The Daily Vroom

Three Years Later: The Real Bet Behind Cars & Bids

It has been three years since The Chernin Group invested in Cars & Bids and rolled Doug DeMuro’s YouTube ecosystem into the broader equation. That structure mattered. They didn’t just buy an auction platform. They bought a built-in funnel attached to one of the largest enthusiast audiences on YouTube.

At the time, it looked like a powerful combination. Doug’s channel in the 2018–2022 window was producing routine multi-million-view breakouts. Pandemic consumption was elevated. The enthusiast market was hot. Launching a modern enthusiast auction site into that moment created asymmetric leverage. Liquidity came quickly because distribution was explosive.

Three years later, the landscape is different. Cars & Bids is listing roughly 35 cars per day and selling 20–25 of them. That is not trivial. That is a real operational machine. And unlike Bring a Trailer, which leans heavily on a self-sustaining, comment-driven ecosystem with a relatively manual but culturally entrenched backend, Cars & Bids runs a more involved internal process. Listings move through more people. There is more active oversight. It is not a light-touch operation.

Selling 20–25 cars per day at scale is a grind. If this were a privately owned, independent business, you could argue that it is a very good one. In a crowded auction market, being the clear number two with consistent volume and stable sell-through is nothing to dismiss. The revenue stream alone, at that level of daily throughput, is meaningful.

But this is not a lifestyle business. Private equity does not buy respectable second place to hold steady. They buy platforms they believe can materially expand. Look at their broader portfolio; mediocrity is not the goal. Growth is.

And this is where the real question sits. Three years in, we have seen stability. We have not seen acceleration.

There has already been one executive team shift. That alone tells you expectations were higher than the trajectory delivered. With the current leadership team now having had roughly a year to shape the next phase, it is reasonable to assume that 20–25 daily sales is not the long-term aspiration. It may be the base. It is unlikely to be the ceiling they are targeting.

Doug’s role inside all of this is nuanced. He still reviews cars. He still hosts the podcast. He still pushes traffic. But he does so as someone who already won. He is operating from passion rather than pressure. That probably makes for better content, but it also changes the psychological intensity behind the funnel. The era of existential urgency is over. What remains is brand alignment.

The embedded bet in the deal was that Doug’s audience would provide durable top-of-funnel compounding. That bet has not failed, but the YouTube environment itself has matured. The regular 5-8 million view spikes of the early phase are rarer. Distribution is steadier, less explosive. That matters when your original velocity was partially powered by algorithmic tailwinds.

So where does growth come from now? There are really only a few levers. The obvious one is volume: list more cars, sell more cars. That is harder than it sounds without diluting quality or compressing margins.

The more interesting lever is price. Even a modest increase in average sale price say 10% across the platform, materially changes revenue without requiring massive additional operational burden. But raising the average price is not cosmetic. It requires attracting higher-caliber inventory, deepening buyer pools at the upper end, and gradually shifting brand perception upward. That is a multi-step strategy involving marketing, seller acquisition, and credibility building. It is doable. It is not automatic.

Adding older classics was one attempt to expand the total addressable market and lift overall numbers, but that move has not yet altered the competitive hierarchy in a meaningful way. Cars & Bids still occupies the modern enthusiast lane, which naturally has a different ceiling than trophy-driven blue-chip auctions.

Three years after the sale, the platform looks stable, professional, and disciplined. What it does not yet look like is a compounding machine pulling away from the field. That does not make it unsuccessful. It makes it a very solid number two in a crowded market.

The question is whether private equity is content with solid. Because 35 listings a day and 20–25 sales is a good business. It is not, however, the kind of trajectory PE typically writes checks for.

The next chapter will not be determined by whether Doug keeps making videos. It will be determined by whether the new leadership team can either materially increase volume or meaningfully lift the average transaction value, ideally both, without breaking the trust layer that made the platform work in the first place.

Three years in, the bet is no longer on momentum. It is on compounding and that is a much harder game.