Randy Nonnenberg on His Auction Platform and 2024's Best Buys; Plus a 1969 Corvette

Bring a Trailer founder Randy Nonnenberg joins Hannah and Matt to talk about how he grew his online auction platform from a personal blog into $1.4 billion in sales last year - and what cars are going big in 2024. Plus, Hannah talks about buying a 1969 Corvette from a swap meet, and Matt finally finds a family-hauler he can stomach.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. I'm Matt Miller and
I'm Hannah Elliott, and this is Hot Pursuit.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Very exciting episode today because we're going to interview Randy Nannenberg,
the founder and president of Bring a Trailer, probably one
of the most important businesses in the automotive industry to
emerge over the last couple of decades, I would say, so,
definitely stay tuned for that. Plus, Hannah, you bought a
car last week.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
I did, we did.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
We're gonna talk about you and your partner, Magnus Walker
bought another C three Corvette. We're going to talk about
that for sure. I'm excited to hear what it's like
to drive a C three Corvette. Maybe when I come over,
you'll let me take one of your resources in. And
then I bought a car as well. I've been searching.
I've been asking people for advice. Our email address, by

(01:03):
the way, you can write in and tell me what
you think about my choice, what you think about Hannah's
corvette growing corvette collection. Our email address is.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Hot Pursuit at Bloomberg dot net. That's Hot Pursuit at
Bloomberg dot net. And we do personally see and read
each email you send us, and we do respond as well.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah. Absolutely, we got so much feedback in terms of
my car family hall or debate, and it was very useful.
And we get a lot of suggestions about content that
we are working behind the scenes to put into action.
So write to us at hot Pursuit at Bloomberg dot
net and we will respond, and eventually we'll send you
signed glossies, maybe.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah, glamour shots if we get some made up.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
We need to get some made up, all right, Why
don't you bring in our next guest, Hannah.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
So, Randy is somebody who might have invented the most
addictive new thing in the car world. It's not new.
It was started in two thousand and seven called Bring
a Trailer. Last year, trailer cleared more than one point
for billion dollars in sales. It's kind of insane. Almost
a million active users and four hundred thousand plus registered bidders.

(02:11):
Randy answers all of our questions about what's trending, what's hot?
You know what he's driving these days. I can't wait
to talk to him.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
Well, let's do it right now. Give us a brief
overview of bring a Trailer, because I think everyone knows
what it is, but I don't think everyone knows how
it started, how you got started with the.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
Site, absolutely, so I'm happy to do that. So we
turned on Bring a Trailer in two thousand and seven,
and at the beginning, it was just a blog where
I was basically hunting around the Internet finding interesting cars
for sale, and it turns out that resonated with an audience.
A lot of people were doing the same thing, hunting
around at weird websites, dealer websites all over the place,

(02:52):
and they'd find something for sale, whether or not they
were going to buy it, but that was their sort
of flavor of entertainment and treasure hunting, and the Internet
was very scattered and it was fun to do that.
So putting all that right on BAT. I didn't have
the money to buy all these fun cars that I found,
but I could certainly hone my skills at finding them,
so decided to share that with a broader group, and

(03:15):
it grew organically and people sort of forwarded it on
to their friends, and we created a morning email digest
that you could wake up and open up your email
and Bat would hit you with four or five interesting
cars that I had found personally the night before in
my Internet ramblings, and for whatever reason, the kind of

(03:35):
cars that I found, and some of them were deals,
some of them were projects, some of them were exotic
and interesting. It was stuff people wouldn't have found otherwise,
so they thought it was compelling and then it kind
of snowballed from there.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
So but it was almost like a blog, right, or
it wasn't an auction site at first, if I recall,
because I remember like I was reading Jelopnik and they
would say, hey, look what came up on bring a trailer.
And at that point it wasn't the same as it
is now.

Speaker 3 (04:03):
Correct. It wasn't a marketplace. Everybody always asked like, oh,
did you have a big business idea for BAT? And
it was more therapy for me than it was business.
It was like what I did with my free time,
and I just decided to share it with everybody else.
And so, yeah, there was no marketplace. There was none
of that until the audience came along and kind of
asked for a marketplace and said, hey, you featured my

(04:26):
MG that was on Craigslist and I got twenty phone
calls for it, why can't I just send you my
next MG instead of hoping you feature it. And so
then the light bulb went off, like, wait, this is
a marketplace opportunity. So we said we'd set up, you know,
classifieds and let people list their car on bat if
they emailed them to me first, and we started to
do that, and then that snowballed into people fighting over

(04:47):
the cars, and that's a natural auction moment was the
next step.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
And at the time, you were you working at BMW
North America at the time, what was catching your eye?
I mean, when you were spending your midnight hours looking online,
what were you looking for?

Speaker 3 (05:03):
Good question? Yeah, I was working in the car business.
I always wanted to work near cars which were near
and dear for me, So I channeled that into engineering
and working for BMW and doing those sort of project
with a modern OEM, which was super fun. But I
always liked vintage cars. I always liked race cars. I
always liked all sorts of different stuff. My interests are very,

(05:25):
very broad, sort of similar to how the website now is, right.
I mean, we list pickup trucks, and we'll list an
army tank, and then we'll list a dots and race car,
and then we'll list a Rolls Royce. Right, it's sort
of schizophrenic and all over the place. But variety for
me has always been what makes cars so cool and
the fact you could pull up at a light and
you know, there's a little four cylinder British car and

(05:46):
then there's a you know, fancy exotic right next to it.
And so what was I looking for? I was looking
for interesting stuff? Right, you load Craigslist and my local
San Francisco Craigslist would have ten million cars you don't
want that are either junk or and they'd have those
two that if you looked long enough in the two
in the morning, you'd find them. And so I figured
out how to find them. And it was it was

(06:07):
more just special and different. And I have my taste
as well around certain stuff that I own and I love,
but I really love just a story and a special find.

Speaker 1 (06:17):
Okay, So tell us about a moment where you kind
of realized this is a thing and this is this
really has legs, because tell me if I'm wrong, I
think you guys did one point four billion in sales
last year, which is unbelievable. At what point along this journey.

(06:38):
Did you realize, oh, this is this is really big?

Speaker 2 (06:41):
When did you quit working for BMW?

Speaker 3 (06:44):
Well, it took a while to do that, even right, Yeah,
three years. It was just a side hustle and a
kind of fun evening project and an excuse to hang
out with a buddy of mine that I started it with.
The light bulb really went on when we saw that
we were making a difference in those cars we were featuring,
When those sellers would be like, I don't know what happened,
but BAT featured it, and everything went bananas all of
a sudden, right, there was like an upswell of interest

(07:06):
in the cars that we were featured, and it became
kind of a good thing to get featured on BAT.
And then we're like, oh, wait a minute, that's different.
But even back up before that, I mean, and yeah,
you said wasn't like a blog. It was a blog.
It was a WordPress blog at the beginning, which is
like a free, easy product you could run off your laptop. Yeah,
And so the fact that there was anybody in the

(07:28):
comments and the discussion that would say anything, the fact
that they would read anything that I wrote as a
total amateur, like want to be you know, I wasn't
like a journalist like you guys are in the halls
of Bloomberg. I was just like a dude that turned
on a website, right, And so for the feedback loop
for me was when people would engage and talk about

(07:48):
either my opinions or the car that was featured. And
I mean it's very rudimentary.

Speaker 1 (07:52):
Now.

Speaker 3 (07:52):
Everybody thinks it's normal to comment on social media or
whatever now, but I mean in seven I mean there
was no we turn it on before there was an iPhone,
right before there was things that we all totally take
for granted now. And obviously we weren't the first to
do that, but in this car sort of universe, we
were one of the early ones to do that where
you'd actually have an interaction talking about something that was

(08:13):
for sale, and that was very different. And so that
was before the marketplace opportunity. It was just sort of
adrenaline that I needed to keep going and doing this
again tomorrow because you needed to keep that energy up
and do it every day.

