You may not have noticed anything particularly different when you opened Bring a Trailer last week, but BaT has added something that makes a lot of sense as the site gets bigger: a personalized Auctions for You feed.

Cars & Bids has something very similar. I didn’t see a big announcement from them, so I’m not going to try to declare who technically got there first. What interests me more is that both platforms have arrived at the same idea, and I suspect we’re going to see a lot more of it.

And over in the UK Collecting Cars have their own version of this.

The problem they are all trying to solve is pretty obvious. There are now so many cars running at once that finding the ones you actually care about can become a job in itself. Platforms can have more so many live auctions at a time, and once you add everything else competing for your attention, simply giving everybody the same giant feed starts to make less sense.

Pretty much the entire internet worked this out years ago. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Netflix and almost every large content platform try to work out what you’re interested in rather than showing everybody exactly the same thing.

Car auctions should be particularly well suited to it because the platforms already have plenty of signals. They know what you click on, watch, search for and subscribe to on their sites. If you spend half your life looking at air-cooled Porsches and old Ferraris, there’s a decent chance you’d rather see more of those than scroll through hundreds of cars you were never going to click on anyway.

It makes total sense. The difficult bit is getting it right.

One BaT user went through 250 recommendations and said only 22 were actually of interest to him. Another found two cars he had completely missed and immediately added them to his watchlist. That feels about right for an early version of something like this. It won’t understand everyone perfectly from day one,(my suggestions are a little off!) but the more interesting question is how quickly it learns.

And this is where I think both platforms could go further.

Watching what somebody does is one thing. Letting them tell you what they don’t want to see might be even more useful.

If BaT shows me a modified Mustang because I happened to click on one three months ago, give me a simple Not interested button. Maybe even let me say why: not this model, not modified cars, not motorcycles, whatever it is. The system then doesn’t have to spend the next six weeks working out from my behavior that it got me wrong. I’ve just told it.

Social platforms have been doing versions of this for years, and I think it would work particularly well with cars because enthusiast tastes can be incredibly specific. Somebody who spends hours looking at E39 M5s is not necessarily interested in every BMW. Someone who follows every F40 auction may have absolutely no interest in a 488. Clicking on something does not always mean liking it.

That distinction is going to matter if these feeds are going to become genuinely useful rather than simply another place to display cars.

In terms of the actual experience, I think BaT currently does the better job on desktop. The recommendations feel naturally integrated into the site and give you another route into what has become an enormous amount of inventory. On mobile, Cars & Bids feels better to me. The feed flows more naturally and feels closer to the way we’re already used to discovering things on our phones. Just my 2 cents, you can of course disagree.

But both are only at the beginning.

The much bigger change is that an auction site no longer needs to look the same for everybody. You can keep the main feed for people who want to browse everything, then have a personalized version when you want the platform to do some of the searching for you. That is a pretty tried and tested formula elsewhere on the internet, and there is no obvious reason it shouldn’t work with cars.

The question I’m more interested in is whether it eventually changes the business, not just the browsing experience. If personalized feeds put cars in front of people who otherwise would never have found them, do those cars get more watchers? More bids? Better sell-through? Do people spend longer on the platform because the cars in front of them are more relevant?

If they do, this becomes much more important than simply adding another tab.

With thousands of cars competing for attention every week, finding more inventory may eventually matter less than getting the right inventory in front of the right person.

And naturally, we’ll be watching the numbers to see if that starts happening.

One of the things I’ve really enjoyed watching recently is how the auction platforms are starting to treat collections as something more than just a group of cars that happen to go live at the same time.

When we looked at this recently, I loved what Hagerty was doing by bringing certain collections back and creating some continuity around them. Then Car & Classic went completely the other way with that beautiful catalogue and superb Chris Harris film, making the whole thing feel like a proper event (which it is!) before you’d even clicked on a car.

Now Cars & Bids is back with its own take, and I think this one is particularly interesting because they’re taking the online auction and actually ending it where the cars are.

The new Willow Springs Collection has 14 cars, all of them will be at Willow Springs Reimagined on October 17, and the auctions finish while the event is taking place. You can obviously still sit at home and bid as normal, but if you’re there, the cars you’re watching online are sitting right in front of you.

This isn’t completely new for Cars & Bids either. They tried the hybrid format at Velocity Invitational in Sonoma earlier this year, where the company says it produced its strongest one-day result to date and an 80% sell-through rate. So Willow Springs looks less like a one-off experiment and more like something they actually want to build around.

And boy have they put together a good group of cars for this one.

Like probably everyone else looking at the page, my eyes immediately went to the orange 1992 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 by Singer. It is already at $550,000 with 11 days left as I write this. Could it end up as C&B record sale?

Then you start looking around it and there is plenty more. A 2022 Shelby GT500 Heritage Edition, Renault Clio V6, 993 Turbo, Huracán Tecnica, Ferrari 360 Modena, Cayman R, Lancia Delta Integrale Evo 2, early 911 Carrera, McLaren 750S Spider and an SLR McLaren are all in there.

It’s a proper enthusiast mix rather than 14 versions of the same thing, which I actually prefer. You could quite easily imagine walking around Willow Springs and stopping at almost every one of them for a completely different reason.

But the bit I find more interesting than the individual cars is what Cars & Bids is doing with the format.

For a long time Cars & Bids has, understandably, been very closely tied to Doug. Doug is the founder, the face of it, his videos drive huge awareness, and even the listings literally have “Doug’s Take” sitting inside them. That personality helped build the platform and I don’t think they should move away from it.

But at some point, Cars & Bids also needs things that feel like Cars & Bids, rather than things that feel like Doug doing something on Cars & Bids.

I think these events can become part of that.

Willow Springs Reimagined x Cars & Bids feels like its own product. You know what it is without Doug necessarily having to be the story. There is a venue, a curated group of cars, people physically attending, online bidding still happening around the world, and then everything comes together when the auctions finish at the event.

That starts giving the platform its own identity outside the normal daily auction feed.

It also solves something I think online auctions sometimes struggle with. They are incredibly efficient, but efficiency can make everything feel the same. A $20,000 BMW and a $700,000 collector car can appear in essentially the same template, on the same screen, ending in roughly the same way.

Collections and live events give the special cars a chance to actually feel special.

That doesn’t mean going backwards and recreating the traditional auction house. The whole advantage is that you don’t have to be at Willow Springs. Anyone can still bid from anywhere. But if the physical event creates more attention, gives sellers better presentation and gets a few more serious buyers emotionally invested in a car, why wouldn’t you combine the two?

Of course, that is also the part we’ll be watching once all 14 are finished. Not just whether one Singer sells for a huge number, but whether holding the auctions around the event actually does anything to the wider results. More watchers, more bidding, stronger sell-through, better prices, whatever it might be.

Because if it does, then Cars & Bids may have found something worth repeating again and again. Although putting on an auction at events is a lot of work, but hey that’s the name of the game in this industry.

Online auctions don’t need to become live auctions again. But there is no reason the best bits of both can’t start meeting somewhere in the middle.

And if you’re going to test that theory, ending 14 very good cars at Willow Springs seems like a pretty decent way to do it.

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