Collecting cars is an expensive hobby, with no guarantee of financial reward down the line. Like real estate, even the most collectible of automobiles (like the 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO) are no longer guaranteed to appreciate, which makes spending the enormous amount of money required to buy one a roll of the dice.

What if you could spend a (more) reasonable amount of money to acquire a collectible automobile that needed neither insurance nor regular maintenance? One that you could view from your office desk, or easy chair in your study, and one that was almost as likely to appreciate as the real thing (relatively speaking, of course)?

Ralph Lauren’s actual 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO isn’t for sale, and you certainly couldn’t buy it for $9,500 if it was. As the duPont Registry reminds us, you can still buy limited edition, 1:8 scale replicas of four of Ralph Lauren’s favorite cars, for a semi-reasonable $9,500 each.

We suspect that calling almost $10k for a model car “reasonable” depends on your perspective, and it’s certainly not the kind of money we have to throw around. Still, each one takes some 350 man-hours to build, paint and detail, and that’s after the initial 3,000 hours spent creating the master molds. At least you know why they cost what they do.

As model cars, they’re expensive, and you could certainly find less detailed examples for far less money. Viewed as art, they’re probably priced on par with other higher end automotive sculpture, and we think they look better in an office than a a stuffy bronze statue.

How you convince the significant other of that, however, is up to you.