De Tomaso Pantera
Why 5.0: A mid-mounted Ford 351 Cleveland under Tom Tjaarda's Italian bodywork means a Pantera owner can get parts at a normal auto parts store and find a mechanic who isn't booked out eighteen months — a genuinely different ownership proposition from every V12 Italian exotic on this shelf. Ford marketed it through Lincoln-Mercury dealers as an exotic for under $10,000, and the mechanical simplicity that made that price possible is still why these get driven more than their badge would suggest.
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Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €9k (1971) → €110k (2026), trending up · illustrative data
The long version
Ford's pitch was audacious even by early-1970s standards — an Italian-styled, mid-engine exotic sold and serviced through Lincoln-Mercury showrooms, backed by a small-block V8 any Ford mechanic already understood. Reliability problems and the 1974 oil shock ended the US partnership after a rocky few years, and values cratered for a decade afterward as the car fell into an awkward gap: too exotic for muscle-car buyers, too American for exotic-car buyers. That two-decade slump is exactly what built its current ownership culture — Panteras attracted people who wanted to actually drive a mid-engine exotic on a mechanic's budget, and the parts-bin driveline means owners today still do their own service more than most cars on this list. It's the rare car here whose relative affordability is the whole point, not a market failure to be corrected.