Speaker 2 (08:26):
So let me ask you now, I mean, Doug DeMuro
famously sold his auctioneering website and went out and bought
a Portia Carrera GT, right, and then and then he
bought a cuntash and he already had the four GT.
Did you go out and buy yourself something special or
did you build yourself a new garage? I mean you
now have the ability to take a hobby. For most

(08:50):
girls and guys that care about cars, they sit on
the internet all night like you, and dream about what
they could do. Now, I imagine you could do it. You
probably have like one hundred employees and an office building,
and so what are you doing now?

Speaker 3 (09:00):
We have all that stuff, We have one hundred and
fifty employees and the site. You know, your vulgarity is okay.
I've heard different terms for it, but b a T Yeah,
you can do the balance sheet of BAT on a
bar napkin if you if you have the patients and
tally up everything on the website. That's very transparent and permanent.
My yeah, my goals are a little different. I didn't

(09:21):
race out and buy any supercars. People say, you know, Randy,
where's your Ferrari or your Lamborghini three points? No. But
I joked in the early days of BAT that I
dreamed twenty thousand dollars at a time. That was kind
of like the stuff on b at a lot of
it was very accessible and that sort of stuff. Now
twenty K and seven is different. Now call it fifty
k at a time. So I still kind of dream

(09:42):
fifty k at a time. I bought, you know, some
of some of my dream vehicles are you know, pickup trucks,
And I've seen some of those sixty yeah, and I
think Hannah kind of shakes her head at me, like
what does this guy do? And then friends of mine
are like, yeah, why aren't you in some port supercar? Right?
And I have a seventy two GMC that's like my

(10:03):
favorite thing in the world. It's part here at bat HQ,
right in the middle and it's it's awesome. It was
just written up in a magazine, but not written up
because it's so expensive. It's written up because it's just
so different and cool and everybody loves it whenever you
show up in it. So that sort of thing I'm into.
I'm into sixties alpha maos and have one that's a
little a little deaded up and I drive on events

(10:25):
the dirt roads and stuff. I don't have the one
that's rolling out to Pebble Beach. I have just sort
of some different stuff and maybe that's just my style,
but I don't. I don't foresee you know, a five
million dollars supercar in my future. I foresee all. I mean,
I still, you know, the early days of BET was
me searching for cars, and like here I am in
present day, like last night, I'm searching on European sites

(10:47):
for you know, thirty thousand dollars cars. It's kind of
like what I It's kind of what I do.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
And oh, by the way, does anyone really still do that, Randy?
Because I imagine most of the cars on the site,
you know, everybody knows and they go to BEAT to
sell it. If I have have a you know, two
thousand and five GT, I know that I'm gonna go
to BAT for the best traction. But is there anybody
still like searching, you know, Craigslist in the Midwestbababs, Well, it's.

Speaker 3 (11:13):
It's pretty painful now because things have changed, right. People
have different channels where they can list these things, and
even social media. Like if you wanted to sell your
car and you have any sort of following on social media,
a lot of people just throw their car on there. Right,
So the places have changed, and BAT is a lot
of people in the early days are like, Randy, you're
gonna You're gonna uncover all the secrets. There's gonna be
no more secrets anymore. And I was like, you know what,

(11:35):
there's so many cars, and there's so many websites and
crazy people out there that you know, hoard their stuff.
Like there's plenty of supply. Thankfully, bat now has you know,
hundreds of these every single week, and you can go
find a bunch of good stuff. But I still go
hunt around, you know, dealers that are clueless and like
have their five cars on their website only and stuff

(11:56):
like that. You can still find crazy stuff now Craigslist
has they don't have as many gems there as maybe
they used to. eBay doesn't have as many gems as
they used to because of again, these these alternatives. But
it's still fun to treasure hunt and I still do it.
And I still have a bunch of cars I want
to own before I die that I haven't bought yet,
and so I have to figure out how to sell

(12:17):
some and buy some and have.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
Where are you keeping these? We're I mean, this is
a space issue now more than anything, As anyone who
loves cars nos it's kind of a problem.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
I moved out of San Francisco. I used to have
the little, you know, tiny, you know, nineteen twenties garadge
in San Francisco. You couldn't even drive a modern suv
into the door. It was like for a horse and
buggy or whatever. So that, thankfully, we've moved beyond that
and out to the burbs. But I have a couple
of cars at home, and then bat the office here
in San Francisco. Thankfully, we're in an industrial space where
the staff, several of my employees and myself we keep

(12:49):
a few cars, which is really fun. And then yeah,
I have an outpost out in the mountains with a
storage unit, and I have some some again, a couple
of trucks up there, Hannah, you're smiling. And then a
couple of cars. And then we have these partners. B A.
T has local partners all over the country now, which
is really fun and one of my favorite automotive things
to do is to go on driving events all over

(13:10):
the place in the US and outside the US. And
so I've kept a car the Partner model in LA
and East Coast. Yeah, so we have I think it's
forty eight of these now coast to coasts, and we've
always just sort of reacted to the car buying and
selling customer and what they actually want. And some of

(13:30):
them want to do everything themselves on BAT and our
control freak. So they want to do every comment, they
want to take every photo, they want to do everything
and be very involved.

Speaker 1 (13:41):
Got a lot of time hands.

Speaker 3 (13:43):
Well, that's right. So where that goes is they're the
flip side of that is there are customers who have
cars and they just want to drive them and have
everybody else handle the rest, right. And so obviously we're
a virtual company and we're based here in SF, so
if somebody in Atlanta two Ferraris they want to sell,
we would start getting many calls saying, hey, who can

(14:04):
help me do this? So we found that the best
way to do that was not to prop up a
Bat brick and mortar in every corner of the globe.
It was to find who's the best person that knows
how to take great photos and prepare a car for
sale in Atlanta. Let's go get to know them and
set them up and support them and promote them and
frankly steer business to them. And we found many partners

(14:27):
that know how to do that, and so many places
where people are located. It's soon expanding outside the US,
but right now in the US, in all the major metros,
you can say, oh, I can take my car and
drop a car and the keys with this person and
they're trusted and they can get the car and BAT
and get that BAT result, you know, that magic BAT
result that requires effort, but without the effort, you just

(14:49):
kind of pay someone else to do it. And it's
been working super well. We love it. It's been a
fast track and a really successful system for many sellers.

Speaker 1 (15:02):
So this brings up a really good point, Randy. You
mentioned the word trusted, and you know previously you also
mentioned the word transparency and about how you could kind
of figure out the BAT business plan on the back
of a napkin if you wanted to. And you know,
I've covered the company and known you for some time now,
and you've always been very transparent about the financials and

(15:23):
and kind of everything, which is unusual and wonderful. And
you know, I know when this whole idea of buying
a car online first started percolating, there were a lot
of people who said, I would never buy a car online.
You can't trust it? How why would you? How could
you even do that without driving it or let alone

(15:43):
even seeing it. Can you talk a little bit about
your philosophy about how do you get people to trust BAT?
You know you mentioned these partners. How do we know
those people are trustworthy? What is the betting process on
your end of things? Because you really had an uphill
battle when BAT first started.

Speaker 3 (16:04):
Absolutely it was a pill and we had to frankly
overcompensate to give people that comfort level because so many
people have been burned or had bad experiences. Or there's
the Internet and there's used car buying, right, like think
of like kind of think of things that are worse
like casinos, immling or something, right, I.

Speaker 1 (16:22):
Mean types are for a reason.

Speaker 3 (16:25):
Yes, absolutely, there's a lot of sharks and alligators in
the water, is what I always like to say. And
there wasn't a lot of truth told, and then people
would go kind of hide behind the internet, and man,
what is what is that going to turn into? It's
not even face to face, right, So there's a lot
of ways it can go wrong. And so for us,
I mean we kind of built this this auction product
like for the for the transactions I wanted to have myself.

