If we've learned anything from the generationality of the collector car scene, it's that everything and anything will become collectible given enough time. We're already there with Eighties and Nineties cars, Edsels have a dedicated club, and we've seen people preserve and restore Saturns, so it stands to reason that enthusiasts will band together and embrace any vehicle produced.

Except maybe modern EVs and hybrids.

One would think that the electric automobile revolution would naturally result in collectible electric vehicles (EVs) 25 or 30 years down the road. The vehicles that are popular or that capture the imagination of people in their youth remain stuck in the back of their minds until those people reach their spending years, when they decide it's finally time to put that car or truck in their garage. Get enough like-minded people all doing the same thing at roughly the same time with the same cars and you'll see clubs spring up, auction companies start consigning those vehicles and aftermarket companies start providing restoration parts. We've seen the same pattern play out time and again with muscle cars, pickups and SUVs, and more recently JDM cars.

There's no denying that EVs have become aspirational in recent years, thanks in large part to Tesla. There's no denying that EVs dominate headlines these days, both in the automotive and general press. Market share might not be overwhelming - it's up to about 7% of U.S. sales - but then again, not everybody was driving around in Hemi 'Cudas or COPO Camaros in the height of the muscle car era, and just count the number of those crossing the block every time Barrett-Jackson puts up a tent. Pollsters over the last decade have found that younger generations - particularly millennials - consistently and substantially show greater interest in owning an EV than their elders, largely because EVs are seen as cool. The only thing holding them back is the cost.

So if everything plays out like it has over the course of the collector car hobby to date, it's not hard to imagine those young EV enthusiasts deferring their dreams to buy, say, a Lucid Air or Tesla Model S P85D until a few decades from now, after their kids have left the house and after the cars of their dreams have aged off of used car lots. They go out in search of that car they've wanted for so long, find one stashed out behind somebody's barn or listed in Hemmings, spend a couple years fixing it up and reading articles about it in vintage car magazines and joining a relevant club, then take it to car shows where they get to show younger generations how different the car is from whatever's plying the roads in that far-flung future.

But just as electric cars are disrupting so much of what we're familiar with when it comes to new car sales, they're also going to disrupt so much of what we're familiar with when it comes to collecting old cars unless three major issues are resolved between then and now.

Nissan Leaf battery pack. Source: Tennen-Gas

Batteries

Lithium-ion batteries are the hallmark trait of modern EVs and, combined with AC induction motors, are what have really made them commercially feasible as opposed to the EVs driven largely by lead-acids and DC forklift motors up until that point. Yet when the batteries in older EVs fail, it's not terribly difficult to source and replace new lead-acids; for all of their faults (weight, energy density, weight), lead-acids are so simple and relatively inexpensive that they're the most widely recycled consumer item on the planet and can be bought via well-established supply chains.

The same cannot be said for lithium-ion batteries. Even though they've been used to power EVs since the 1998 Nissan Altra, the replacement lithium-ion traction battery market is still in its infancy, making replacement battery costs prohibitively expensive for the people who need them the most: owners trying to squeeze another five to 10 years out of their used cars. Owners of early Nissan Leafs - now coming up on a dozen years old - are already up against this problem, with battery degradation rendering the cars almost unusable and with the few battery replacement options costing $10,000 or more - more than what the car's worth.

As a result, used EVs older than a decade or so tend to become scrapped EVs even when the rest of the vehicle remains in decent shape. And given that the collector car scene depends on a supply of non-scrapped used vehicles, battery supply alone could doom the potential for a thriving collector EV market. After all, what would a rust-free, mint-interior stored-in-climate-control 30-year-old EV be worth if the traction battery's shot and you can't find a replacement?

On a similar note, battery charging infrastructure not only needs to expand, it also needs to accommodate legacy battery charging standards and formats. Owners of cars with CHAdeMO charging systems are already feeling the pinch as other charging standards like CCS and Tesla's Supercharger become dominant, and adapters to allow legacy charging standards to work on newer chargers are easier proposed than actually created.

What needs to change: While we see headlines every other week about some new breakthrough battery technology that allows faster charging or greater range, we don't see much research into making lithium-ion traction batteries usable in EVs beyond the typical lifecycle of a car. Meanwhile, lithium admittedly remains a resource that's problematic to obtain, potentially limited in supply, and not nearly as widely recycled as lead-acid batteries.

To overcome this issue, we need to see a thriving battery-replacement aftermarket - possibly one driven by more investment in lithium battery recycling - and/or development of batteries with longer service life in mind. Automakers and the EV charging industry also need to pledge to support one standard for charging and to maintain support for or provide conversion kits for older EVs with different charging standards so that older EVs can charge up right alongside their newer counterparts the same way Model Ts can fuel up from the same pump that fills an F-150's tank.

Software and parts availability

Just as important as traction battery supply for older EVs is the need for all of the other components and the software required to keep all those components talking to each other.

This is not a new phenomenon; cars have become ever more complex over the last couple of decades, regardless of their powertrain, to the point where auto techs need to be just as handy with a laptop as with a wrench. But there are still plenty of instances where one can easily swap hard components from one car to the next - it was that interchangeability of parts that won Cadillac the 1908 Dewar Trophy and that has made it possible through the decades to fix up an old car using parts scavenged from junkyard cars.

With EVs, that becomes far more difficult. Take the Nissan Leaf traction batteries mentioned above. While upgrades in battery technology over the Leaf's lifespan have increased its capacity from 24 kWh to 62 kWh, the traction battery has retained the same size and shape, making it a simple matter to bolt a later battery in place of an earlier one. But that doesn't mean the newer battery's going to want to talk to the older car; from the factory, the batteries are paired to their specific cars, so one can't just plug the new battery in and go.

