0 - I have written in the past that I know Doug personally from his pre-fame days in Atlanta; we still keep in touch, but we are obviously not as close as we once were. I texted with him after the announcement, which coincided with his appearance on The Smoking Tire podcast (which I listened to). It is my understanding based on Doug’s comments on the podcast that he remains the majority owner of Cars & Bids; I don’t know what percentage of the entity he owns, but the business is theoretically / on paper worth a minimum of ~$75 million. It could be north of $100 million, of course. I did not pry into the transaction terms and structure - if he wanted me to know, he would have told me. He did share the comps that informed his Carrera GT purchase, which were all from … BaT!
1 - I don’t understand the popularity of auction sites, personally. Despite working in finance, I have never been interested in keeping up with the values of toys that I own (or aspire to own). I would never buy a car in a competitive auction scenario.
2 - I am amazed that BaT does not have a financing partner, especially given the aggregate dollar volume of sales and the range of prices; seven figure cars are likely purchased with cash or loans against assets (brokerage accounts, real estate, business interests, etc.), but there are plenty of buyers of cars below, say, $500K (just a guess) that will need financing. Why not bring it in house?
3 - To my point above, Cars & Bids uses Lightstream, the unsecured lender that SunTrust (now Truist) purchased. I worked the buy side of that deal a LONG time ago.
As a guy who has zero business buying a $$$ car online (or at all), I use BaT just like I used to use eBay Motors, which is daydream fodder. I randomly see or hear about a cool car, and I think “oh cool, Ferrari 360, I like those, I want to look at a bunch of pictures of cool ones and see what the going rate for one is so I can daydream about buying one when daycare bills and 529 plans are no longer my problem.” And then I spend 20 minutes clicking and fantasizing. And then I continue on with my life.
I go the opposite way. I enjoy the shallower end of the pool and see a Merkur Xr4ti and make a serious bid on it because it isn't THAT much money vs my finances. Unfortunately, or perhaps not, I have been the second place bidder many times, but have yet to win.
At some point for obscure cars below a certain threshold I don't know how I would ever come across them. There isn't any other searchable digestible national market place.
However, I also realize that my ES350 would wipe the floor with it in every conceivable metric - save styling. I'd probably keep it for a year, realize my nostalgia was underwhelming, and then re-list it on BaT.
I feel you on those daycare bills, ha. As an aside, I managed to turn a 1981 Celica into a bathroom (which never fully materialized before we up and moved) so I, too, dream about that one day car.
re: 2; That's genious and they should do it. I quit looking at BAT after spending 2 hours on the phone trying to get a day-of loan for 60k to buy a 996 GT3... In retrospect I could have owned it for 2 years for free if I dumped it now, but that's besides the point.
I've sold an 500E there about 2 years before they were hot an lost money. The buyer showed up to claim his prize when I was out of town, and was so rude and condescending my wife almost canceled the sale. My brother sold a car there and was happy, and his bestie listed his there with my brother bidding it up. He ended up being the high bid and paying the fee cause they weren't close to hitting the number. BAT tries really hard to get you to list w/o a reserve.
If anyone wants to assist me in my current obsession; I want (NEED!) a hot wagon. The AMGs are the easy button, or an E34 M5. The CTS-V are ok too, but a touch to garish for my highfalutin taste. The next are the home-made kind, E9X M3 wagon swaps of my current favorite daydream, an E39 M5 swap. I would take a hot Volvo too, screw Jack and his lack of imagination. Anyway.
I had half a mind to leverage some connections to learn firsthand why Hearst hasn’t adopted a financing partner in hopes of potentially earning a fee putting one together for them.
Alas, I stumbled into another interesting deal about six months ago that’s taking up all of my time.
" I would take a hot Volvo too, screw Jack and his lack of imagination."
So would I, and in fact I drove a Ford 302-powered V-8 240 in a couple of races, but the "282" on offer seemed to have a LOT of excuses as standard equipment.
I've long wondered about your second point. Seems like a no-brainer. Originally, no financing made sense because of the age of most of the cars, but now that what seems like half of the listings are less than five years old, they are leaving money and bidders on the table.