(16:48):
I was like customer number one, right, I was like,
I don't trust any of these other people, so let's
go build it in a way that we would actually
use it. And to do that this you know, community
engagement and doing things more transparently almost overly transparent in
a way. It was unsettling to people, and I think
they were kind of like, is this for real? And

(17:08):
thankfully we were patient, and so we didn't have a
again business plan deadline to make money in year two
or whatever like that, right, it was just kind of like,
let's do this the right way and kind of play
the long game. And so it took some years. And
even when we launched auctions, we had skeptics saying, you know,
the world doesn't need another auction, and you're just like
eBay and like, oh, ten auctions are better. You know,

(17:30):
there was all these reasons why it shouldn't work or
it wouldn't work, and we just kind of kept finding
these different components that people didn't like and go break
those down and make it positive. And that long sort
of trudge to do that when you don't borrow money
and you kind of just like have your eye on
the long game. You can make different decisions. You don't
have to like hurry up and take shortcuts.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
You know what.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
Speaking of borrowing money, so Hannah and I both have
just recently bought a car. We're going to talk about
that longer. And it is terrifying and disheartening.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
And exhilarating and can.

Speaker 2 (18:02):
Be exhilarating right if you get it right. But yet
there's a lot of sharks in the water, for sure.
One of the issues a lot of people have is financing.

Speaker 3 (18:09):
Right.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
Okay, not the gal who picks up the new new
generation for GT for a million dollars, but for people
who are buying like a thirty thousand dollars car or
a fifty thousand dollars car, a lot of times they're
going to be at a normal dealer financing. Do you
have like a financing arm or do you have to
bring that into the equation?

Speaker 3 (18:25):
So your t and me up perfectly. Anna was asking
what's coming and what's going on? And so we're within
days or a couple of weeks of a new pretty
revolutionary product that we're excited and component of BAT that
I'm happy to tease here, which is going to basically
change the checkout experience on BAT. BT has long been

(18:46):
pursued by yeah, financing, insurance, all these different sort of
tack on components that you could add, and frankly, we've
been very skeptical of that because we didn't want to
make it too commercial or muddy the waters, or or
jump in with the first offer or anything like that.
So a lot of people for a long time said,
why isn't there financing on BT? You could do that
so easily. But with the variety that we offer on BAT, again,

(19:10):
a five thousand dollar dots and a five million dollar
Ferrari is our range. There's not a one size fits all, right,
So a bank will walk in the door and say, hey,
we want to be vat finance bank partner, and it's like,
if it's that one dimensional, they have a challenge for
the variety of customer and for the variety of inventory.
And so we've always wanted like a suite of products

(19:31):
that we can offer cleanly and in a non confusing
way and again in a trustworthy way. And so what's
going to roll out for us is kind of the
after the point of the auction is over, there's some
decisions to make and we're going to be able to
offer a checkout process which takes care of paperwork, financing, insurance,

(19:51):
different sorts of things that are rolled up into and
more streamlined and trustworthy transfer of funds is also going
to be in a things which are right now. We're
kind of like a dating service. We like mixed match
you up with the car, but then like what you
do with your life is up to you, and that
that's great and that freedom is great, but a lot
of people are like, hey, can you help me with

(20:12):
all these other things, and financing is one of them.
We get asked all the time. And so we really
think this new checkout B and T checkout process is
going to be really cool. And that's no joke. We're
doing that after I get off the the mic with
you guys. We're going through some of the final demos
this afternoon and it will be out on the market soon.

Speaker 2 (20:29):
So, by the way, I just have been looking at
cars dealers across the country and I notice a lot
of them will charge a few hundred dollars for dock
fees and then some say, oh, there was a three
thousand dollars down payment in addition to the price plus
you know, there's a two thousand dollars prep fee and
oh yeah, we sell Lowjack on every single car and
we require you to buy it for eight ninety five?

(20:49):
Is the price that I get on BAT when I
finally win the auction? Is that near the price that
I'm going to actually pay for the vehicle?

Speaker 3 (20:56):
So that is I mean, we do take a fee
for auctions, as all auction do ours is five percent,
So that that's very that's pretty low. It's very low
for compared to a physical auction, and it's even low
among most digital competitors that we have. And I've always
liked sort of low fees. I think it's one of
the reasons for our success frankly. But yeah, is that
pretty close to what you pay? Yeah? Right now the

(21:17):
digital checkout will be auctional right, Like we're not going
to like make you go do this and then charge
you for it and different sorts of things. It's like,
I like adding all the kart services if people want them,
but if they don't want them. If you if you
love spending the time, it's your favorite thing to control
everything end to end, we we always try to support that. Again,
that's that's a reputation that the car dealer world. Right,
you get kind of shoved into the F and I
office and then all these charges and you're like what.

(21:39):
You walk out of their bruised and battered and say,
what did I underbody?

Speaker 2 (21:42):
Ceilant? Do you have a tyre and wheel package?

Speaker 3 (21:45):
Totally like special window tints you end up buying you
didn't know you needed that are gonna you know? Who knows?
So yeah, there's there's I've never liked that sort of stuff,
and I think culturally on BET there's a there's a
desire from the entire BT community that it's just clear
and understood and not a pressure sales approach, and I
think that has served us well. So yeah, anyway, a

(22:07):
bunch of services that we want to be able to offer,
and I'll offer them in a sort of delightful way
that is additive instead of feels punitive. So yeah, you
can walk away, but you bit on the car. There's
a five percent fee and that you're not going to
get away from when you win a car at auction.
But then other than that, it's kind of up to
you after that.

Speaker 1 (22:25):
I'm very curious who you see people cross shopping against
bring a trailer. I mean, I don't know if I
want to say, who's your competition, but if people are
looking for things on bring a trailer, where else are
they looking to buy a similar thing these days?

Speaker 3 (22:42):
Good question, And I'm very explicit about our competition and
who's out there. Right when we started it, the whiteboard
session was no joke, like eBay was on one side,
and RM and Bottoms and Gooding and all these high
end auctions were on the other side, and we tried
to find a sweet spot in the middle. Now that
was twenty fourteen, right fast forward. B AT Auctions will
celebrate ten years in June July timeframe of this year,

(23:05):
and so things change right for the better, for the worse,
you know, COVID happened in that time frame. It's been
We've all lived a lot of life in the last
ten years, and the whiteboard right now would be totally different,
Like they would be very different players right now. Some
of them are the same. But obviously a lot of
people have adopted our model of online selling and curation

(23:27):
and listing quality and the things that we introduced, and
yeah you talk about you know, collecting cars out of
the UK. They're a meaningful player. The older classified sites
have launched auctions, right, like Hemmings and Auto Traders launching theirs,
and different different things are happening. It's a very dynamic market.
You mentioned Doug DeMuro, Like YouTubers are starting Supercar Blondie

(23:48):
is supposedly starting an auction next month, right. I mean,
it's like a trendy thing to do because Doug DeMuro
showed that the YouTuber audience, you can try to pivot
them into paying money for cars.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
I don't know, cars and bids. Is that really creative?
It's just I guess I don't think on anybody.

Speaker 3 (24:06):
Because bring a trailer, everybody said was the weirdest. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:09):
I really love to tell the story. Tell the story.

Speaker 2 (24:12):
Yeah, how about what.

Speaker 1 (24:13):
What bring a trailer means? Because I think we know
what it means, but let's hear it from you.

Speaker 3 (24:17):
Yeah, well, bring a trailer. I mean I searched even
before there was an Internet. When I was a kid.
Instead of you know, reading the back of the cereal box,
you know, eating before school or whatever, I would read
the classifieds in the Santa Mercury News and people would
would put funny little taglines and abbreviate that you paid
by the letter, and you paid by the line and stuff.
So there were all these buzzwords, which was always really funny.

