The Daily Vroom

Good morning Vroomers,

Bring a Trailer had a storming day with 170 vehicles sold. That is huge. The amount of work that goes into getting that many listings live is something worth celebrating. What is crazy is they still did not sell 48 cars yesterday. Imagine the headroom left if they can convert more of those reserve listings. I have said it before, I can see them hitting 200 plus sales in a single day at some point.

Now, this is not the BaT newsletter, so who else is making noise out there? Honestly, no one is on BaT’s level. They are in a league of their own. But Cars & Bids, who I mentioned earlier this week, might be having their biggest listing week ever and had a strong day yesterday. There is so much room for them to grow. No reason they cannot get to 50 plus listings a day. The potential is huge.

And on that note, you know how I feel about the power of real world events. C&B has stepped it up there, and they have said they will be at Oktoberfest this weekend. But there is no location published about it yet on their site. Hopefully they get those details out, show up in force, meet more of the community, and let the rest play out.

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.

Nearly Sale of the Day

Here we give opinions. Plenty of them. But opinion is not the same as market fact.

Pet hate of mine. People say the whole market is up or down like it is one thing. It is not. Today we are talking about one thing only. The Ford GT Carbon Series.

Yesterday’s 20 mile 2022 GT Carbon Series ran to $865,000 and stopped at reserve. No mystery here. It is the exact same car that sold in February for $891,000. The seller did not buy it to drive. Twenty miles says everything. He was never letting it go for less than the last ticket.

Values for this model have come off their highs. A year ago clean Carbon Series cars were easily $100,000 higher. Some cleared a million. Today the money sits mid eight hundreds to low nines for delivery mileage cars. Two bidders can always take it further. Outliers happen. The base reality has shifted.

So what did yesterday tell us. Not that the entire market is falling. Not that everything is soft. It told us exactly where Carbon Series money is right now. Mid eights is the number buyers want to pay. Low nines if the spec and timing line up. If you are selling and you need last year’s price, you wait. If you are buying, this is your lane.

Opinion is fun. Facts are cleaner. For the Ford GT Carbon Series, this is the fact.

Money Alone Doesn’t Win the Online Auction Game

If you watch this space as obsessively as I do, you might know AutoHunter. It has been around for about five years, sitting quietly in the corner of the online car world. From the first click the site feels aimed at older and classic cars. Only a few auctions close each day. The look and feel have barely changed since launch.

AutoHunter was spun out of ClassicCars.com, the big classifieds site Roger Falcione built into a go-to place for vintage buyers. In 2017 Barrett-Jackson one of the heavyweight of live collector-car auctions bought a majority stake in Falcione’s Collector Car Network to add a digital arm to its empire. The thinking was obvious: pair the most famous live auction brand with an online platform and watch it grow.

But in 2020, Barrett-Jackson and Falcione sold the whole network to IMG/Endeavor, the global sports and media giant behind UFC, Fashion Week, and more. IMG doubled down in 2022 and bought a majority stake in Barrett-Jackson itself. On paper AutoHunter ended up with everything: the biggest live-auction name, deep-pocketed owners, and massive media reach.

And yet, five years on, AutoHunter still moves only a handful of cars a day. It has never broken out as a daily habit for buyers the way Bring a Trailer has. Even with IMG’s capital (do they even know who Autohunter is?) and Barrett-Jackson’s heritage, it hasn’t built the kind of engaged community or bidding momentum that drives the top platforms.

That’s the real story here. Money and brand muscle help you survive, but they don’t automatically create a winning online auction platform. Trust, user experience, and daily engagement are what move the needle. BaT built that from the ground up. Cars & Bids is still chasing it but doing so by leaning into personality and community. Legacy players have found out that you can’t just buy your way into the conversation.

AutoHunter is an interesting case study. It shows how even with the best possible backing, Barrett-Jackson’s name and IMG’s global resources, the online enthusiast space stays hard to crack. The lesson for anyone watching or building in this world: capital opens doors, but product and community decide who actually walks through them.

With a new platform launch on the horizon this month (more on that soon), here’s a question for you.