When it comes to car enthusiasts, Doug DeMuro is in a class all his own. After beginning his career in a cubicle at Porsche, the Denver native started penning a car blog that ultimately led to creating his own YouTube channel reviewing cars. More than four million subscribers later, DeMuro is an authority on all things automotive, including spinning out his own car auction site called Cars and Bids.

Now based primarily in Southern California, DeMuro has been spending his summers in his home in Sconset for nearly a decade. N Magazine caught up with DeMuro to talk shop.

Explain how you became one of America’s top car vloggers.

Right out of college I got a job working for Porsche for their corporate headquarters in Atlanta. It was a desk job. It was what I thought I’d be doing the rest of my life. I was sitting in a cubicle and that was that. It was a cool job; I had a Porsche 911 company car. I was twenty-two, so it was the coolest thing in the world. But I always wanted to do a little more, and so on the side, I eventually started writing about cars for Jalopnik, which was a big car blog. Someone wrote me an email and said, “Hey, I like your writing. You should consider making videos.” It had never crossed my mind until I got this email, and now more than five hundred videos later, it’s been a good ride.

What have been some of the coolest cars that you have reviewed?

My very favorite car of all time is the V10 Porsche Carrera GT, which was made in the mid-2000s. I’ve always wanted one of those, but I bought a house on Nantucket instead, so I don’t think I’ll ever have one. They’ve gotten incredibly expensive— over $2 million now. I also like the really quirky and interesting stuff. I reviewed a Vector W8, which was an American supercar from the ’80s that is just the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen. It was so much fun. I reviewed an Aston Martin Lagonda, which was a luxury sedan in the ’70s that had so many stupid quirks, like the odometer was under the hood. It’s the stupidest car in the world—and I love stuff like that. To me, those are my very favorite. Then I also really love the very newest stuff. I love the new electric vehicles, the Rivian and the electric Hummer. The brand-new cars also really get me excited.

The car market has exploded. The sales volume at the auctions has just absolutely taken off, as have car prices, defying conventional wisdom. Why do you think the car culture is accelerating like this?

There’s a lot of factors. Right now, a lot of people have some money. There’ve been obviously a lot of gains in people’s homes and in the market and all that, and people in situations like this often look to diversify into assets. Or they just have nostalgia. I think a lot of people are getting older and even ’80s, ’90s cars are starting to go for serious money now, as younger people are starting to get nostalgic for that era. As cars convert to automatic transmissions and plug-ins and electrics, the nostalgic factor is even higher.

If nostalgia is indeed a driver, pun intended, then what happens to the values of cars that the sixty-year-olds relate to from the ’60s and early ’70s, when the new generation comes along? Does the value of that class of car decline?

It’s a great question. I think about that a lot actually. Cars from the 1920s and ’30s have declined as those people have sort of aged out of the world. People in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties don’t necessarily want ’30s cars. It’s not a thing. However, the ’60s were a really special era. The ’60s were an iconic period in a way that has never really returned, and I think that those cars, at least the great ones, will probably always be protected. That’s my guess anyway.

There’s tremendous pressure from an environmental standpoint to go electric. What happens to these cars twenty, thirty, forty years from now? One would presume there will still be gas stations, but less of them. Do you see this transition becoming problematic?

There will still be gas stations, at least in our lifetimes. I’m not too worried about that, especially for enthusiast cars. There are companies in California that are converting some of these cars to electric drivetrain. You lose some stuff when that happens; you lose the rumble. That’s part of the fun with these cars. But you gain reliability and the ability to keep it going forever. A lot of those cars, the specialness of them, is in how they look and how they make you feel when you’re cruising with the top down. I think that that might be the future for some of these cars: They swap to electric powertrains, and then they can live on forever and ever. It’s not like the performance of any of those cars is any good anyway, by modern standards. It’s really more about the style and the look and the beauty.

What is your top investment advice when it comes to collecting cars?

My top investment advice is ultimately “buy what you love.” You’ll never really beat the market. You might get close. If you buy what you love, you might be surprised at how many other people love them also. I’ve taken my own advice on this. I’ve bought cars that I’ve loved and they’ve all gone way up in value. I could’ve bought other cars that would’ve gone up more, but they’re not what I wanted. So not only have my cars gone up in value, but every time I open my garage, I get a thrill because I’m driving what I want, and I think that that’s a special thing.

What do you have in your garage?