I got similar messages when i sold the truck I had in high school. The truck was semi broken half the time cause I was 16 and a crappy mechanic. Half my facebook dm's were some form of "wasn't this the truck you were always working on". Yes it was, but it was as fixed as an 80's Dodge product could be when I sold it.
I am banned from commenting on Cars and Bids. Pointed out the hilarity of flippers claiming "the car wasn't right for me 🥺👉👈" when asked why they were selling.
Oh, and my comment about selling a car with 10 year old tires being moronic got flagged as well.
The 360 with which he failed to attract even a single woman?(Apart from his wife, if I haven't gotten my timeline botched up. )And any lady attracted to a guy with a 20 year old ferrari that a spec miata could probably cream around any track strikes me as being, uhm...., difficult.
I shudder at your comment about needing to interact with every commenter on BaT. I’d be OK with legit questions, but all the stupid questions and comments from the peanut gallery would tire me out, and it appears to be bad form to verbally eviscerate them even if you are right. Would be great if they had different comment areas for the real bidders, another for legit experts, and a third for the vapid morons (“glwta!,” “brought my popcorn for this one, hurr durr durrr,” etc).
it really irritates me that experts comment on BaT for free and the seller and Hurst profit from their knowledge. I guess it’s just the sign of the times where expertise is valued at zero or expert value is Hoover-ed up by lizards. I am somewhat of an expert on 105/115 series Alfas and limit sharing my expertise either in person or on Alfa forums. I learned my stuff from the Alfisti old timers in the 80’s and now I’m one of those old timers. I need to pass that knowledge on, but damned if I will do it to help Hurst or Doug DeMoron.
I had an internal job pitched to me a couple of years ago. Exposure was offered in reply to my request of a higher grade and more money. It was all I could do to not laugh in his face.
"Hold on, it gets better still. You might think that you’d be better off putting your Porsche 993 on Cars and Bids, since BaT already has five 993s on the site, but you’d be wrong — because the presence of your car will increase interest in the others, and vice versa. Every time an auction closes on a car like yours, you basically inherit all the bidders but the top one."
A couple of miles from where I'm sitting is the site of the Northland Mall, opened the year I was born, 1954, regarded as the country's first regional shopping mall. Now being redeveloped, it was originally built by the J.L. Hudson company, Detroit's version of Macy's, but even with the region's most prominent retailer as an anchor they had trouble at first renting out the other space. Operators of shoe stores would say, "Why should I locate there, you already have a shoe store." They didn't realize that if there was a bunch of shoe stores in one general location, that's where people would go to buy shoes.
It may be apocryphal, but I've heard that is the same strategy for fast food. Wendy's or Burger King would site a restaurant near a McDonald's to grab some of that potential customer traffic
I believe Jack did an article about these "chicken corners." Maybe he could post an archived version of it so that the host doesn't receive any additional clicks. It was a good one as I recall.
Lowes and home depot are a block from eachother where i live too. Ace is 10x more convenient. Also 10x more expensive. I used to temp at the Ace corporate headquarters
I can't bring myself to buy a car from ANYONE online. Nor am I going to buy one in an auction where I have to bid against a bunch of goofballs who are way too excited because it's a RARE 1 of 5 example that combines Metallic Pea paint with the optional Rallye Fun Pack. I'd just assume buy it from a private seller or even a consignment dealer, as long as I can touch the damn car first.
Also, how the hell is a "30th Anniversary" Miata worth 40k? When I can buy a brand new Miata, even with the stupid retractable roof, for way less?
It was better equipped than any Miata you can buy this year, it had $4k worth of genuinely unique wheels with bespoke engraving, and it only came one way (besides choice of roof) so everybody knows you have the bad boy. It's the '96 Grand Sport of NDs... and that $40k number is the floor, there are other results at $43-46k.
I'm in my 30s, I just don't feel like giving Google ALL my data. I mean, it's one thing to use my gmail to log into OnlyFans, but letting them see all my obscure old car searches is just too much!