(24:39):
It was like this code that I had to crack
and figure out, and I was I would do that
every day, so I would. I was pretty adept at it.
But anyway, there were buzzwords, and one of them oftentimes
was bring a trailer was written right there in the
ad because that could mean either a piece of junk
in your side yard, or if there was like a
race car in the classifieds, they'd say bring a trailer

(24:59):
or for whatever reason, like that was a call to action.
And so that later when I was searching Craig's List
or wherever, I would actually search that term on the
Internet and find it in classified its places, and that
would mean maybe it's an interesting project car. So that's
where the term bring a trailer came from, and it
was it was decided on amongst some other random names

(25:20):
of what we may name a website, and so we
decided to call it that.

Speaker 2 (25:23):
I imagine COVID really breathed life into bat right. I mean,
before COVID prices just weren't nearly as high as they are,
and I think at least in my mind. For the
last few years, I have blamed BAT for driving prices
up in.

Speaker 3 (25:39):
The many houses many have done that.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
Is that fair? Is that fair?

Speaker 3 (25:44):
I think prices have gone up because people and yeah,
COVID experience and what people have wanted has evolved over
the last ten years. Also, yeah, just a dollar. I mean,
you guys are the financial experts, but a dollar doesn't
go as far as it did in twenty fourteen or
two thousand and seven. So prices are up in general.
But I think we've helped and some other media has

(26:05):
helped shine a light on how cool cars can be.
For not just you know, it's a it's a shiny
you know, red Ferrari asset, it's a but experientially, I
think there's some events that have come on. I think
there's different classes of car. This whole trucks thing that
I'm talking about, Like that wasn't that cool twenty years ago?

Speaker 1 (26:25):
But like it if your dad it was embarrassing.

Speaker 3 (26:28):
Yeah, yeah, going down a dirt road now is actually
you know, you see all these every single print clothing
catalog I get in the mail has like an old
Bronco on the cover, you know, I mean it's like
a thing. So I think a lot of things have
driven prices up. I think bat has made it accessible
and trustworthy, which I think unlocked a lot of baters

(26:49):
and financial capability of buyers, so that that tends to
drive prices up a little bit.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
Sure, when I think of collector cars, I always think
of the Mustangs and the muscle cars. Hannah, I'm sure
thinks of the Ferraris and.

Speaker 1 (27:08):
Also Rolls Royces.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
Of course, Yes, she's the higher end, right and I'm
like in my uncle's garage. But what are the hot
cars right now? Because obviously a six so we really
want to know Mustang is gonna be or the Bronco.
You know, it had its moment, Sure for the last
few years. What about right now, what do you see
as the rising stars.

Speaker 3 (27:28):
Yeah, there's a few that like were rocket chips to
the moon for a while there, and then now they
have pulled back. Broncos have pulled back. It got a
little out of control, and then honestly, there was a
macro economic sort of reset in twenty twenty three which
brought prices down kind of across the board compared to
twenty twenty two. Was the peak of the of the
bubble and then it kind of settled down. People got

(27:49):
some sanity, but there were broader financial implications as well,
And so I saw almost all prices come down a
little bit last year, and now they're stabilized and people
kind of are back to basics of what do I
really like, what do I really want to again experience?
And I think the things that are being driven specific models,
there will always be this sort of nostalgia narrative, meaning
that as time marches on newer and newer cars, we

(28:12):
get more focus. Right, everybody was talking about oh, nineties cars,
nineties cars a little bit ago. Now that narrative has
marched into the early two thousands cars and up to
twenty ten type cars. Those are, you know, starting to
be fifteen and twenty years old.

Speaker 1 (28:26):
Now does that make you feel old?

Speaker 3 (28:28):
It does? It does? It makes me feel old too.
You know that classic cars have airbags in them and
that sort of thing, you know, but that is insane,
But those are you know, those are getting older and
a younger group, right, people in their thirties. Those they
were kids when those cars were coming out and that
sort of stuff. So I like how that marches forward

(28:48):
because it kind of lets differently in different eras. It
bothers me.

Speaker 2 (28:53):
When a Fox Body Mustang gets a six figure price.

Speaker 3 (28:56):
I don't know, and that happens, that happens a fair amount.
At ninety three Cobra Mustang is about a thirty year
old car, and it's it's it's quite a collector's item
at this point. I don't know if you've driven a
Fox Mustang recently, but it kind of feels old.

Speaker 2 (29:10):
I haven't since in nineteen ninety three.

Speaker 3 (29:12):
Oh, I love those, man, I love you.

Speaker 1 (29:14):
What do you think is the ceiling of what you
can sell on bait in terms of prices? I know,
obviously we had a couple of Kara gts that sold
for well over a million. What do you think, I mean,
when will the most expensive sale in the world happen
on bring a trailer.

Speaker 3 (29:33):
We'll see, We'll see if it does. I mean, the
top sail to date is a five million dollar La Ferrari,
and that happened in twenty twenty two as part of
that price run up. And then yeah, many you know,
seven figure cars are pretty common down closer to one
and between one and two million, but over two and
into five and that's pretty rare air on beat or

(29:55):
or anywhere truly online like what we're doing. Really the
tent auctions have very active sales teams that are out
there running around, you know, shaking the trees and trying
to kind of track as many of those as they can.
But our fee structure is so low that some sellers
just can't resist and like want want to do it
in a new and different way, and so I think
that there will be more and more of those. I

(30:18):
think the long game is that the low fees win.
Will it ever become our bread and butter and we'll
you know, abandon cars under one hundred k to do
all high end card No. I love that we can
at the same time, you know, give as much attention
to it a ten thousand dollars motorcycle or car as
we do to a million dollar car motorcyclist.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
I want to see more motorcycles.

Speaker 3 (30:39):
I do as well. So but just to finish on
this question that the big the big ticket type stuff,
I think we'll get that peppered in and I think
we're actually a very compelling place for cars, call it
three million dollars in under. But like, does be a
team need to sell a forty million dollar Lamal winner.
I mean, it would be it would be an interesting exercise,
but thankfully we're not relying on that whatsoever. So if

(31:02):
it happens, great, and we cap our fees so we
make the same money on a forty million dollar cars
we do on a one million dollar car wild and
we're fine with that. That's not how the big auction
company works, so they'll spend a lot more to go
capture that listing than we will, and thankfully we don't
need it. We can win on different types. Are you turning, Yeah,
mot motos are a thing. Moti is a big category

(31:24):
on BAT, and we did a moto event at Quill
Lodge last year and we're investing more in that. I mean,
people don't see it because it's a little bit, you know,
mixed in with the cars. But we're the largest motorcycle
marketplace online by a good measure. Wow. I think there's
forty forty to sixty motos every week are are listed
and transacted on BAT. And that isn't really being done

(31:45):
in a focused way any in any of the market.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
No, that's very cool, that's cool. Cycle Cycle Trader definitely
needs to be disrupted. Are you are you turning a
lot of cars away. I heard you say one time
you're listing like one four GT a week, but you
don't want to do an more than that because you
don't want to let them stack up. Are there lines
of cars like sixty five Mustangs, you know, or Broncos
that where you're saying, hey, we'll sell your car, but

(32:10):
not until like March fifteenth.

Speaker 3 (32:12):
There can be it all eggs and flows, you know.
I check in with my team on a routine basis
on what's what's like that. We don't want things to
stack up because if you have to wait a long
time to list your car, that's not as compelling as
a seller. But there are certain models where we don't
want it to overlap. And if you were a seller,
you know you're selling the most, you know, perfect rolls,

(32:32):
Royce corniche or whatever, and then it goes live and
the next day the same color, same car goes live,
you'd be like, wait, wait, wait a minute. I want
the scarcity and the rarity is.

Speaker 1 (32:42):
Where we don't want to flood the market here with corniches.

