The Daily Vroom

Good Morning Vroomers,

What makes this industry special isn’t just the cars or the headlines or the record sales, it’s the people behind it, the ones who have been in this space long enough to see multiple cycles, multiple shifts, and still come out sharper on the other side.

I spend a lot of time speaking to buyers, sellers, and dealers, and one thing that keeps coming up is how easy this all looks from the outside. You see a few strong auction results, a few big wins, and it starts to feel like a system you can just step into. List the car, answer a few questions, and let the market do its thing.

But the reality is very different. Behind every successful result there’s a series of decisions that most people never see, from which cars to buy and what to pay, to how to prepare them, where to list them, how to position them, and how to manage the auction when it’s live. Get a few of those wrong and the result changes quickly, which is why consistency in this market is a lot harder than it looks.

And every now and then, you come across someone who’s been doing this long enough, and at a high enough level, that the way they think about the market is actually worth paying attention to.

Someone who isn’t tied to one platform, doesn’t follow a rigid formula, and doesn’t chase noise, but instead focuses on matching the right cars to the right audience and executing consistently. And today I want focus the spotlight on one such person.

Chris Carbine has been selling cars for nearly 50 years, but that’s not the interesting part, because there are plenty of people who have been around a long time and still haven’t adapted to how this market actually works today.

What stood out to me is something much simpler and much rarer, which is that he’s completely platform agnostic in a world where most sellers still treat platforms like identity.

He sells across Bring a Trailer, Cars & Bids, The MB Market, and others without trying to force consistency where it doesn’t exist, because he’s not starting with the question of where to list a car, he’s starting with what the car actually is and who is most likely to understand it.

That distinction sounds obvious until you realize most people do the opposite, defaulting to a platform first and then hoping the right buyer shows up, which is why results feel inconsistent when in reality the mismatch was baked in from the start.

That way of thinking doesn’t come from theory, it comes from repetition, and in his case it started early.

Like most people who actually understand this business, it didn’t begin online and it didn’t begin with scale, it began with one car, a silver 1973 Datsun 240Z he had been watching for years, which he eventually bought after saving up and getting help from his dad, (so many of us started that way) and from that point on this stopped being interest and turned into process.

By 17, he was already buying and selling cars out of his house, sourcing them from across the country, flying out, driving them back, figuring them out along the way, and finding buyers, which is where most of the real learning happens because you are forced to make decisions without perfect information and live with the outcome.

That’s the part people skip when they try to shortcut into this today.

Over time that turned into a business, then into multiple businesses, and eventually into what is now effectively two completely different operating models running in parallel.

One is local, built on relationships, repeat clients, trade-ins, and long-term trust, where cars often come back through the same network years later and the process is controlled and familiar.

The other is online, where the audience is national, often anonymous, and where about 80 percent of the cars he sells end up out of state, many on the West Coast, never to be seen again.

Those two worlds require completely different thinking, and treating them the same is usually where people get into trouble.

This is also where a lot of people misread what’s actually happening when they look at auction results.

From the outside, it looks simple, almost mechanical, like the platform is doing most of the work, but in reality the outcome is being shaped long before the auction ever goes live and then again while it’s happening in real time.

Choosing the right car is not the same as choosing a good car, because not every good car translates well to an online audience.

Pricing is not about what something should be worth, it’s about understanding how a specific group of bidders is likely to react in a specific setting.

Preparation is not just cleaning and servicing, it’s deciding what actually matters to the buyer on the other side of the screen and what doesn’t, which directly affects confidence.

And once the auction is live, being passive is one of the easiest ways to lose momentum, (we’ve all seen it multiple times) because the comment section is where buyers decide whether to lean in or step back, and knowing how to manage that without forcing it is something that only comes from doing it repeatedly.

What looks simple is anything but. That’s why consistency is the real tell.

Across platforms, across different types of cars, across different market conditions, he’s still producing results, having listed 51 cars and sold 38 of them on Cars & Bids alone, while also actively participating as a bidder, which keeps him grounded in how buyers are actually thinking, not how sellers hope they are.

That combination matters more than most people realize, because it closes the gap between expectation and reality.

There’s also another layer here that doesn’t show up in the results themselves.

He’s active in the ecosystem, not just on his own listings but across the platform, answering questions, helping other sellers, and adding context where it’s needed, which is something you don’t do if you’re just trying to move inventory.

You do that if you understand how the market functions and you’re operating inside it, not just passing through it.

None of this is complicated, but it’s also not easy, and that’s the point.

Because when you strip everything else away, what you’re left with is a process that rewards judgment, experience, and timing, and punishes shortcuts.

And if you’re paying attention, the people who consistently get it right tend to think about the market in a very similar way, even if they never say it out loud.

Chris just happens to be one of the clearer examples of that and we need more Chris’s in this wonderful industry that we all love.