Besides, "Hey Jack, your article on this car was the 400th hit on Google" would have just been shitposting, even by my low standards.
your comment on the "144 a month lambo bolian" and everything else on that show man. That really sent my down the baruth rabbithole.As a side note, that was the pinnacle of TST for me. Now it's become whatever this jerkoff is:
Matt used to be fun. Now he's just an NPC talking about how we should all drive hybrids. As someone who lives in India with middle class parents, I can tell you that when they asked me what they should buy to replace our venerable innova(basically a hilux with a mpv body on it), and they said the word hybrid, I lost my collective mind. Three of my friends have parents that own ev's and hybrid's(lol ev adoption everywhere except california is about 0.000004 %, tell that to mr. "I live in california and I have a job where I sit at home and write for a website so why dont we all just cycle to our nearest grocery store and school and buy two cars one fun and one ev why dont we all do that"). When you dont have a 9 figure trust fund from daddy "tiffany coo", sometimes your parents with government jobs dontt have the money to pay insurance on two cars and then fund their son's college in the US.
Lol. I mean nothing I read or watch is any interesting to google and tbh, it is pretty convinient lmao(this is a cry for help, they have me locked up in their basement). Does your onlyfans have feet streams?
Second, I'm with you. For something like a car, I want to crawl all over and under it before considering a purchase.
Agree with the article comment about car collecting, and hence auction sites catering to it, to fade. There are a couple young gearheads at my place of work, but otherwise I think the interest in cars in general is dropping off in the coming generations
I think that is blissfully wrong. As someone who's young and around young people, I assure you we acknowledge ev's but we dont give any more of a shit about them than a 60 year old from good ol' lubbock texas would. In fact, most of my friends swear by z's, gtr's and hellcats. The rest take an uber. That's it. Car culture will be alive. What's killing it is morons on car twitter telling me how I should live my life and how I should have an ev and a fun car and how a demon 170 is "dumb" and shit on it(probably because it doesn't matter to their narrative: https://jackbaruth.com/?p=20187) but somehow having a classic car and an ev is acceptable, but if I like a trx and a 2020 stick shift redeye with a henessey tune, I'm a "environmental heathen".
After my experience selling a car on BaT, some level of protection and gurantee around the sale would be the only way I'd try selling another car on a site like that.
I went with BaT since the car was something I truly didn't know how to value, so an auction seemed like a good fit. I thought that'd be the lowest hassle way to get the sale for a fair price. Instead I got to deal with getting sued by some super boomer Perry Mason afficiando who seemingly spends most of his free time writing letters to the editor to the newspaper and replying to @potus on twitter.
I realize you can get sued for a regular private party sale just as easily, but at least in those cases you can tell the buyer to fuck all the way off before the sale as soon as its clear they're a piece of shit. With BaT I was stuck with this guy or I'd just have wasted my time/money with the auction and been unable to re-list. Which, yes in hindsight would have still been the better move here.
"Instead I got to deal with getting sued by some super boomer Perry Mason afficiando who seemingly spends most of his free time writing letters to the editor to the newspaper and replying to @potus on twitter."
I am in no way surprised by that. Bad sellers create bad buyers who make good sellers miserable.
The fun thing is the guy recently won another auction for another 50 year old british car. It'll be interesting to see if another lawsuit pops up in the court system or if I uniquely offended his sensibilities.
Your thoughts on better consumer protection make me think of sites such as KEH and Adorama. They buy the camera gear, inspect it, rate it, and resell. I predict the original seller gets substantially less than if they sold direct Craigslist-style. As an end user I've never had an issue and what arrives in the mail is exactly as described in their rating systems. As a result I rarely buy new camera gear.
I've sold three cars to Carmax. Always been satisfied with the price and the process. Could I have found somebody to give me more money? Maybe. But not dealing with people and their bullshit has a considerable dollar value.
Ive sold every car and bike I’ve owned on craigslist. Can be slightly annoying but it’s a couple grand difference from the car offers i get. I’ve also had some rare cars people want but dealers dont.
There is no new rover. I do quite like a SD1 tho. With the buick V8. Squint hard enough, it looks like a daytona. Hot up that buick V8 with some cams, probably goes like a daytona.
I don't call it entertainment myself, but I know what you mean. I sold a '98 BMW 540 6-speed with almost 200k miles to someone who seemed burdened by the cost of the bridge toll and fuel to get it home (30 miles away).
