Just last week I wrote about Barrett-Jackson closing down AutoHunter and getting ready to launch its new online auction business. I was genuinely interested to see what came next because, whatever you think of Barrett-Jackson, this is one of the biggest names in the collector-car world and a company that knows how to put on an event better than almost anyone.

Well, a few days later (yesterday) I was scrolling LinkedIn, don't scroll, people and there it was. Barrett-Jackson Digital Select Auctions, accompanied by the fairly bold statement: “THE NEW STANDARD IN ONLINE COLLECTOR CAR AUCTIONS.”

Okay, you've got my attention, so I clicked.

The first link somehow took me to the Barrett-Jackson homepage, which was promoting their Las Vegas auction, not a great start!

There was another link that did actually take me to a Digital Select landing page, but once I got there I wasn't much wiser. There was plenty about trust, confidence, expertise and bringing the Barrett-Jackson experience online, but very little answering the things I actually wanted to know: what cars are coming, what does it cost, how does it work and, most importantly, what exactly is Barrett-Jackson going to do differently?

There was also video, so of course I watched that too. It basically repeated the same marketing message with what sounded like an AI voice and, when I found it on YouTube, it had 19 views!

By this point I was committed, so I filled out the form asking for more information. A phone number was mandatory, which already annoys me, but I filled it in (not with my real number of course) and immediately received an automated email with a link for more information. That link sent me straight back to the Barrett-Jackson homepage, not anything about their online offering.

Then another automated email arrived welcoming me to Barrett-Jackson and, amazingly, that link took me back to the homepage as well. My frustration level at this point was getting relatively high.

I know some of this probably sounds incredibly picky, but I really don't think it is. Barrett-Jackson had got my attention, I'd clicked because I was interested in its new product and I'd then given them my details specifically because I wanted to know more about it. Yet at almost every stage I was either being given generic marketing language or sent somewhere other than the thing I'd actually asked to learn about.

Then, finally, an actual human being saved the whole experience.

I received an email from Matt, Barrett-Jackson's Online Auctions Manager, who sent me to the actual Digital Select page, (I’m no design expert but this page is so poorly designed for a company like BJ.)

When I emailed him with a couple of questions, came straight back with useful answers. Lovely guy, great response and easily the best part of this entire journey.

Matt told me the lot numbers are still being finalized and will be published in the coming weeks. I also asked about the fees because, strangely, something that important wasn't in the FAQ, and he told me the buyer's premium will be 10% of the hammer price, while sellers will pay 8% for no-reserve lots and 10% for reserve lots.

Barrett-Jackson isn't entering an online auction market where everyone is still figuring this stuff out. The leading platforms have spent years getting very good at it. The cars are easy to find, the fees are clear, the experience is polished and you can generally go from discovering a car to understanding it and bidding on it without having to work particularly hard.

That's the standard Barrett-Jackson is walking into, and it's doing so with enormous advantages. The name, the audience, the database of buyers and sellers, decades of credibility, television exposure and a marketing reach that most online auction companies would love to have. Yet my first experience involved hunting around just to understand what the product actually was, being sent to the wrong place several times and eventually having to email an actual person to find out something as basic as the fees.

And those fees are where this gets even more interesting. 10% from the buyer and either 8% or 10% from the seller.

Some of the biggest established online auction platforms charge buyers 5%, so Barrett-Jackson is effectively asking buyers to accept a substantially higher premium while entering a market where the existing leaders have already spent years making the online experience incredibly good.

That doesn't automatically make Barrett-Jackson too expensive. If their brand, audience and marketing machine produce better results, perhaps people will decide it's worth paying for. But at those numbers, they really do need to show me what I'm getting that I can't already get elsewhere.

And that's where I keep getting stuck. Barrett-Jackson's live auctions genuinely have set standards.(you decide what those standards are!) The crowds, television coverage, energy and theatre make them unmistakably Barrett-Jackson. If you're paying a premium to participate in that, you can at least see what you're paying for.

