The Daily Vroom

Good Morning Vroomers,

Here at TDV, we get a lot of questions and one recently we’ve had more than a few times is what’s going on at SBX Cars, since our article last week about them shutting down auctions.

From what I understand, and based on how this is playing out, this is the final week of auctions before an announcement is made. This week alone they have 14 auctions ending, which is likely the highest weekly volume they’ve ever run and feels like a deliberate push to clear the board before anything is said publicly.

There’s still been no official communication, which isn’t surprising. When auctions are live and money is still moving, you let that process run its course and deal with the messaging after. From the outside, nothing suggests this is the end. The site is still active, the promotion hasn’t changed, and everything continues as normal.

That feels deliberate, and it ties back to the bigger point. SBX as a brand is not the issue here.

What they built on the content side is significant. A 120 million–plus audience, real reach, real engagement, and access that most platforms in this space simply don’t have. That doesn’t go away, and it’s likely what gets protected in how this is positioned next.

The issue, as we’ve already covered, is that attention doesn’t automatically convert into transactions.

And ultimately they ran into the one constraint that matters here. Attention is easy. Getting people to actually buy is not.

At the same time, things are already shifting internally. The CEO has been removed from the team page, which lines up with everything else we’re seeing.

What comes next is how they choose to frame this. Whether it’s positioned as a pivot, a reset, or something more final will determine how much of that brand carries forward.

And to be clear, there’s no real shame in how this played out. They went after something ambitious, made adjustments along the way, and ultimately ran into a very real constraint in this market.

For now, it comes down to this week. 14 auctions, likely their biggest push, and one last chance to finish cleanly before everything becomes official.

Cars & Bids Is Working. Now Comes the Hard Part

For a while now we’ve been banging on about the same thing with Cars & Bids.

Can they actually scale this properly? Can they get to 30+ sales a day consistently, not just on a good week but as a baseline? Can they increase volume without killing sell-through? And more importantly, can they build something that feels bigger than just the listings themselves?

Over the past few weeks, you can start to see a bit of an answer forming.

Listing volume is pushing toward 200-250 a week, and last week they ran at around an 80% sell-through. That combination is not easy to hit because most platforms can push volume or protect sell-through, but doing both at the same time is where it starts to mean something.

At the same time, the shift isn’t just happening on the site. We’ve talked a lot about how the best platforms don’t live purely online, and Bring a Trailer and others built a lot of its trust through events and real-world presence. Cars & Bids has always felt more digital in comparison, which worked, but also limited how far the brand could stretch.

Now you’re seeing them lean into that side with more intent, and the clearest example is Velocity Invitational in Sonoma, one of the bigger car weekends in the U.S., where Cars & Bids will have auctions ending live at the event with cars physically on-site while the full online audience bids alongside. From what it looks like, bidding will still be fully online, which is a bit disappointing because having people in the room actually bidding would add a completely different level of energy and urgency to it. That said, it’s an easier format to control and probably the right first step, especially when others have shown that blending live and online can work if it’s executed properly.

If they keep pushing this, the next logical step is obvious. Let people in the room participate. It’s more complex to run, but it’s doable, and it changes the atmosphere entirely from something you watch to something you’re part of.

At the same time, they’ve moved away from Doug’s Takes. Those worked, people liked them, even if they hadn’t been written by Doug for a while, and they didn’t have to change it. Choosing to move on from something that already worked and try something new, especially around live auctions, tells you they’re at least willing to experiment rather than just protect what they already have.

For now though, the focus isn’t on how far they can push it. It’s much simpler.

Can they do this again next week? Because that’s the part that matters. One strong stretch is interesting, but if they can hold volume around these levels and keep sell-through in that range week after week, then you’re no longer looking at a spike, you’re looking at something repeatable.

After that, the next layer opens up. Can they push toward 50 listings a day without ‘flooding’ the platform? Do they finally start using weekends properly, which we know works, or do they keep leaving that gap? Does the live auction format actually translate into better results, or is it just a brand exercise?

Those are the questions that decide what this becomes. Right now, they’re at the point where things are working. Now they have to prove it wasn’t just a moment.

