to just keep the car, regardless? I can just see myself passing this one on the grandkids in thirty years as an automotive oddity, like a Stanley Steamer or a boat-tailed Auburn. Or, at least, with something like the status of an Edsel...

"Yes, little Eddie, this is what cars were like, right after the turn of the century..." !!!