Thought I’d wrap up the sale of my 1971 Fiat 124 Spider on Bring a Trailer before getting back to CarMax unicorns. This post about taken longer than I wanted to write, because the whole Bring a Trailer process has taken far longer than I had expected. It was an exhausting and exhilarating ride, and ironically one of my lingering memories will be just how much Bring a Trailer struggled to actually bring a trailer when the buyer requested shipment via the web site. More on that later. Fortunately, the buyer is a patient and kind man.
I initially submitted my Fiat in mid-October 2021 to begin the process. I elected to go for the $349 package that included Bring a Trailer (BaT) sending out a professional photographer and assigning an editor to write my listing. It took a few weeks to schedule and shoot the photos and make them available to me for review. Then it took a couple of weeks to assign a writer to complete my ad. If you’re wondering, BaT uses a template to input owner-provided info and allows for a little, but not much, color commentary. That’s why all the ads sound alike (powered by a 1.6 liter four-cylinder mated to a five-speed manual gearbox….) Fellow DC Fiat member Brewster Thackery is a BaT rep and was assigned as my writer. He did a good job and accepted edits that were important to me. By now we were into late November with no date set for going live and the holidays were looming. I began to fret.
To their credit, BaT noted there was a single digit discrepancy between my vehicle title and the VIN, and I would need to get that corrected before it could be listed. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a new title issued in Virginia for a 50 year old Italian car? Turns out not hard at all – wonderful lady at the DMV got it done in about 20 minutes. Not a corrected or salvage or anything – an original title with the correct VIN. Whew!
Although I was frustrated we were two months into this process the BaT folks were accommodating in postponing going live until after Christmas. I didn’t think launching the auction right before Christmas was going to help sell the car. Who buys a vintage Fiat as a Christmas present? Instead I had a better plan – go live on New Year’s Eve and hope car enthusiasts with lots of time and lots of booze might go nuts bidding. And so we went live, for eight days instead of the normal seven, with the auction to close at 11 am Pacific time – 2 pm my time on January 7th. BaT has a provision to prevent last second snipers – if the high bid is placed at the deadline, the auction is extended another two minutes. Let’s go to the bidding.
I got a chuckle right off the bat with a compliment by solarfish and a clever $1,971 bid. Get it? BaT members can make comments whether or not they are bidding, and that makes for an interesting auction. Normally the negotiation of a car sale is between a buyer and a seller. Not here. Negotiations are more chaotic, and like normal auctions potential buyers are negotiating with each other with escalating bids – not negotiating with me. I made the sale “no reserve” and so highest bidder was getting my car. The interesting part is that the bidding is going on while bystanders, who may or may not know Fiats, and may or may not even be interested buying the car, can add comments. I was prepared for some sharp shooters who tune in only to point out defects and signal to all of us how much they know about these cars. Irritating, but can’t get irritated. Calmly answer their points because everyone is watching – but be aware that their comments can influence other real bidders. Tom Milton irked me by asking questions that seemed like that, at one point suggesting I might be hiding something and “maybe beauty is only skin deep?”. Imagine my surprise when he later bid on the car! That reinforced the need to stay calm. BaT advisors also told me I did not need to respond to each and every comment in real time, especially not from non-bidders.
After solarfish, bidding seemed to go up by nickels and dimes for a week and plateaued under $8,000 as the final day of the auction arrived. I was sick. I’ve watched a number of BaT auctions close and pretty much ALL of them escalate rapidly near the end. Of course, I was convinced mine would be the only one that wouldn’t, and someone would “steal” my beloved car that I was in over $25,000 deep, for pocket change. I loved when an unnamed friend (we’ll call him Hans) offered to drive up the bidding. I even considered buying it from myself (secretly), paying the 4% BaT commission (the buyer pays the fee) and donating the car to charity for a tax write-off rather than sell for $8,000.
I got a little silly and added pictures of my Fiat T-shirt I said would convey, and had more plans to make my auction the most fun ever. I considered posting a comment asking for the Nigerian prince who sent me a private message offering me $35,000 to email me again because I accidentally deleted it. My friends, though, talked me out of it suggesting maybe I would diminish how seriously I had loved and invested in this car. Good counsel.