Online, I'm still looking for it. Maybe it's the live commentary at the close. Maybe their enormous audience creates bidding competition that other platforms can't replicate. (doubt it)

Maybe their marketing machine gives sellers enough additional exposure to justify those fees. Maybe there's something else entirely that they haven't shown us yet. Whatever it is, tell me, because if you're going to charge live-auction-style commissions for an online product, I need to understand what I'm getting for them.

And I want to make something clear because I know how pieces like this can sometimes come across. I have nothing personal against Barrett-Jackson. Quite the opposite. I want them to succeed, I've written plenty of positive things about them before and I'm sure they'll bring some great cars to these auctions. They may sell every single one of them, and if they do I'll happily write about that too.

But wanting them to succeed doesn't mean I shouldn't say what I see, and long-term readers knows I don’t mince my words here. This is Barrett-Jackson. They should be brilliant at this.

They have almost every advantage imaginable and they're entering a market where the existing players have already spent years raising the bar. That's why a launch with wrong links, generic messaging, irrelevant automated emails, missing information and a proposition I still can't clearly differentiate is so frustrating.

Maybe when the first auction arrives, the cars are fantastic, the live closing works brilliantly, the bidding is huge and the whole thing suddenly makes sense. I genuinely hope that's what happens.

But for now, I keep coming back to the claim that started me down this rabbit hole in the first place.

Maybe Barrett-Jackson has created a new standard for online collector-car auctions. The problem is, right now it looks like a lower standard at a higher price.

What do you think?

GoAskSam has been live for just over a week now. In that week I have answered more questions than I can count, and fixed more bugs than I would like to admit. Here is the thing though: nearly every one of those bugs came from you. A reader in Camarillo ran his 1973 Mazda RX2 through it and caught two real issues in one email. Another one of you typed in an '88 325i Convertible and got back something so wrong I am still slightly embarrassed. Both were traced and fixed the same day, and the tool is better for every single person who uses it now because those readers took five minutes to write in.

Oh, and the servers melted on day one. Let's not dwell on that.

We’ve made so many changes recently, so if you’re logged in, just refresh your page.

Before anything else, one thing that matters in 2026: GoAskSam is not an AI making things up.

Yes, there is clever technology in there, it is what lets you type your car in plain English instead of filling out forms. But the answers come from a purpose-built algorithm we spent the best part of a year engineering, running fixed rules over real market data.

Every sale we track gets cleaned, checked and deduplicated. Auction house buyer's premiums get normalized. The data refreshes every single day as new sales close. And the whole thing runs on hard gates: if there is not enough real evidence behind an answer, the system is built to say so rather than guess. Not one number, recommendation or claim is generated by AI. Every figure is a real sale that actually happened. AI helps understand what you typed. The algorithm, the rules and the data do everything else.

Instead, let me tell you what this thing actually does:

1. It tells you where to sell, with real numbers behind it. Not a hunch. GoAskSam looks at what cars like yours have actually closed for across the platforms we track and tells you where the market for your car genuinely is, and why.

2. It knows which day of the week your car closes strongest. Sounds like a small thing. It is not. Where the data is deep enough, GoAskSam will tell you that cars like yours have closed strongest on, say, Thursdays, with the real percentage behind it. That is the kind of detail nobody else will give you.

3. Reserve or no reserve, answered with data instead of opinion. One of the oldest arguments in the hobby. Where we have enough sales in your price band, GoAskSam shows you what reserved auctions actually brought versus no-reserve ones, and lets you decide.

4. It is honest when it is not for you. Type in a 2017 Altima and GoAskSam will politely tell you that CarMax, Carvana or Facebook Marketplace will serve you better, because for that car, they genuinely will. A tool that only ever says yes is a tool you cannot trust. This one tells you the honest answer even when the honest answer is somewhere else entirely.

5. It remembers, and the answer changes. Every search is saved. The data underneath refreshes every single day as new sales close. Run your car today, come back in a month, run it again, and see what moved. That alone is worth a bookmark.

A year in the making, because you asked for it. I am not here to toot our own horn, but I will say this once: this took the best part of a year to build, and it exists because of you. "Where should I sell my car?" has been the most asked question in my inbox since the day this newsletter started. Now there is a real answer.