Speaker 3 (32:45):
You don't want to get crazy on the corniche market.
So I mean that's an example, but Yeah, you mentioned
four gts, the five oh six, the first four GT.
Most people don't modify those. There's like three or four
options on them, and they're like very similar. So if
you one and you launched another one that's the same moment,
particularly the same color, in the same geographic region, like

(33:05):
you can kind of torpedo the momentum there. So we
have to be very thoughtful. We have a Yeah, our
team is like picking which vehicles go live when and
where they are and what the seller, what the seller
expects for timing, and it's it's an orchestration and a
curation of the whole experience. A lot of people think
it's just oh, I'll just throw my car on bat tonight,

(33:25):
you know, and it's it actually isn't. It's it's much
more thoughtful than that. And so the only other thing
I'll say on the on the yeah, things stacking up
there will can be modern models that come out and
are hard to get, like when the Ford Lightning came out,
when the Bronco Raptor came out, when some of the
when Rivian's first came out, the pickup trucks that were rare,

(33:46):
there were people that wanted to you know, turn their
early early number into a profit to actually flip the
car pretty quickly, and those would would stack up and
we had to be very careful. We wouldn't just flood
the website with that because I just didn't think that
was great. I'm out of the buyer the seller. Well, yeah,
automakers don't love it, but their all MSRs system is
so broken that like it makes all kind of Porsche

(34:08):
is like only letting you lease the st now so
you don't flip it. And there's all these there's all
these dynamics. So we navigate that and we try to
do what's best for the market and the customer and
the result, the goal is a good sales result.

Speaker 2 (34:20):
This brings up an interesting point, at least to me. Interesting.
I've listened to you over the last few years talk
about the idea of transparency and kind of the idea
that you're not trying to really pimp the ride. Obviously
you want to sell the car, that's your job, but
you're not making it sound better than it is because
you want to be as fair to the buyer as
you are to the seller in some way. So what's

(34:43):
your take on reserve auctions? Because to me, if you
want to be totally transparent, the seller just tell me
what he wants, and then if me and Hannah both
want the car, then we'll start outbidding each other. But
there's no point in all the work that goes up
to the reserve price. It just seems like kind of
a scam.

Speaker 3 (35:02):
I love your point of view on that. So the
in the one point zero of bat auctions, I'll tell
you a little story. I don't like reserves either, and
I hated them, and I was like, so we're going
to start an auction company that doesn't have reserves, right,
We're going to do bat auctions and there's no option
for reserves. And I thought that was a great idea.
And we started it at some arbitrary number that was

(35:25):
like a quasi reserve and hoped it would bid up.
And we had these different mechanics because honestly, a lot
of this was experimentation. We didn't we didn't always start
it right at one dollar. But it turns out sellers
are resistant. Obviously, they're trying to protect their interest as
much as as they want to sell the car, right.
They don't want to take a bath at They're nervous
there's no marketplace, so convincing people to start at one

(35:47):
dollar with no reserve on you know, Randy Nunenberg's shiny,
brand new website, like they were like, you're never going
to get any cars, right, it's never going to work.
And there's meaningful even today, like when we're curating, there's
not people that will just have faith and go no reserve.
They just they're not willing to sell it under some number,
whether they're in it that much or it's some psychological thing,

(36:09):
or their buddy sold a transam for this number two
weeks ago, so that's their number. They're anchored. It's like
a auctions are psychological, right.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
But why not start at that? Like if I come
to you with a transam and say, like, dude, I
want at least thirty, so let's start at twenty nine.

Speaker 3 (36:23):
I love it. So this is the psychology part. So
it turns out if you start the bidding at twenty nine,
first of all, that the energy around it is totally
different because you've effectively named your price, right, Like, I
don't know if we can go deep on this if
you want, but if you're on eBay and the bidding
starts at one dollar, but there's a twenty nine to
five by it. Now you already know what the reserve is.
This is one of my frustrations with ten auctions too

(36:45):
that put a range and estimate, because they're often legally
obligated to sell it at the low estimate. So they're
telling you what the reserve is, and they're going to
manufacture bids to get it as close as they can,
and then somebody's going to leap off the cliff that
actually sell it. There's there's all sorts of crazy dynamics
in play, and none of them feel good. To your point,

(37:05):
it's like, none of this feels right. So the best
thing ever is no reserve and it starts at one
dollar and let it fly. And unfortunately you can't get
all the good cars. You can't get all the sellers,
even if they're lovely people. They're not dishonest, they're not
messing with the system. They just won't I won't necessarily
just throw my car on eBay no reserve, like I'll
sell it no matter what. Like that's a little vulnerable

(37:26):
for some people in these cars can be special, and
particularly on bat a story of like their grandmother's car
that it's like a one of one. It's like a
special special Volkswagen bug. And you tell them to take
a risk, they'll be like, I'll go to the grave
without selling it. I'll just just won't do it. So
there's a ton of psychology that goes into it. Reserves

(37:47):
are a tricky topic and we have to negotiate them,
as all auction houses do beforehand. But things like setting
ranges and there's all these like external bogus things you
can do to impact the auction out And what I
love and what our ethos is is they all start
at one dollar. There may or may not be a reserve,
and we'll be very upfront about telling you what that is.

(38:07):
We negotiate the reserve because we want to not like
zero cars in a day to sell on bat if
all the reserves are crazy. If we just let any reserve,
it would never work.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
But by the way, the game other staff already every
car that you're gonna buy used car has some history.
It's always going to be somebody's dad's car or someone's grandmother's,
you know, first ride. But when I know that personal history,
it makes me trust a lot more and actually I'm
more and more willing to buy that car, which is

(38:37):
what I'm sure made Bring a Trailer so popular and
successful at in the first place, is that you actually
give more than like three lines and the options right
now that you're so big, is it hard to find
enough editorial staff to give us that much history on
every single car that comes across the website, Well, it is.

Speaker 3 (38:55):
The short answer is yes, it's it's amazingly difficult to
try to still do that at scale and not lose
the quality of the listening. One thing that was different
on BT way back early days was yeah, you know,
two sentences of bad grammar and two blurry photos on
CRAIG'SLST just don't get the job done right, Like, we
can do better than this as a society, as humans,
we can do better than this. So we found ways

(39:17):
to encourage a deeper bunch of detail in the listening
and great photos and those sort of things as sort
of table stakes, like you just start there, whether you're
going to bid or not, you start there, And so
doing all that was very important, but scaling that to
eight hundred of those a week gets difficult. And again,
the story is important, and interaction with the seller and
to extract that story sometimes takes effort. So yeah, we

(39:41):
have figured out what we are absolutely committed to, which
is like writing in pros right, You'll see a lot
of the other auctions they're just like us, screw it,
just do bullet points. All you need is like, all
you need is bullet points, and that's kind of true.
But that specialness at auction is what makes people care
and makes people bid and so like, could we listen
one seven sl with like ten bullet points, Yeah, we

(40:02):
could probably do that. We could probably fire you know,
a ton of those out onto the marketplace at the
same time and do it all with AI, right, But
that you'd lose something if you did that. So we've
always wanted to, you know, hang our hat on that
quality metric and we're not going to let go of that.
And we'd rather develop tools to maintain that quality metric
instead of veer away from it. And I think that's

(40:24):
that's again part of the success and why people stick
around on BAT.

Speaker 1 (40:28):
I'm really interested in the psychology of buying and selling
old cars. Randy. I don't know if you ever go
to like the Pomona swap market, swap meet, or you know,
some of these flea markets that also sell cars. But
I'm just curious about what have you learned about buying
a used car and haggling over a price, and who

(40:53):
should make the first offer? And do you say a
number first or do you force the other person to
say a number first. I just want to hear some
of your like what have you observed and learned and
what can you teach us about being incredible buyers and
savvy negotiators when it comes to price.