A few things:
0 - I have written in the past that I know Doug personally from his pre-fame days in Atlanta; we still keep in touch, but we are obviously not as close as we once were. I texted with him after the announcement, which coincided with his appearance on The Smoking Tire podcast (which I listened to). It is my understanding based on Doug’s comments on the podcast that he remains the majority owner of Cars & Bids; I don’t know what percentage of the entity he owns, but the business is theoretically / on paper worth a minimum of ~$75 million. It could be north of $100 million, of course. I did not pry into the transaction terms and structure - if he wanted me to know, he would have told me. He did share the comps that informed his Carrera GT purchase, which were all from … BaT!
1 - I don’t understand the popularity of auction sites, personally. Despite working in finance, I have never been interested in keeping up with the values of toys that I own (or aspire to own). I would never buy a car in a competitive auction scenario.
2 - I am amazed that BaT does not have a financing partner, especially given the aggregate dollar volume of sales and the range of prices; seven figure cars are likely purchased with cash or loans against assets (brokerage accounts, real estate, business interests, etc.), but there are plenty of buyers of cars below, say, $500K (just a guess) that will need financing. Why not bring it in house?
3 - To my point above, Cars & Bids uses Lightstream, the unsecured lender that SunTrust (now Truist) purchased. I worked the buy side of that deal a LONG time ago.
As a guy who has zero business buying a $$$ car online (or at all), I use BaT just like I used to use eBay Motors, which is daydream fodder. I randomly see or hear about a cool car, and I think “oh cool, Ferrari 360, I like those, I want to look at a bunch of pictures of cool ones and see what the going rate for one is so I can daydream about buying one when daycare bills and 529 plans are no longer my problem.” And then I spend 20 minutes clicking and fantasizing. And then I continue on with my life.
I go the opposite way. I enjoy the shallower end of the pool and see a Merkur Xr4ti and make a serious bid on it because it isn't THAT much money vs my finances. Unfortunately, or perhaps not, I have been the second place bidder many times, but have yet to win.
At some point for obscure cars below a certain threshold I don't know how I would ever come across them. There isn't any other searchable digestible national market place.
That is me. Just bought a Mercury Bobcat (pinto). Now if I could just find a 75-79 Granada...
Why not a Monarch?
BE CONSISTENT! :)
I don't know why, by I have an absolute lust for a Mercury LN7. Probably because it touched me so deeply when it was first made.
If this came up today, I can't say I wouldn't be the highest bidder.
https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1982-mercury-ln7/
However, I also realize that my ES350 would wipe the floor with it in every conceivable metric - save styling. I'd probably keep it for a year, realize my nostalgia was underwhelming, and then re-list it on BaT.
I suppose I don’t need to window shop / daydream, because I already know what I want!
Rather than “what can I get for $X?,” my thought process is “I want ______, which costs $Y, so how do I achieve that goal?”
I feel you on those daycare bills, ha. As an aside, I managed to turn a 1981 Celica into a bathroom (which never fully materialized before we up and moved) so I, too, dream about that one day car.
re: 2; That's genious and they should do it. I quit looking at BAT after spending 2 hours on the phone trying to get a day-of loan for 60k to buy a 996 GT3... In retrospect I could have owned it for 2 years for free if I dumped it now, but that's besides the point.
I've sold an 500E there about 2 years before they were hot an lost money. The buyer showed up to claim his prize when I was out of town, and was so rude and condescending my wife almost canceled the sale. My brother sold a car there and was happy, and his bestie listed his there with my brother bidding it up. He ended up being the high bid and paying the fee cause they weren't close to hitting the number. BAT tries really hard to get you to list w/o a reserve.
If anyone wants to assist me in my current obsession; I want (NEED!) a hot wagon. The AMGs are the easy button, or an E34 M5. The CTS-V are ok too, but a touch to garish for my highfalutin taste. The next are the home-made kind, E9X M3 wagon swaps of my current favorite daydream, an E39 M5 swap. I would take a hot Volvo too, screw Jack and his lack of imagination. Anyway.
Bless ye all this Good Friday.
I had half a mind to leverage some connections to learn firsthand why Hearst hasn’t adopted a financing partner in hopes of potentially earning a fee putting one together for them.
Alas, I stumbled into another interesting deal about six months ago that’s taking up all of my time.
" I would take a hot Volvo too, screw Jack and his lack of imagination."