Why PowerSellers are part of it. Sometimes GoAskSam will suggest a specialist who can run the whole sale for you, one of a small, hand-picked group who know their corner of the market inside out. Where the data shows their represented sales bringing more than comparable ones, we show you that. But it is a suggestion, never a push. Plenty of you will run your own auction and love every minute of it. Your car, your call.

How the introduction works, start to finish. When GoAskSam shows you a PowerSeller it thinks fits your car, you will see a contact button on their card. Click it, and your email and the car you searched go straight over to them, and that is the only place your details go. As soon as you have pressed it, a small optional box pops up where you can add anything else useful before you talk, the VIN, condition, service history, whatever helps them come to the conversation prepared. Then they reach out to you directly, usually quickly, and you arrange a time to speak. No forms beyond that, no commitment, and no obligation whatsoever to use their services. It is an introduction to someone worth talking to, nothing more.

We have never asked for anything. Since the day we started, I hope we have given you a lot of genuinely useful information, the tools, the data, the daily read on this market. We have never ruined the experience with ads, and we have sent a steady stream of readers and real sellers to the platforms we cover, for free, because pointing you to the right place is the whole point.

I have always believed this market needs independent, valuable advice and tools, from someone with no side deals and nothing to push. That is what this is, and that is what it will stay.

So here is the ask, and it is a small one. If you read this every day and have not tried it yet or wanna have another go, please do: goasksam.com. not a big ask 😃

If something looks wrong, tell me at [email protected], because that is genuinely how this gets better for everyone.

And if you get something out of this newsletter, please share it with a friend (thedailyvroom.com) Many of you already do. We have never run a single ad. It has been organic from day one, and honestly, we love it that way.

Yesterday I had a bit of a rant about garage apps. I genuinely thought I'd get some pushback. Instead, I don't think I've written about many things recently that have produced such a strong reaction.

86% of you said you've never used a garage app and never wanted one.

But once again, the comments were far more interesting than the poll.

A lot of you came back to exactly the thing that bothers me: it's another job. One reader summed it up perfectly: “Tons of work for little reward.” Another said a spreadsheet works just fine. Someone else said they simply keep their maintenance receipts.

And then there was my favorite:

“I have a wife to annoy me. She's much better at it than the garage app.”

Fair enough. But something I hadn't really concentrated on yesterday came up again and again: the data.

If you're putting your cars, mileage, service history, photographs and potentially values into one place, quite a few of you wanted to know what happens to all of that information. One reader called garage apps “data mining exercises,” while another simply wrote: “They collect your data - no way!”

I don't know what any individual company does with its users' data, and I'm certainly not suggesting they're all selling it. But it's a perfectly reasonable question to ask before uploading the details of an entire collection.

There were a few people on the other side. One reader with several cars likes having his records, photos and paperwork together in one place rather than scattered everywhere. I get that.

And interestingly, after yesterday's piece I also heard from Vroomer Jeff, founder of The Common Gear, who actually operates in this space.

His take was slightly different. The problem isn't that digitizing records has no value, it's that owners don't necessarily want to do the digitizing themselves.

As Jeff put it:

His company will actually go to a client's storage facility and turn the physical records into a digital file for them. That distinction is interesting because suddenly someone else is doing the work rather than asking the owner to do it.

And perhaps that's what I was really ranting about yesterday.

I don't think there's anything wrong with having all your cars and records organized digitally. If you've got a decent-sized collection, I can absolutely see the value in that. And good records unquestionably matter when you eventually come to sell.

It's the amount of work these apps expect you to do that I can't get past.

Photograph everything. Upload everything. Enter the mileage. Add every service. Keep it all updated. And after I've done all that work, the reward is often a chart telling me what my cars are supposedly worth. (which are never accurate)

Jeff's approach interests me because he's effectively saying: we'll do the work for you. Now that makes more sense to me.

So after yesterday's rant and a lot more comments and emails than I expected, I haven't suddenly become a garage-app convert.

But I think I understand a little better what a good one would actually need to do.