The big difference between a car and a home is that a home generally doesn't depreciate in value, but rather increases in value. And any work you do on your house to make it better is basically adding more money to the "asset."

A car, on the other hand, very rapidly depreciates in value. For that very reason, I would never buy a brand-new car. You lose thousands of dollars just driving it off of the lot. This is why you can buy a car with ~6k miles on it for like half of the cost of the same car new. The only way a car will go up in value is if you pimp it out, and even then, you'll never get your money back on the investment fully.

EDIT: Some classic cars are exceptions too but that's really not the case most of the time. You might be able to stick a car in a garage for a few decades and take really good care of it and resell it for more down the road, but generally speaking, cars depreciate in value.