So would I, and in fact I drove a Ford 302-powered V-8 240 in a couple of races, but the "282" on offer seemed to have a LOT of excuses as standard equipment.
The AMG E 63 S Wagon speaks to me. It just doesn't speak to my bank account
I was going to suggest a breathed on Hemi Magnum, but you said highfalutin. Maybe a Hellcat crate motor would fit.
Oh it would for sure, but if I can’t handle GM interiors I for definitely can’t handle a fiat one.
You might be surprised!
It isn't a fiat interior.
I've long wondered about your second point. Seems like a no-brainer. Originally, no financing made sense because of the age of most of the cars, but now that what seems like half of the listings are less than five years old, they are leaving money and bidders on the table.
They could hire steve lang to do the repos
The self-repoing Ford's are almost here too!
He's a real friend to the working man!
This comment has been flagged as non-constructive
I got that treatment when I pointed out the very public previous mechanical failure of a race car being sold on BaT!
I got similar messages when i sold the truck I had in high school. The truck was semi broken half the time cause I was 16 and a crappy mechanic. Half my facebook dm's were some form of "wasn't this the truck you were always working on". Yes it was, but it was as fixed as an 80's Dodge product could be when I sold it.
The father of a friend always said, "You can't fix an old Mopar. you can only work on it."
Lol, many such cases!
I'm a day late and a $ short. All I see of a comment with 26 likes is "This comment has been flagged as non-constructive"
That's the joke -- BaT is highly eager to flag comments as non-constructive.
Substack doesn't even have a mechanism for that.
(but you should've seen it before it was flagged!)
Ha
Too funny.
I am banned from commenting on Cars and Bids. Pointed out the hilarity of flippers claiming "the car wasn't right for me 🥺👉👈" when asked why they were selling.
Oh, and my comment about selling a car with 10 year old tires being moronic got flagged as well.
Ironic, since a car with ten year old tires made Doug famous.
Damnit JACK! just came to say pretty much exactly this! haha
Great minds, sir!
The 360 with which he failed to attract even a single woman?(Apart from his wife, if I haven't gotten my timeline botched up. )And any lady attracted to a guy with a 20 year old ferrari that a spec miata could probably cream around any track strikes me as being, uhm...., difficult.
"It's fully restored. It sat under a tree for 15 years until the property was sold, and it had to be relocated to a garage. Hence, re-stored."
Ha. I am sure I am close to being banned as well. Good riddance
I shudder at your comment about needing to interact with every commenter on BaT. I’d be OK with legit questions, but all the stupid questions and comments from the peanut gallery would tire me out, and it appears to be bad form to verbally eviscerate them even if you are right. Would be great if they had different comment areas for the real bidders, another for legit experts, and a third for the vapid morons (“glwta!,” “brought my popcorn for this one, hurr durr durrr,” etc).
it really irritates me that experts comment on BaT for free and the seller and Hurst profit from their knowledge. I guess it’s just the sign of the times where expertise is valued at zero or expert value is Hoover-ed up by lizards. I am somewhat of an expert on 105/115 series Alfas and limit sharing my expertise either in person or on Alfa forums. I learned my stuff from the Alfisti old timers in the 80’s and now I’m one of those old timers. I need to pass that knowledge on, but damned if I will do it to help Hurst or Doug DeMoron.
The BaT experts get paid in internet esteem.
The only currency that matters is updoots
You and Sherman just likes from me. You 2 are making bank!!!!
Can I buy a hot dog with all this EXPOSURE?
fuck no
I had an internal job pitched to me a couple of years ago. Exposure was offered in reply to my request of a higher grade and more money. It was all I could do to not laugh in his face.
For certain businesses it makes sense. Demonstrating some expertise for a specific model probably can drive you some new customers.
I charge $300 an hour for advice and give it away for free on reddit when I’m bored. And the retard redditors dont even listen
Plastic timing chain tensioner on a Jaguar 4.0 v-8? Its so low miles they don't need to be changed! Also, easy fix!
Yes...I'd combine Categories I&II.
"Hold on, it gets better still. You might think that you’d be better off putting your Porsche 993 on Cars and Bids, since BaT already has five 993s on the site, but you’d be wrong — because the presence of your car will increase interest in the others, and vice versa. Every time an auction closes on a car like yours, you basically inherit all the bidders but the top one."
