Hagerty Goes Public to Pursue a Simple Mission: Save Driving

In recent years, Hagerty has greatly expanded its mission. It has ventured into the editorial realm, releasing boundless automotive coverage on Hagerty.com, as well as YouTube, where it has 1.75 million subscribers. It publishes a monthly car magazine, Hagerty Driver’s Club, sent to 1.2 million readers, as well as a semiregular lifestyle publication, Radius, distributed to its top collectors. It purchased Drive Share, a peer-to-peer classic car rental platform, like Airbnb for vintage vehicles.

It opened a half-dozen vintage car storage and lounge spaces, Garage + Social, around North America where members can gather, and preserve their cars. It acquired the rights to major concours d’elegance for aficionados to show off their collector cars in Amelia Island, Fla., Detroit and Greenwich, Conn.

And through its nonprofit Hagerty Driver’s Foundation, the company organizes events to promote the collector-car hobby. In collaboration with the Interior Department, the foundation also nominates additions to the National Historic Vehicle Register — a designation for notable cars in American history and culture, akin to the National Register of Historic Places.

Hagerty went public via a SPAC, or special-purpose acquisition company, raising roughly $265 million in the process with a goal of expanding. So, what are Hagerty’s ambitions now? And why did it need to become a publicly traded company in order to achieve them?

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/business/classic-cars-hagerty.html