The Daily Vroom

Good morning Vroomers!

The online market is still finding its footing in early 2026, while the live auction world is doing the opposite and absolutely moving. Case in point: the Bachmann no-reserve Ferrari collection, with 46 historically significant cars crossing the block without a safety net. That’s real momentum at the very top.

Back here in the online market, the chart below shows where sales landed yesterday. As a quick rule of thumb, when the $100k+ segment is hovering around or above 10%, the high end is performing better than average.

MARKET LEADERBOARD

💰 The figures shared below don’t count any other sales such as car seats, memorabilia etc… All online auction sites are analyzed to put this leaderboard together.

I only include websites that have sold 5+ vehicles in the chart below.

YESTERDAY’S TOP 5 SALES

Want to dive deeper into any of these listings? Just click on the car to take you directly to the listing.

Sale of the Day

There still aren’t many airplanes on BaT, which is part of why these listings hit different. The car people show up out of curiosity, the aviation people show up with receipts, and the comments instantly turn into equal parts prebuy checklist, hangar humor, and somebody’s “I flew one of these in ’69” memory that makes you stop scrolling for a second.

The Bird Dog itself is a perfect BaT aircraft because it’s easy to understand even if you’re not a pilot. It’s low and slow, it’s all visibility, it’s built for a job, and it carries a ton of emotional weight for anyone with a Vietnam or Army aviation connection. That came through loud and clear in the thread. You had the nostalgia and the reverence, but also the sober voices reminding everyone that planes are not posters. Logs, AD compliance, annuals, prebuy. The fun is real, but the due diligence is non-negotiable.

And then there’s the number. $185,000 sounded crazy to some people until the folks who actually know the market chimed in like, yeah, that’s what a nice one costs now. Which is kind of the whole point of BaT expanding beyond cars. (Will we see more planes this year??) You don’t need a huge inventory of aircraft for this to work. You just need the right ones, presented the right way, so the right community feels confident enough to raise their hand.

Auctions To Watch

We’ve all seen RUF cars before. Some are incredible. Some are more story than substance. This one lands on the right side of that line.

It started life as a 1985 RoW Porsche 911 Carrera Targa and was taken to RUF in period for a BTR III conversion. That matters, but it’s not the whole story. What makes this car interesting is how normal it feels in the best possible way. It isn’t trying to be louder or flashier than it needs to be.

Most RUF builds you picture are coupes. This being a Targa changes the character a bit. Same narrow-body look, same serious performance, but with a slightly more relaxed personality that fits real road use better than track-day heroics.

The recent work was done with restraint. It’s been refreshed, not rewritten. Paint, interior, suspension, brakes, engine and transaxle have all been addressed, but nothing about it feels overcooked or modernized beyond recognition.

That’s usually the tell.

When a RUF car still looks like something you could’ve seen on the road in the early ’90s, it tends to age better than the ones built to impress Instagram.

This isn’t the RUF you buy to make a point. It’s the RUF you buy because you like driving and you want something that feels special without being precious.

The Targa aspect will narrow the buyer pool, (more opportunity for others) but for the right person it’s actually the appeal. It’s a little different, a little more usable, and a lot harder to replicate today.

Not every great air-cooled car needs to be a headline. Some just need to be done right. This one is.

This custom ‘55 Thunderbird isn’t a “value the car” listing as much as a value the story listing.

A normal ’55 Thunderbird is an easy mental model. This is not that. This is a period full-custom that lived an actual life, got famous, got used, got shelved, got found, and then got rebuilt with the kind of care you usually only see when someone feels like they’re preserving a piece of culture, not just finishing a project.

And that’s why the comments are split in a very specific way. Half the room says it belongs in a museum, because the documentation is almost as important as the metal. The other half says it deserves to be driven again, because that’s literally what it did back then. Either way, nobody’s pretending this is everyone’s aesthetic. They’re reacting to the fact that this thing is still here at all.

You’re not buying a clean T-Bird. You’re buying a time capsule from the era when creativity was the whole point, and the tools were whatever you could get your hands on.

We just wrote about a plane. Now we’re talking about a yacht!

Because that’s exactly what a 1978 Lincoln Continental Mark V is. Not a coupe. Not transportation. A rolling living room from a time when personal luxury meant space, silence, and zero concern for what came next. I love that this is on Cars & Bids. It’s such a clean reminder that the platform works best when it stretches beyond the obvious.

This isn’t about novelty. People have seen Mark Vs before. What makes this one interesting is how intact it is. Low miles. Unmodified. Still doing precisely what it was built to do, which is float along and make everything else feel rushed. The velour, the vinyl roof panel, the opera windows, the sheer length. None of it is ironic. It’s just honest.

And at the time of writing, it feels like this one needs a little love from the community to find its next home. That’s not a knock. That’s how cars like this work. You don’t impulse-buy a yacht. You wait for the right person to notice it, smile, and remember exactly why these once mattered.

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