A couple of miles from where I'm sitting is the site of the Northland Mall, opened the year I was born, 1954, regarded as the country's first regional shopping mall. Now being redeveloped, it was originally built by the J.L. Hudson company, Detroit's version of Macy's, but even with the region's most prominent retailer as an anchor they had trouble at first renting out the other space. Operators of shoe stores would say, "Why should I locate there, you already have a shoe store." They didn't realize that if there was a bunch of shoe stores in one general location, that's where people would go to buy shoes.
It may be apocryphal, but I've heard that is the same strategy for fast food. Wendy's or Burger King would site a restaurant near a McDonald's to grab some of that potential customer traffic
I believe Jack did an article about these "chicken corners." Maybe he could post an archived version of it so that the host doesn't receive any additional clicks. It was a good one as I recall.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230124171046/https://www.hagerty.com/media/opinion/avoidable-contact/avoidable-contact-142-using-the-chicken-corner-strategy-to-save-new-car-enthusiasm/
There it is! Thanks!
There's a Home Depot and a Lowe's next to each other not that far from here.
Lowes and home depot are a block from eachother where i live too. Ace is 10x more convenient. Also 10x more expensive. I used to temp at the Ace corporate headquarters
I can't bring myself to buy a car from ANYONE online. Nor am I going to buy one in an auction where I have to bid against a bunch of goofballs who are way too excited because it's a RARE 1 of 5 example that combines Metallic Pea paint with the optional Rallye Fun Pack. I'd just assume buy it from a private seller or even a consignment dealer, as long as I can touch the damn car first.
Also, how the hell is a "30th Anniversary" Miata worth 40k? When I can buy a brand new Miata, even with the stupid retractable roof, for way less?
It was better equipped than any Miata you can buy this year, it had $4k worth of genuinely unique wheels with bespoke engraving, and it only came one way (besides choice of roof) so everybody knows you have the bad boy. It's the '96 Grand Sport of NDs... and that $40k number is the floor, there are other results at $43-46k.
Oddly enough, the first DuckDuckGo hit I get for the car is a Hagerty article written by...you.
Thanks for reminding me how much I want an ND.
Get one. It may be the last real one of the breed. You won't regret it.
Imagine being so old you use duckduckgo holy shit is jacks readership age skewed
I'm in my 30s, I just don't feel like giving Google ALL my data. I mean, it's one thing to use my gmail to log into OnlyFans, but letting them see all my obscure old car searches is just too much!
Besides, "Hey Jack, your article on this car was the 400th hit on Google" would have just been shitposting, even by my low standards.
And to think I used to actively manipulate Excite! listings for a living, twenty years ago!
I think I might be your youngest listener. 17 lol. I was going through the TST podcast archives and came across this gem: https://open.spotify.com/episode/78lcQ0PRfywc3VfmSN9hsC?si=1f3234a821ed4527
your comment on the "144 a month lambo bolian" and everything else on that show man. That really sent my down the baruth rabbithole.As a side note, that was the pinnacle of TST for me. Now it's become whatever this jerkoff is:
https://twitter.com/TheSmokingTire/status/1644360727900356609?s=20
Matt used to be fun. Now he's just an NPC talking about how we should all drive hybrids. As someone who lives in India with middle class parents, I can tell you that when they asked me what they should buy to replace our venerable innova(basically a hilux with a mpv body on it), and they said the word hybrid, I lost my collective mind. Three of my friends have parents that own ev's and hybrid's(lol ev adoption everywhere except california is about 0.000004 %, tell that to mr. "I live in california and I have a job where I sit at home and write for a website so why dont we all just cycle to our nearest grocery store and school and buy two cars one fun and one ev why dont we all do that"). When you dont have a 9 figure trust fund from daddy "tiffany coo", sometimes your parents with government jobs dontt have the money to pay insurance on two cars and then fund their son's college in the US.
Lol. I mean nothing I read or watch is any interesting to google and tbh, it is pretty convinient lmao(this is a cry for help, they have me locked up in their basement). Does your onlyfans have feet streams?
I don't use goolag or DDG but am curious as to what the young hep cats use these days.