I have a 2005 Ford GT, which is my sort of supercar. It’s crazy and terrifying. I have a yellow Defender, like everybody on Nantucket. I have a Mercedes G Wagon convertible, which is just as ugly as it sounds—it basically looks like a G Wagon wearing a toupee. Then I have an old Audi station wagon, an Audi RS 2, which was a weird car that was actually built by Porsche in the ’90s for Audi. They’re very, very rare. I imported that car. That’s my fun car fleet. Then every summer I drive all the way across the country with my dog and my new Land Rover Defender.

For those who do buy cars as an investment, what would be your top five list of cars to buy today?

The early Dodge Viper; I would buy that in a heartbeat. I don’t understand why those are still in the thirties. They should be worth double that, if not more. I would definitely get a Lamborghini Gallardo with a manual transmission. That car came out 2004. I think those are way undervalued. Generally speaking, I think that cars from the ’90s and 2000s are still a little undervalued compared to where they will get. People who are trying to invest and trying to be smart about it should probably park some money in some of those cars, because I think as younger people, Gen X and millennials, get more and more money, those cars will become more and more valuable, just like we saw with the muscle cars as the baby boomers grew up.

Tesla, maybe not by virtue of styling but by virtue of performance, has pretty much owned the electric market globally. Do you think Tesla can hold its lock on the market because of its ability to leapfrog in terms of innovation? Or do you think that ten years from now, it’s just going to be a fractionalized market of many, many high-performing electric cars?

There’s no question that Tesla is going to start to lose its seat at the top of the table. Tesla’s amazing innovations were unbelievable for the last decade. They were way ahead of everybody. But I’ve been in all the latest electric cars. Everybody else is catching up, and Tesla’s innovative power seems to be declining. Their biggest innovation last year was this yoke steering wheel. That was what they had. Ten years ago, it was an electric car that did 250 miles and drove itself. That was a real innovation. I think that they’re slowing down. Other automakers are catching up.

Tesla claims that they were going to have a pickup truck out, but all the other automakers—Rivian, General Motors— have beaten them to the market with these pickup trucks. Now, I will say, to put a little caveat on this, people have been saying this stuff about Tesla for the last ten years and they’ve still been tremendously successful and they’ve still done really well. Last year, the Tesla Model Y outsold the Honda Accord, which is an unbelievable statistic, so don’t count them out. But I don’t think they will be number one forever.

What is your prognosis for the domestic car companies? American cars are vastly better than they used to be, and the delta between American cars and European cars has narrowed. But what’s your prognosis for the American car manufacturer, as it relates Europe and Japan?

They’re just doing so much better than they were. The recession and General Motors’ and Chrysler’s bankruptcy—that really kind of pushed them all into gear. I still see some of the stuff from General Motors that I don’t like to see, which is that some of the cars still aren’t that competitive, a little overpriced, not as high quality. But Ford especially has really taken a lead. They’ve got so many products that so many people are excited about. The new Bronco is really hot, and obviously the electric Mustang has been a huge seller. They have this Raptor pickup truck that everybody wants. They’ve really focused on great products. The American brands are doing so, so, so much better than ten years ago. The future is reasonably bright.

Could you ever get comfortable with a self-driving car?

I love the self-driving car. I live in Southern California, the traffic capital of the world. I would give anything to be able to sit in traffic and just text and email while the car drove. Now, I will always want cars that are fun, that I can drive on the weekends with no truck traffic in canyons and on mountain roads, but I would give anything for a self-driving car for day-to-day, boring, sit-in-traffic kind of driving.

Who is the market for the hypercar niche of Bugatti and Koenigseggs? I assume you’ve gotten behind the wheel of them; how exhilarating is that experience?

I’ve driven almost all those cars: the Pagani, the Koenigsegg and the Bugatti. I can’t believe these cars exist. When I was a kid, a car that cost a million dollars, nobody could fathom it. Now there’s maybe a dozen cars on the market that cost a million dollars. Obviously, it’s a function of the economy over the last ten years, but I think there’s just a group of people who don’t want to simply be exclusive and own a Ferrari. They want to be hyper-exclusive and own this unbelievably rare and special thing. Is it exhilarating? Yeah, it’s amazing to drive. They’re very cool and all that. Is it worth $3 million? Not to me, but to the kind of person who has had ten Ferraris, I could understand why the next step is something that nobody else has, something you’re never going to see on the road when you’re driving around in Miami or in Newport Beach. That’s what they’re paying for: true exclusivity.

Join Doug DeMuro and Bruce Percelay at the Dreamland Theater on Thursday, July 21, at 7 p.m. as part of the Dreamland Conversation series.