Speaker 3 (41:08):
Good question. So some of that is auction and some
of that is just you know, a handshake transaction, you
know at a at a flea market or at a
at a car sale lot. And there's, yeah, a lot
that goes into that. But what gets people to purchase
is either the item for sale or the some connection
to the person that's selling it, like you believe what

(41:29):
they say or you like it right, Like I I
would buy a modern car at the closest forward dealer
to me, it doesn't honestly, it doesn't. The inventory is
the same, It doesn't really matter whether I got close. Yeah,
and that's why online models for that are taking off
and the dealer model is evolving. But for special, one
special thing, it gets into deep emotional, you know, investment

(41:52):
in the deal. And that's why a seven day auction
is very interesting because it kind of gives you time
to ride this rollercost. There's this elation when you first
see it and you're totally over optimistic about everything, and
then kind of reality sets in when you do your homework,
and then fear sets in when somebody else might get
it instead of you, and then I mean, it's this
whole deal and it is by the end of it,

(42:12):
it's crazy. Yes, yeah, it can be. It can for sure.
So we've seen all sorts of different dynamics there, and
I tend to stick to the auction narrative because we
don't we don't list too much private party. I buy
cars and sell cars in a whole bunch of different ways.
But the auction psychology, I mean, I've looked into it
and like, I mean, there's HBS studies on auction dynamics

(42:34):
and like reserve like you were talking about, and what
does it feel like to get out bid and the
winner's curse of like you're going to go higher and
oh no, now I want it? What do I do?
Like all these different components of the psychology and what
I always tell my team, and what we've experienced over
the years is you pull one little lever and there
are other things, there are other everything's interconnected. So you say, like, oh,

(42:57):
if it's a no reserve auction, what does that do?
That impacts like five other things like how people play
the clock and how many people try to show up
late on a no reserve auction as opposed to bid early,
And what if you've bed huge the second day and
block everybody out? That is that a winning strategy?

Speaker 1 (43:15):
And all of them, I'm curious it can.

Speaker 3 (43:17):
I mean, we've the craziest one is we've seen. It's
a very small handful. I mean there's been one hundred
and forty thousand auctions on BE eighteen now, but there
are a few that stick out where on the first day,
like a person won it with a first day bid. Wow, big,
And that's crazy, and it's it's probably you can probably
count it on two sets of ten fingers how often
that has happened, because it's a very unusual approach and

(43:40):
most people are more let's see what happens towards the
end minded or strategic love that way.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
So somebody was like, there's a I don't know, like
a sixty nine Camaro and I want it. It's worth forty,
but I don't want to I don't want to spend
too much time with this, so I'm just gonna bid
sixty five.

Speaker 3 (43:57):
You know, it's a little it's a little crazy if
you think about it. But yeah, I don't know. I'm
going on a fishing trip. I'm going to be out
of Wi Fi. And I don't have a surrogate to
help me do this, so I'm like, I'm going to
win this. I'll be taking the car, thank you very much.
It's like a It's like when you have a straight
flush or whatever and you just drop it down. It's like,
I'll take the car and everybody there's crazy stories and

(44:17):
it's fun to have a front row seat and watch
that right because it's it plays out one hundred times
a day. That's crazy psychology roller coaster and it's kind
of fun to see.

Speaker 1 (44:25):
We have to talk about EV's a little bit because
I know you mentioned you recently bought your first EV
and I'm also so I'm curious about how that's going.
But I also want to hear about EV's selling on
bring a Trailer. You know, we talk so much about
this emotional connection and the story behind what is being

(44:47):
sold and the roller coaster and how it really reels
people in. Is that possible with an electric vehicle? Is
it possible to feel emotional about electric vehicle?

Speaker 2 (44:58):
What can you tell us as an aside, I will say,
when I was looking for an R one ass, I
decided that I would just only look at bring a
trailer because I didn't feel like dealing with anybody else
and they're not like sitting on dealer lots, right, But
I knew that BAT was going to have one every
couple of weeks and that's the only place I looked
for one, and they and they sold for good deals.

Speaker 3 (45:19):
Some of them are a deal. Yeah, the markets moving
on those. Those were one that was huge. The first
one we sold was like thirty over stick or crazy
and then it settled down and just like all those
in demand models, that has happened. So but electric cars
are super obviously, super prevalent and interesting and the whole
Tesla narrative is going to go down in history as
like a crazy story that everybody had on the tip

(45:40):
of their tongue for years and years and years in
the car world, and rightly so, because it's it's compelling
an interesting product. We have an electric EV category on
BAT where people are selling cars and people always ask
are they special enough? Or are they cool enough? Or
are they nostalgic enough? And all of those are moving targets.

(46:00):
And you know something that jumps out is, yeah, the
original Tesla Roadster, the Lotus based original Tesla Roadster. Those
are selling for multiples of their original MSRP now and
people consider them a collector's items, right, whether you're a
Musk fanboy or a or a Tesla driver and you
think that's a cool collector's item. There are different models

(46:22):
of every make, like the early you know, low zero,
number portion nine to eleven, the first one or whatever.
It's worth a gazillion dollars, right, And so out there
somewhere floating around is like the first ever Model S
or whatever. And if that surfaces, there are enthusiasts in
that EV realm that would go for it or pay
over for it, or you know that rarity. What makes

(46:45):
the trick with EV's is they've come mostly in an
era where they're shooting for mass market, right, Like a
Tesla Model three? Is that very cool? We don't really
list those on BET because they're you know, you step
outside three of them drive by. But if there was
a special one or it was owned by Mick Jagger
or what, I don't know. I mean, it's like some
crazy story all of a sudden, those are there are

(47:09):
bright spots that can come out of very pedestrian sort
of models. So there's that. And then Tesla Roaster was
actually kind of a cool looking car and different, and
they came in bright colors that were not white or
gray or black, right, I mean, they were cool. And
then there's other models, right, the EV trucks that came out.
There's more like stuff that is on waiting lists and
are special. Those evs have a bunch of traction, like

(47:31):
you're saying, buy an Aribbean on VH or the Hummer obviously, Yeah,
the Hummers were very low production at the beginning and
people wanted them. So I think EV's there's innovation in them.
Some of them are cool looking, many of them are
just appliances going down the road and nobody really cares,
and so that's terrible for auction, right, like herds selling
a zillion Tesla Model threes back to the market. We're
not going to scoop those up and list them all

(47:53):
on BAT. That doesn't make any sense. But I think
EV's some of them, if designed properly, can be very cool.
What did you get? It's funny, you said, Rivian Man.
I got an R one as oh nice that we've
used as a as a sort of shuttle and support
vehicle at our events. We have a calendar of events
through the year, and so that says be a t
down the side of it, and people love it. That

(48:14):
thing's super cool. My kids asked to write in that
one as much as the classic cars, just because it's
kind of like a spaceship. Very cool.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Dude, Thank you so much for your time. I really
do appreciate it. It was great talking to you. I
still have a million more questions, So maybe someday we'll
run into each other at one of your forty eight
partner locations and I'll be able to ask. But really
appreciate you joining us. Brandi Nunenberg, founder of Bring a Trailers.

Speaker 1 (48:45):
So it's kind of perfect that we're talking about buying
things on Bring a Trailer because one of you know,
you can go and bring a trailer and sort of
choose which makes and models you want to set a
note for if you want to get alerts when they
go online. And obviously one of the alerts that I've
set up on my phone is C three Corvettes because

(49:06):
I own a seventy seven, which is sort of toward
the later end of the Sea three generation, and so
I see all the time all these corvettes coming online,
and Magnus, we share the seventy seven. Magnus kind of
wanted one of his own.

Speaker 2 (49:20):
We should say for the listener that Magnus Walker is
your partner in crime.

Speaker 1 (49:23):
Yes, yes, yes, he is in crime and in life,
and so we kind of always have an eye out.
And a couple weekends ago we went to the Pomona
Swap Meet, which is this old old swap meet that
happens at the fairgrounds out in Pomona, you know, forty
minutes outside of Los Angeles.

