The Daily Vroom

YESTERDAY’S TOP 6 SALES

Want to dive deeper into any of these listings? Just click on the car to take you directly to the listing. (extra bonus one featured today)

Your Take On Bid Shilling

After yesterday’s piece on questionable bidding and incentives, I assumed the poll would come back angry. Topics like this usually do. A few suspicious bid histories surface, someone posts screenshots, and within minutes the conversation turns into outrage, as if we’ve uncovered some unique flaw that only exists on one platform and could be eliminated if everyone simply behaved better.

Instead, the overwhelming response was far more measured and, honestly, far more realistic. Most of you didn’t choose “unacceptable” or “this has to be eliminated completely.” The dominant answer was simply that it’s part of auctions and probably always will be.

Not approval. Not endorsement. Just realism.

I’ll admit that reaction caught me off guard and, at first, made me a little sad. There’s something comforting about believing that markets can be perfectly clean if we design them the right way. You want to think there’s a version of auctions where every bid is pure, every participant is acting in perfect faith, and price discovery happens in this neat, frictionless way.

But the longer you spend around this business, the harder that illusion is to maintain.

I’ve been part of more auctions than I can count at this point, across live sales, dealer lanes, and every flavor of online platform, and somewhere along the way you stop expecting perfection and start looking for something simpler: whether the system feels fair enough to trust. You realize that whenever real money and real competition are involved, people are going to test boundaries. Incentives guarantee that. Human nature guarantees that. The format changes, but the behavior doesn’t disappear.

What surprised me about the poll wasn’t the behavior itself, because none of this is new. What surprised me was realizing how many of you sound like you’ve come to the same conclusion. The tone wasn’t outrage or betrayal. It sounded seasoned, like people who have spent enough time inside auctions to understand that this isn’t a courtroom with perfect rules and perfect actors. It’s a marketplace, and marketplaces are messy by definition.

That shift in perspective actually says something encouraging about where the industry is today, because once you stop chasing the fantasy of a flawless auction, you start judging platforms on a much more practical question: how visible is everything?

And that’s where online has quietly changed the game.

Not because the internet magically makes everyone honest, but because it makes behavior harder to hide. Bid histories are public, usernames carry reputations, sales are recorded permanently, and thousands of eyes watch every listing in real time. Suspicious activity doesn’t just vanish into the noise the way it used to on a crowded auction floor or inside a closed dealer network. It leaves a trail, and that trail creates accountability.

If you’ve been around long enough to remember how opaque this market used to be, that difference is massive. Back then you either trusted the room or you didn’t, and most of the time you had no real way to verify what actually happened. Today, even with all the imperfections that still exist, you can see the process unfold. You can check histories. You can question outcomes. You can make informed decisions instead of guesses.

That isn’t perfection, but it is real progress.

So maybe the poll result isn’t cynicism after all. Maybe it’s maturity. The people who spend their time in these auctions don’t expect some imaginary clean-room version of the market. They just want transparency and enough guardrails to feel confident they’re not walking into the dark.

By that standard, online auctions aren’t just incrementally better than what came before them. They’re fundamentally better. Not flawless and not immune to the same human behavior that shows up everywhere money changes hands, but dramatically more open and dramatically more accountable than anything this industry used to offer.

If anything, seeing how many of you share that perspective made me feel less jaded, not more. It suggests that the market hasn’t gotten worse or dirtier. It’s simply grown up, and so have the people participating in it.

And honestly, that feels like progress.

When a car doesn’t sell on BaT, what actually happens next?

One of the most common questions I get, especially after a no-sale on Bring a Trailer, is what happens next. If the biggest audience in the hobby watched the auction play out and the car still didn’t clear, does it quietly disappear, get relisted somewhere else, or eventually show up months later with a new set of photos and a slightly different pitch?

Most of the time, we never really see the answer.

Collectible Classics just made it unusually visible.

Instead of fading away, a cluster of recent BaT no-sales has shown up almost immediately on Hagerty Marketplace, effectively giving these cars a very public second act. And they’re not fringe projects or oddball stuff. We’re talking about real, mainstream enthusiast metal, including a 7k-mile McLaren MP4-12C, an early RT/10 Viper, and a low-mile Shelby GT500. These are exactly the kinds of cars that typically trade well online, which is what makes their reappearance interesting in the first place.

The bigger story, though, isn’t the individual cars. It’s the seller behind them.

This isn’t a casual consignor testing another site. This is a genuine heavyweight who has already pushed 50+ listings through BaT this year alone and previously ran more than forty auctions on Cars & Bids with a 68% sell-through rate. Sellers like this aren’t just customers. They’re supply lines. They determine whether a platform feels busy or thin because they consistently bring the next fifty or hundred cars buyers actually want to watch.

What’s notable is that they haven’t listed on C&B in months and are now using Hagerty as the second stop after BaT. That’s not random. That’s strategy.

It also matches how they behave as a bidder. They participate constantly but rarely chase a number, which usually tells you you’re looking at someone disciplined rather than emotional. They treat auctions like math, not theater. When a car doesn’t clear, they don’t try to force it. They simply move it to the next channel and keep the machine running.

That’s where this gets interesting for Hagerty.

Because when a seller with this kind of volume reroutes inventory your way, it’s less a courtesy and more a test. If these cars convert, Hagerty starts to look like a legitimate second lane for serious operators. If they stall again, there’s nothing stopping this same portfolio from landing on another platform next month.

In other words, the power dynamic isn’t what most people assume. Platforms don’t just choose the cars. The best sellers choose the platforms.

And that’s exactly why this matters beyond just a few listings.

I know platforms already court sellers in different ways, but this feels like a perfect example of where the smaller players should be leaning in harder. Sellers like this aren’t one-offs. One relationship can mean dozens of quality cars a year, steady inventory, repeat buyers, and the kind of momentum that compounds over time. You don’t build a marketplace one viral auction at a time. You build it by winning the operators who can reliably bring the next run of cars.

It’s a competitive field now, and the edge doesn’t just come from fees or features. It comes from proving to serious sellers that your audience actually converts. If you can consistently close cars, the next batch naturally follows. If you can’t, those same cars simply move down the road.

Watching where this seller sends their next wave of inventory will probably tell us more about which platforms are really working than any press release ever could.

Enjoying The Daily Vroom?

Pay it forward by sharing this newsletter with an automotive aficionado in your circles. Your endorsement allows us to accelerate our growth.