Time capsule Accord

The problem is, cars don't do well sitting. They need to be driven.

And this thing has zero value sitting there, really.

What's the point? After you pay new Acura money for this thing, what next? Do you dare drive it? CAN you drive it--or is all the rubber hard, are all the fluids congealed?

Show me this car in this condition with a couple hundred thousand miles on it, and I might be interested at some price.

Also remember, though, you will have paid new Acura money for a relative death trap. This is not a great daily driver at all. So again, it just sits there like a diamond that it's not?

With completely original cars of any make that are in this kind of condition, there's a fine line between driving it often enough to keep everything in good working order, and driving it as little as possible to preserve its originality and condition (and collector value).

It's usually the seemingly little stuff, rather than major components like engines, that wears out or breaks down over time on old cars, but collectively all of that little stuff becomes a bigger problem. It's very rare to see an old Honda like this where everything (supposedly) works and is in pristine condition. Most Hondas of similar vintage you run across are more like this one, in decent shape for its age but certainly well-worn:

There's no way the time-capsule car ever becomes a daily driver. It will go to a collector who is obsessive enough and has the ability to pay new Acura money for a four-wheeled unicorn that will probably sit in a climate-controlled garage and spend the next 35 years accumulating another 4600 miles. Accords will never be a blue-chip collectible like a pre-1968 Ferrari, nor are they likely to be on the radar of people who collect 1960s Japanese exotics like Honda S600/S800s or Toyota 2000 GTs, but I don't doubt there is a collector's market out there for more prosaic cars in immaculate condition like this one.

yeah, but the collector market for this thing is so narrow as to be non-existent.

If you're the sucker who buys it today, who's to say there's another sucker to buy it from you--ever? The odds are so slim as to be non-existent for a car like this.

Is this model's egine still carburated?

Yes - all of the first-gen (1976-1981) Accords had carburated engines. IIRC, the second-gen (1981-1985) Accords also all had carburated engines until late in the run when they started offering a fuel-injected engine in the SE-i in 1985.

There's a subset of "tuner" culture that fetishizes JDM equipment and prizes old original Japanese iron like this car. Certainly pretty far removed from the traditional collector car market, and like the tuners that spend small fortunes rebuilding their cars with expensive aftermarket performance parts, getting back what they put into a car probably isn't uppermost on their minds when they buy one.

I'd bet this car will wind up in California. Given that this car was originally sold in MN and is currently in PA, it's a miracle that it hasn't rusted at all - those old Honda bodies were susceptible to rot even in temperate climates.

Too bad. Those carburators just needed so much more maintenance.