Speaker 2 (49:40):
I really want to go.

Speaker 1 (49:41):
It's you would love it. It's so cool and so fun,
and so we're walking through and it's just every different
kind of car. There are tons of Beetles and old
Cadillacs and old Mustangs and a few old Porsches and
just everything, and it's really fun. To people watch, and
when we were out there, we saw a friend of ours,
Ho Jose, who had just bought a cool sort of

(50:05):
burnt orange nineteen sixty nine C three Corvette chrome bumpers,
four speed manual small block. Yes, very cool and literally
he bought it like ten minutes before we ran into him.
So of course Magnus is super bombed, because of course
you want what you can't have. We didn't know we
needed it, but now that we know we can't have it,

(50:27):
we want it, you know, but happy for our friend
or whatever. And you know, at the time, Magnus did say, hey,
if you want to flip it to us, give me
a call, because Jose was talking about painting it. It's
I don't want to call it ropie, but it's got
quite a patina on it. Sure, it's been repainted. It's

(50:47):
not original, this is not a concore quality, but it
is driver quality and it looks super cool and it actually,
as it turns out, drives great. Anyway, fast forward to
last week and we get a call from Jose, Hey,
you want to come look at the Corvette that We're like,
obviously wow, So we go and yeah, Jose did make

(51:08):
a little bit of money on us just because he
beat us by ten to fifteen minutes out at Pomona.
But it was fair, you know, first come, first service.

Speaker 2 (51:17):
Well, you only owned the car for a matter of weeks.
How long did you owned it?

Speaker 1 (51:20):
A week and a half? Two weeks? Maybe? I mean
it literally sat in his driveway. But you know, good
for him. We didn't make that much off us, and
we really saved him. You know, we're not going to
paint it or anything. I think he realized, oh, I'm
gonna have to put some work into this if he
wants to drive it. So anyway, long story short, we
got the vet. Now we'd have the C three, the

(51:41):
seventy seven and powder blue, and now we have the
sixty nine that's a bit of a sort of rust
burnt orange. It drives great, stops terrible, but it's cool
and it's fun and they're really not that expensive, especially
when you're buying them out at a swap meet.

Speaker 2 (51:56):
Well, I want to get your take on that, because
if I just googled C three Corvette and the first
thing that, you know how Google lists a bunch of
questions FAQ. The first thing, why is the C three
Corvette so cheap. But this is a car that was
made from I think sixty seven was when they first
started producing him in the factory until the early case

(52:16):
till to eighty two. Yep, and it's an up and comer.
In my opinion, it's it's a car that's not gonna
stay cheap. I remember, like we talk about, when the
Cuntash or the Ferrari three eight was twenty five grand
on eBay. Yeah, and those days are long gone. I
imagine that the C three also isn't going to remain
a bargain. So tell me about your fascination with this car,
because it's the second one.

Speaker 1 (52:37):
As you said that you guys have you know, we
could go real deep psychological on this. I did have
a core the Barbie, the Pink Barbie Corvette as a child,
which I didn't I was not into cars at all.
I don't my uncle gave that to me. So maybe
there's something really deeply embedded in my mind that it
was impressed upon me by the Pink Barbie Corvette many
years ago. But aside from that, I'd never had a

(52:57):
thing for corvettes at all. But honestly, this is the
honest truth. Dating someone who living with someone who is
so deeply ingrained into certain pockets in the car world,
and then with my own work driving a bunch of
new fancy cars. I just wanted something that was completely
different that nobody else had, that I could afford, that

(53:21):
I liked, That was nobody else's idea that I just
liked for me. And oh it didn't hurt that. Joan
Didion of course, has some iconic photos of her with
her C three Stingray when she was living in Los Angeles,
about a mile from where I currently live. So you know,
if Didion likes it, of course, that's a very very
good stamp of approval. But the other thing about the Corvette,

(53:45):
I am new to Corvette, so I am in no
way an expert, but I do know, you know that
this car is really an American icon when you think
about how and why it was designed, the fact that
it has been in existence since the fifties for so
long uninterrupted. There are very few American made automoti automobiles

(54:08):
that have that type of heritage and pedigree. And you know,
I'm I love European cars, obviously, I own a Rolls
Royce and love Porsches, and you love many many European cars,
but I just think it's cool and it's different, and
nobody else I knew owned one when I when I
first got it, or was talking about it. They're inexpensive.
I could afford it.

Speaker 2 (54:28):
So do you track the values by the way, I
mean you said you have an alert on bat have
you have you noticed them going up?

Speaker 1 (54:34):
And they really? Honestly, I do look every now and then,
just because I'm curious, and because when I first started
looking for one, I really wanted a white one, which
I know a lot of people hate white cars, but
I liked it white one. Yeah, I know, we've discussed this.
To me. The values seem all over the place. You
can you can get a C three for fifteen thousand

(54:56):
dollars driving running C three for fifteen thousand bucks, or
you could spend eighty thousand. They really seem all over
the place. It really depends, of course, on the engine.
You know what kind of transmission. So many of them
are really in very poor condition. And I have to say,
where something like a Rolls Royce or a Porsche might

(55:17):
look still fine and cool if it's a little bit
dirty or ropey, the Corvette does not hold up well,
if it's dirty and really rough.

Speaker 2 (55:28):
I imagine, all right for me, I don't like, that's not.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
My look, so I it's they walk a very fine
line between being extremely cool and extremely horrible.

Speaker 2 (55:41):
What's it like to drive? Because it's got such a
huge front end, at least to me, the proportions look
like it's all hood right. Yeah, but I've never been
in when or driven one. So what's it like.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
Well, there's a reason for the chrome bumpers in front.
And the first day that I drove my brand new
to me Corvette to the office, I pulled in and
just touched the cement wall when I was parking. I
wasn't even on the gas. The car was just rolling
forward when I was parking, and I just touched it

(56:13):
and died. It was horrible and devastating and all that
to say it is it takes a second to readjust
because you're right, the front end is really long.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
The chrome bumpers on every model, because I have no, no, no.

Speaker 1 (56:29):
No, The chrome bumpers are more desirable and those will
cost you a little bit more, which is why this
particular new Corvette, the sixty nine, the earlier ones have
chrome bumpers. The later ones like the seventy seven don't
and the chrome bumpers are more desirable. Yeah, the sixty
nine that we just got does have the chrome bumpers.

Speaker 2 (56:46):
All right, Well, that's an exciting used car story, and
I'm on the other end of the spectrum.

Speaker 1 (56:51):
Tell us everything, and thank you to everyone who rode in.

Speaker 3 (56:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:54):
No, I heally appreciate everyone's help and advice, and I
got a lot of really good suggestions, but I stuck
to I mean, pretty much. The range Rover dropped out
of the picture as soon as I started shopping around
and realized I can't really afford a range drover long wheelbase.
I mean, the fifty thousand dollars price cap held me
back from getting anything twenty eighteen or up. So everything

(57:17):
was older than that, and then I have worries about
the maintenance costs, and there's no wireless Apple car play,
and the infotainment is bad enough in a modern range drover,
and it's even worse when you get so that kind
of dropped out of the picture. We looked at Jeeps
for a while because my wife she became open to
that prospect, but it was quickly clear that they also

(57:40):
wouldn't have enough room for the rear facing car seats.
We have big rear facing car seats because we want
to keep our kids safe, healthy until they're like seven.
So basically, the Mercedes was the only one in the running,
and I have been test driving a twenty twenty four
Mercedes GLS. I fell in love with what might as
well be a minivan. Let me tell you, wow, it's

(58:02):
actually I looked at the the GLS versus a Toyota
Sienna minivan. Right, the GLS is longer, it's wider, and
it's taller than a Toyota Sienna. It's got seating for seven.
You know, it's absolutely massive. It does feel like a
bus when you're driving it around, which doesn't speak well

(58:24):
obviously for it. I drove it up to Bear Mountain.

