Surprisingly high prices
05/07/2021
Actually, " Bring a Trailer" ( BaT for short ) was once purely a hobby, a blog on which Randy Nonnenberg wrote about cars that he found somewhere online and that were for sale. It was rarely about high-class classic cars, otherwise you wouldn't have had to bring a trailer to pick up the car (see name).
Well, the site developed dynamically and Nonnenberg gave up his normal job in 2010. Many years have passed since then and Bring a Trailer has become a successful online auction site for classic cars with six-figure user numbers (bidder candidates).
The days when only cheap and difficult to sell cars were offered on such sites also seem to be over. And interesting classics can also fetch high prices on this pure online format from the States. Two recent results that caught our eye cannot be interpreted any other way.
There was a Subaru Impreza, for example, for which USD 312,555 was paid. More precisely, it was a Subaru Impreza 22B STi from 1998, number 156 of around 400 examples built for the Japanese market, imported to the USA in July 2020, but not (yet) usable on the road in the USA. This obviously didn't stop the highest bidder from bidding hard, as he will be able to officially register the car for road use in around two years' time.
Now you could call this a flash in the pan if a 1974 BMW 2002 turbo had not also recently been sold for a whopping USD 193,100. This was certainly a very good (and extensively restored) example, but even in Europe it would not be easy for a renowned dealer to get that kind of money for a 2002 turbo.
And by the way, the following analysis, which only shows results for the Jaguar E-Type (XKE), also shows that BaT prices are trending upwards.
