OK boomer, time to get out of the fast lane.

When it comes to classic car ownership and investing, the belief was that older buyers had all money to burn. Turns out, the conventional thinking was wrong.

Classic car insurer Hagerty (HGTY) found in a recent survey that while 47% of respondents expressed interest in owning a classic car, Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) expressed significantly greater interest at 60%, compared to 31% of baby boomers.

In fact, 75% of Gen Z respondents said they either loved or liked driving, bucking the belief that younger people didn’t care for licenses or driving and preferred taking Ubers instead.

“The generational shift is really upon us," said McKeel Hagerty, CEO of Hagerty, in an interview with Yahoo Finance. "For many years, the baby boomers ... the largest collector generation of all time ... they drove the collecting market all the way up.”

Boomers were interested in 50s cars, post-war cars, and pre-war cars, Hagerty said, and they were “firmly in control of what people were buying.”

But now that’s finally changing. Millennials, now earning more, and their younger Gen Z brethren are more interested in newer cars from the '80s, '90s, and 2000s, he said. (Think more late '90s Toyota Supra coupes than '60s-era Dodge Charger muscle cars.)

Hagerty noted that BMWs and Japanese cars from the '90s are also gaining in popularity. They’re also cheaper to buy and maintain than classic air-cooled Porsches or “holy grail” cars from Ferrari.

Read more: What classic car insurance covers — and doesn’t

What happened to get these younger buyers more interested? It turns out it was simple economics.

“After the financial crisis [of 2008], there was a whole cohort of people who were struggling to actually make enough money to have cars — it's not whether they liked them. The job market wasn't very good,” Hagerty said. “Fast-forward 15 years, it's quite a different story. And more and more people can afford fun cars to be able to go out there and buy them, own them, collect them, even race them,” he said

The popularity of online auction sites like Bring a Trailer and Cars & Bids has also fueled the buying frenzy for these modern classics. (I've spent an inordinate amount of time on these sites!) Bring a Trailer pulled in a record $1.4 billion in sales last year, with total volume of sales up 19% from a year ago.

Many of the cars bought on these sites appeared in Hagerty’s 2024 Bull Market list. Hagerty highlighted cars like late-'80s Lamborghini Countachs, 2000s-era BMW M3s, and the radical Plymouth Prowler from the late '90s as cars that may increase in value.