Speaker 1 (58:26):
What are you IE level with? Like? Are you IE
level with? Ups drivers? One?

Speaker 2 (58:32):
It doesn't because it's not a body on frame like
a range drover or a Tahoe or an Escalade. It
doesn't sit up high. It sits a little higher than
your average car, but not much so. It doesn't raise
you up, and it is huge. However, I fell in
love with the Inline six that Mercedes has put into

(58:52):
those cars for the last I guess five years. Absolutely
beautiful motor. You know when you have an engine that
you just can't wait to go out and drive, Like
I'll be sitting in bed thinking about how the throttle
feels and the responsiveness is really good for a turbo motor.
It's it's a mild hybrid, but you can't even really tell.

(59:14):
It's just the forty eight volt system gives you a
little goose when you need it. Every day, I picked
somewhere new to go and drove just to drive this
big bus.

Speaker 1 (59:24):
Wow, so you found one in California, right?

Speaker 3 (59:27):
So?

Speaker 2 (59:27):
Yeah, So I was looking around everywhere. I used mostly
Auto Trader, but also car Gurus and auto Tempest, which
Barrier Holt told me about. But I feel like Auto
Traders the easiest to navigate. And I discovered something I
had not known previously, which is that a lot of
car dealers, and the sketchiest dealers for some reason, are
in New York and New Jersey, and then Illinois takes

(59:50):
the cake. Like the absolute sketchiest dealers are in Illinois.
But what they'll do is they'll say, Okay, this GLS
costs forty seven to five and then in this nine
print it'll say price does not include twenty nine ninety
five down payment, so it's automatically three thousand higher. And
then they'll say, oh, and there's a two thousand dollars
prep fee. They're gonna charge me a prep fee over

(01:00:11):
and above the price for a used car. No, it's insane.
And then, like I said, we install LoJack and all
our cars, so you're obligated to pay eight ninety five
for that, and then paint protection film and underbody steal
it and all this. It's such as off.

Speaker 1 (01:00:25):
It is complete extortion.

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
I don't normally advocate for regulation, but the government needs
to come and regulate these used car dealers because they
are criminals. And what happened was I found one at
I'll just go ahead and say Galpin, which is I
know from covering Ford, the largest Ford dealer in the country,
and I had met the owner, I guess the now

(01:00:48):
president's father at Augusta. I was there one time with
Alan Molalley for the Masters, and then I knew because
David Tracy and Jason Torchinsky started this website, the Utopia,
and it's bankrolled by Bo who now is the president
and I thought, you know what, I trust this guy
if he's gonna bankroll the Utopian, which is, you know,

(01:01:10):
a website for people that are interested in like three
thousand dollars JDM minivans. Like that's a trust.

Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
That's real.

Speaker 2 (01:01:16):
Yeah that's real.

Speaker 1 (01:01:17):
Yeah, that's real.

Speaker 2 (01:01:17):
So I thought, all right, I can trust them. I
called him up. The salesman was very transparent, very easy
to deal with obviously, so simple, Yeah it was. I
mean I had to ship it from LA and I
had to get my brother in law to go over
and check it out.

Speaker 1 (01:01:32):
Now what did he do to check I'm curious, so
he's not a list? Well, his checklist, he just I
didn't know.

Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
I just wanted someone to test drive it. Right, it's
a fairly new car. It's a twenty twenty one GLS
four fifty, so it's still in warranty. So I thought
at first about getting a pre purchase inspection, but it's
in warranty. Like, if something's wrong with it, I'll just
have a Mercedes fix it. I just wanted someone to
look at it to see that there's not too many scs.

(01:02:00):
I didn't want the driver's seat to be too used up,
you know, and he just took a bunch of pictures
and said he loved it, and he didn't want to
love it. He wanted to be as critical as possible. Yeah,
but he he said it was cool. So it's not cool.
It's emerald green, the same color that we had a

(01:02:22):
g a g Wagon in Berlin that was also emerald green.
Looks black in most days, but if the sun is
out and it's really bright, then you can see.

Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
That'll be really nice. And what's the interior color.

Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
It's got a brown leather interior. I can't remember. They
call it like espresso or a cappuccino or something dark
brown leather interior, and it's got like fine line would
I don't know, it looks it looks kind of luxurious.
So it's basically a way to stomach a mini van
and exciting with an engine that I adore, with an

(01:02:54):
infotainment system that I'm used to because I had this
same m Bux system in my g Wagon, and.

Speaker 1 (01:03:00):
It counts for a lot, to be honest, and.

Speaker 2 (01:03:02):
Most importantly, I can fit rear facing car seats in
the second row and move my seat all the way back.

Speaker 1 (01:03:08):
Have you tested the sound system? No? Well, yes, potential hypothetically.

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
It's got a Burmester sound system. By the way, you
bring up an interesting and important point. I think I
care a lot about sound systems.

Speaker 1 (01:03:21):
I know you do.

Speaker 2 (01:03:21):
I know I've wasted a lot of money trying to
make my Challenger. The Harmon cardon that you can option
up to in the Challenger is garbage, and even spending
thousands of dollars, I haven't been able to improve it
that much. The Burmester in the GLS, which is the
same as in the G five hundred or at least,
you know, it sounds about the same to me, is

(01:03:42):
pretty good. It's nothing to write home about, but it's
not horrible. It's not going to ruin my day. You
know when I put on Sime's Dream and I can't
hear any detail at all, So I'm okay with the
sound system. I think more people should review sound systems. Yeah,
you know, I grew up reading Car and Driver and
Road the Track, and I watch now everybody's you know,

(01:04:05):
Doug DeMuro and Matt Farrah and nobody except for the
Savage Geese, nobody does any review of sound systems. And
I feel like the manufacturers get off easy when it
comes to sound system.

Speaker 1 (01:04:16):
Probably they probably do. You know, I'm genuinely really curious
to hear what Edna thinks of the car.

Speaker 2 (01:04:23):
Edna was angry at first because the test car was white,
but I think she'll be happy that the actual car
we're buying is green because she's obsessed with t Rex
and so we've dinosaurs everywhere, and she thinks, you know,
I don't know if t Rex was really green, but
to her, that makes the car like a dinosaur.

Speaker 1 (01:04:44):
I love that great.

Speaker 2 (01:04:45):
All right, So that, I guess wraps it up for
this week. What do you got coming up?

Speaker 3 (01:04:49):
Ooh, you know what.

Speaker 1 (01:04:51):
Tomorrow I'm driving a cyber truck. Actually I should have
I should have led with this. I'm driving the cyber
truck tomorrow around Beverly Hills and I'm may, you know,
try to valet it somewhere for launch and see how
that goes, and see what the valets do with this
enormous vehicle. And then next week early I'm going to
go to Vegas to drive the new McLaren.

Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
Wow, okay, I feel like this cyber truck is even
more interesting, Like the McLaren is obviously going to be amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:05:19):
Sure, right, then the cyber truck's more of a wild card,
right exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:05:24):
I'm driving, by the way, I just picked up a
Kia EV nine.

Speaker 1 (01:05:27):
I like the EV nine and I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:05:30):
I just drove it from the garage to the office,
so I don't really have a verdict yet, but I
will tell you more about it next week.

Speaker 1 (01:05:36):
Let's put it like that, okay, all right, we're all
in suspense.

Speaker 2 (01:05:40):
All right, Well, I guess that does it for this week.
Join us, same time, same place next week, and definitely
give us an email.

Speaker 1 (01:05:47):
The email is hot pursuit at Bloomberg dot net, Hot
Pursuit all one word, all lowercase at Bloomberg b e
RG dot net. I'm Matt Miller and I'm Hannah Elliott,
and this is bloom