Auctions To Keep An Eye On

We’ve been spending a lot of time recently building out the TDV Import Calculator, mainly because one thing keeps coming up again and again. People think they understand what a car costs until they actually run the full numbers.

This 1990 Porsche 928 GT is a good example of that. It’s a manual car, RoW spec, originally delivered to Japan and now sitting in Canada with a long ownership history and recent service, which makes it interesting but not perfect, and exactly the kind of car where the price has to make sense.

At a glance, it feels straightforward. It’s over 25 years old, it’s relatively close, and there’s nothing about it that immediately signals complexity, which is usually where buyers stop thinking.

Once you run it through the calculator, the picture sharpens. Bringing a car like this into the U.S. adds roughly 16% on top of wherever it lands, and that number is consistent enough that you can treat it as part of the price, not an afterthought.

That’s where the real question comes in, because this isn’t about whether the cost exists. It’s about who actually absorbs it.

A U.S. buyer is effectively bidding on the landed number, not the hammer price, which means they either adjust their bid to account for that 16% or accept that they’re paying above what the car might otherwise justify. A Canadian buyer doesn’t have that problem, which creates two very different views of the same auction.

What looks like a fair result on paper can be a stretched one in reality depending on where you’re sitting, and on cars like this, right in the middle between perfect and flawed, that difference actually changes behavior.

That’s the gap the calculator is meant to close, not by telling you whether to buy the car, but by making sure you’re making that decision on the real number, not the one you see on the listing.

We’ve made a number of updates to it in the background over the past few days, and one small but useful change on the front end is that you can now input the purchase price in any currency rather than being limited to the car’s origin.

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I’ve always liked cars that have actually been used, properly used, not just kept around for weekends or preserved for the next owner, but driven day in and day out to the point where the mileage stops being something you apologize for and just becomes the story.

This 1991 Nissan 300ZX has 372,000 miles on it, and you can feel that in the right way. It spent 30 years with the same owner, commuting, being maintained, fixed when it needed to be, and just kept on the road, which is really the whole point of a car like this. Somewhere along the way the original engine was replaced, which almost adds to it rather than taking anything away, because it shows the car didn’t get parked when things got difficult, it just kept going.

And to a certain extent, I trust something like this more than a car showing 50,000 miles. At this point, everything that was going to break probably has, and more importantly, it’s been fixed and driven again. You’re not guessing how it behaves or how it’s been treated, you can see it.

It’s not perfect, and it’s not trying to be. There’s been paintwork, the air conditioning doesn’t blow cold, there are small issues that come with a car that’s lived a full life, but none of that really changes the appeal because this isn’t about condition in the traditional sense. It’s about durability, about what it takes for a car to get to this point and still be here, still running, still something someone can get in and drive.

We spend a lot of time focusing on low-mileage examples and originality, and those matter, but cars like this are a different kind of proof. They show what happens when a car is actually used the way it was meant to be used, and more importantly, what happens when someone cares enough to keep it going.

And the fact it’s no reserve just makes it cleaner. There’s no narrative being forced onto it, no number it has to justify. It’s just the market deciding what a car like this is worth, knowing exactly what it is.

At some point, mileage stops being a negative and just becomes the story, and this is exactly that kind of car.

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Following on from that 300ZX, here’s the same idea, just done differently.

You know I love a wagon, and this is exactly my kind of car. A 1995 Mercedes-Benz E320 Wagon with just over 150k miles, not low, not extreme, but right in that range where you know it’s been used properly and not just kept around for show.

What really matters here isn’t the mileage, it’s the work that’s gone into it. There’s over $8,000 in recent mechanical refresh, and not the usual vague “sorted” description, but actual, meaningful items like the head gasket, suspension, steering, and cooling system, all the things that determine whether a car like this is something you can actually rely on or just something that looks good in a listing.

That’s what separates it. Most cars get to this point and either get neglected or passed along without being properly addressed, but this one didn’t. Someone took the time to go through it properly and make it right, which changes the entire equation, because instead of trying to work out what might need doing next, you’re looking at a car where that process has already happened.

This is also exactly what these wagons were built for in the first place. They’re meant to be used, to carry people, to carry things, and to just keep going without turning into a project, and when you find one that’s already been driven and then properly sorted, it becomes a much clearer proposition.