Granted, do-it-yourselfers have been digging into the code and figuring out how to pair new batteries or other components to older cars, but that's not a step many casual or shade tree enthusiasts will want or be able to take.

Other EV components, including chargers and inverters, pose the same problem but with the added hurdle of finding the parts in the first place. Due to their complexity, crashed EVs tend to be totaled out instead of repaired, and while drivetrains from crashed Teslas often find a second life in EV conversions, with less demand for repair and replacement parts, there's less of a supply of those parts from which anybody restoring/maintaining/preserving an EV decades down the road will be able to source what they need.

What needs to change: Pairing replacement or high-performance EV components needs to be no more complicated than bolting on an aftermarket intake manifold, and here's where the aftermarket could shine by offering plug-and-play pairing as simple to use as the recent tunable EFI systems.

As for used EV component supply, that would require a change in the way insurers view older/wrecked/bricked EVs, and insurers may not be as likely to come around until EVs reach a much larger market share. It also wouldn't hurt for carmakers to eventually offer replacement parts for their pioneering EVs under programs similar to the Classic or Heritage departments that many European carmakers already have in place.

Finally, initiatives like Massachusetts's Right to Repair law need to be adopted on a nationwide basis to force carmakers to share software that could help ensure a future for not just today's EVs but all of today's tech-laden cars.

GMC Hummer EV. Source: GM Media

Culture

Some cars will inevitably be considered collectible regardless of the abovementioned issues due to their rarity, their cost when new, their exclusiveness, their significance, their performance aspect or the myriad other small factors that make a car desirable. The Hummer EV will. The Porsche Taycan will. The Tesla Roadster already has.

But what of more mundane, mass-market EVs? The sedans and SUVs that people buy not because they're flash but because they represent a technological leap forward in automobiles? Historically, the early adopters of such cars - think of the GM EV1 or the Nineties-era Geo Metro conversions or the Bradley GTEs - have been seen as nerds or wonks. If mainstream car collectors consider owners of those cars at all, they consider them as existing at the fringe of the hobby. Granted, their numbers aren't great simply because the number of vintage EVs to collect hasn't been great, but that will change, and the attitude toward collectors who treasure, maintain and restore early Chevrolet Volts or Henney Kilowatts needs to become more inclusive.

One other aspect of car collecting culture that'll need to change is the discussion around originality and upgrades. Despite wider acceptance of restomods, a substantial segment of the hobby remains dedicated to original or restored-to-stock automobiles. How will those attitudes about cars square with the realities of degraded battery packs and outdated charging systems, as discussed above? Will future EV collectors insist that cars originally powered by silver-zinc batteries or nickel metal hydride batteries still be powered by batteries of the same chemical makeup to retain the character and historical accuracy of that car? Or will it be acceptable to swap lithium-ion batteries for iron-air or solid-state or whatever becomes the next de facto battery chemistry?

What needs to change: EVs and hybrids will need to become acceptable to the mainstream collector car culture, and discussions about how EVs and hybrids will integrate into that culture will need to happen within every level of every collector car club, organization, publication, and event. And those discussions will have to progress beyond, "Sure, I guess any older EV can come to our show."

Some marketplacewebsites already have sections dedicated to EVs and hybrids, which is a good step, and SEMA does carve out a portion of the annual trade show for the EV aftermarket, but in the next 10 to 20 years we should see category awards for vintage EVs at general shows, we should see symposia discussing the finer points of EV collecting, we should see more clubs dedicated to sharing resources for vintage EVs, and we should see collector car publications treating vintage EVs as more than mere curiosities.

This cultural change isn't as far-fetched as some may argue. The Petersen Automotive Museum, for instance, held its first all-EV Cars and Coffee, on June 25.

Jaguar's electrified E-type. Source: Jaguar Land Rover

What about converted cars?

Of course, there are still many questions about the collectability of electric vehicles that will need to be answered, some that are harder to anticipate than others. For instance, how collectible will electrified vintage vehicles become? The people converting those cars see the cars as the way forward for people to enjoy their old ICE cars in electrified futures. If that's indeed the case, will that make electrified XK120s worth more than the ICE versions because they're not relegated to museums? Or will the electrification of vintage cars be seen as a fad as customers re-install the cars' original ICE engines?

Perhaps other factors beyond those we're well familiar with already will play into vintage EVs' potential collectibility. For instance, though many of the remaining EV1s are still in museums or at universities, some - as many as nine at this writing - have made their way into private hands, with the "forbidden fruit" aspect of the cars making them highly desirable for certain private collectors.

Will restomodding evolve from a subculture dedicated to performance to one dedicated to efficiency?

Will automakers find even more ways to hobble the long-term survivability and viability of EVs? Saint Elon's already floated the idea of integrating traction batteries into the structure of the vehicle, which would do wonders for weight reduction and range but which would almost assuredly make battery replacement impossible and thus build in a finite lifespan for every such vehicle.

Or will the desire for the cars of their youth inspire future generations to do whatever it takes to resurrect and collect modern EVs despite all of the above challenges? The lack of replacement parts hasn't proved an impediment to brass-era car restorers who cast their own blocks and carve their own wooden wheels. The obsolete software locked away in the computers of OBDI-era Eighties and Nineties cars hasn't proved an insurmountable challenge to those enthusiasts tinkering with MegaSquirt and other DIY EFI systems. Aftermarket companies spring up all the time to meet emerging markets and niches in the collector car industry.

And these are just the challenges and potential solutions we can see at this moment. As the EV marketplace continues to evolve and take shape, so too will the potential for EVs to become collectibles down the road or to become forgotten in the face of a new wave of planned obsolescence.

Editor's note: This article originally appeared on Hemmings Motor News.