January 7th, the last day of the sale, about 12:30 pm with an hour and a half to go things got interesting. I put on a pot of coffee and dug in. Bids went up $2,500 and topped $10,000 as we entered the last hour. For a bit it seemed like rylynchtx really wanted the car as he (she?) outbid four others by maybe $100 only a minute or two after they bumped it up. And at 1:59 pm rylynchtx put us into overtime! I don’t know who you are, Ben_Texas, but you made me howl and brought my stress way down with your comment below.
For the next 12 minutes of overtime it went bananas. rylynchtx dropped out and joshua.trinidad and Pacoryan joined the fray. I had been corresponding with Pacoryan via email for the week prior, and answered every question I could. He was in the UK and I hated the idea of someone buying from abroad and having any surprises after shipment. I really tried to be the most forthcoming seller possible as I still believe car folks don’t screw car folks. When the bidding was below $10,000 I worried my honesty might come back to bite me. Then these two dueled and I started to become comfortable the car would sell for a fair price.
Some fun commentary near the end as I sweated bullets. Or rivets.
And at 2:23 Joshua Trinidad in North Carolina won with the final bid of $17,250. Exhausted, exhilarated, and content. Most surprising, it took eight days for someone to share the trite “Fiat stands for Fix It Again Tony”, which all of us Fiat people hate both because once these cars are sorted it’s untrue, and the phrase is just unoriginal. But pldc, the commenter, did bump the price above $17,000 so there’s that.
I had friends and family watching and texting me asking what I thought was a reasonable price. Of course I knew my $25,000+ sunk costs were irrelevant – I never expected to recover my money. I thought less than $12-13,000 I’d be really disappointed and probably regret the sale. Maybe around $15,000 I’d accept that it went okay, not great, but the market decided my car’s worth. The $15,000-$20,000 zone would be satisfying, perhaps recognition that this show winner car that I had worked so hard on was appreciated by vintage car people. It really wasn’t all about the money. If it went over $20,000 I probably would have shut down bidding.
The sale closed on January 7th, 2022, a good three months after I started the process with BaT. Joshua and I corresponded immediately and we were both surprised the post-sale instructions from BaT. They provide the buyer and seller email contact info and “The buyer and seller then work together to complete the transaction and arrange for shipping if necessary. BaT is happy to provide assistance or answer questions during this part of the process.” That’s it? We discussed various ways to exchange payment, documents, and the car, and in the end there really wasn’t any way consistent with a BaT sale to do it other than Joshua paid me and I sent him the title. He requested shipping via BaT and they won’t ship unless the seller certifies that they have been paid. We trusted each other and it worked out.
That said, BaT used the broker “u-Ship” to book car movements and it was nothing but ass pain. I’d get a call the night before that a truck was coming my way in the morning – and I was out of town. The broker just could not schedule more than a few hours in advance and this went on for days. Weeks. A trucker called once and berated me for not being home one afternoon he wanted to come (on an hour’s notice) saying “It was booked two days ago in the app! It was in the app!”. Neither the buyer nor seller have access to the u-Ship app. u-Ship tries to book car movements with independent truckers – dualies with trailers – the truckers, of course, want to combine loads as much as possible, and it’s one chaotic mess. They once offered to pick up and move the car in a snowstorm. Joshua and I both said no. Finally, a month after the sale, a truck showed up. a six-foot seven dude loaded it, pleasant as could be (he was the one that yelled at me on the phone the weekend prior, for the record!), and with his wife who was driving her own rig, made their way to North Carolina.
Joshua and I have been in contact and I was pleased he sent me the picture below. A yellow house to match his yellow Fiat! I have tried to share everything, and while I know he once owned a later model Spider, there will be hiccups – it’s a 50 year old Italian car. Despite those hiccups it is really a well sorted car and a pleasure to drive. I hope he enjoys it like I did and forgives me if I forgot anything.
And so I have this big hole in my heart and in my garage, and will need to find another enthusiast car soon. Prepping the Mercedes S600 for sale while there’s still MaxCare warranty but don’t know if I can do the BaT thing again. We shall see.
For now, I’ll just open an old bottle of Italian wine and surf the CarMax website, and try not to think of the little Italian car that brought me so much joy for the last 10 years. Sigh.