I am reminded of this gem: https://stonetoss.com/comic/e-girls/
I didn't understand a word of what you said but that comic is kinda funny bixby is the goofiest ass assistant
First, nice Vacation reference.
Second, I'm with you. For something like a car, I want to crawl all over and under it before considering a purchase.
Agree with the article comment about car collecting, and hence auction sites catering to it, to fade. There are a couple young gearheads at my place of work, but otherwise I think the interest in cars in general is dropping off in the coming generations
I think that is blissfully wrong. As someone who's young and around young people, I assure you we acknowledge ev's but we dont give any more of a shit about them than a 60 year old from good ol' lubbock texas would. In fact, most of my friends swear by z's, gtr's and hellcats. The rest take an uber. That's it. Car culture will be alive. What's killing it is morons on car twitter telling me how I should live my life and how I should have an ev and a fun car and how a demon 170 is "dumb" and shit on it(probably because it doesn't matter to their narrative: https://jackbaruth.com/?p=20187) but somehow having a classic car and an ev is acceptable, but if I like a trx and a 2020 stick shift redeye with a henessey tune, I'm a "environmental heathen".
"Where's my old car?"
After my experience selling a car on BaT, some level of protection and gurantee around the sale would be the only way I'd try selling another car on a site like that.
I went with BaT since the car was something I truly didn't know how to value, so an auction seemed like a good fit. I thought that'd be the lowest hassle way to get the sale for a fair price. Instead I got to deal with getting sued by some super boomer Perry Mason afficiando who seemingly spends most of his free time writing letters to the editor to the newspaper and replying to @potus on twitter.
I realize you can get sued for a regular private party sale just as easily, but at least in those cases you can tell the buyer to fuck all the way off before the sale as soon as its clear they're a piece of shit. With BaT I was stuck with this guy or I'd just have wasted my time/money with the auction and been unable to re-list. Which, yes in hindsight would have still been the better move here.
"Instead I got to deal with getting sued by some super boomer Perry Mason afficiando who seemingly spends most of his free time writing letters to the editor to the newspaper and replying to @potus on twitter."
I am in no way surprised by that. Bad sellers create bad buyers who make good sellers miserable.
The fun thing is the guy recently won another auction for another 50 year old british car. It'll be interesting to see if another lawsuit pops up in the court system or if I uniquely offended his sensibilities.
Your thoughts on better consumer protection make me think of sites such as KEH and Adorama. They buy the camera gear, inspect it, rate it, and resell. I predict the original seller gets substantially less than if they sold direct Craigslist-style. As an end user I've never had an issue and what arrives in the mail is exactly as described in their rating systems. As a result I rarely buy new camera gear.
In a nation of middlemen, there's an example of when it's genuinely useful!
Isn't that what carmax is for?
I've sold three cars to Carmax. Always been satisfied with the price and the process. Could I have found somebody to give me more money? Maybe. But not dealing with people and their bullshit has a considerable dollar value.
Ive sold every car and bike I’ve owned on craigslist. Can be slightly annoying but it’s a couple grand difference from the car offers i get. I’ve also had some rare cars people want but dealers dont.
You didn't have to call me out directly like that.
I wouldn't mind having another Jag or P38. The new Rovers leave me cold.
There is no new rover. I do quite like a SD1 tho. With the buick V8. Squint hard enough, it looks like a daytona. Hot up that buick V8 with some cams, probably goes like a daytona.
I don't call it entertainment myself, but I know what you mean. I sold a '98 BMW 540 6-speed with almost 200k miles to someone who seemed burdened by the cost of the bridge toll and fuel to get it home (30 miles away).
When are people going to understand there's no prestige in driving a 15-year-old Mercedes?
When there isn't, which depending on the community involved is not yet the case.
When they understand there's no prestige in driving any Mercedes
Wait, are you telling me there’s prestige to be had in driving a car?!
The 30 year old ones are better than the new ones. The 15 year old ones are close to the low point, which would be around 1998-2000, I guess.
I've read economics papers that suggested consistent markers of poverty are:
- Not finishing high school
- Single parenthood
I would add borrowing money on a 15 year old high end luxury car to the list.
I used them to dump a leased BMW 328 M Sport Touring. Worked great for that situation