Want to dive deeper into any of these listings? Just click on the car to take you directly to the listing.

I've written about Hagerty's collections before, and looking through Marketplace again this morning, they really do seem to be leaning into them more than anyone else. I actually quite like it.

One currently running is the Snook's Dream Cars Collection, with 15 cars ranging from a Jaguar XKE and Volvo P1800 to a '57 Bel Air, Kaiser-Darrin and 1942 Ford GPW. There's also the much smaller Haskins Collection, with five old cars and projects that have apparently been in the same family for more than 40 years, while the Autobahn Speed Collection is basically a Porsche rabbit hole, with cars, race cars, bikes, wheels, memorabilia and plenty more. And there are other collections on Hagerty beyond those.

Collections obviously aren't something Hagerty invented, and we've seen BaT, SOMO and other platforms sell them too, but Hagerty seems to make them a much bigger part of Marketplace. And I can see why. Instead of 15 unrelated auctions, suddenly there's a story connecting everything, and that makes me want to look through cars I probably wouldn't have clicked on individually.

It's a little closer to the experience of walking around a physical collection or auction. You might have gone there to see one particular car, but inevitably you end up wandering over to something else. Online auctions don't always encourage that because we're generally clicking on the cars we already know we want to see. Put them together as a collection, though, and I find myself doing exactly what I would in person, just having a nose around.

Hagerty has done this plenty of times before, so presumably they like what collections bring to Marketplace, and I'd actually be interested to know how people behave differently when they're browsing one. Do they look at more cars? Stay longer? Bid on something they hadn't originally come for? I don't know, but the fact Hagerty keeps returning to the format suggests it's something they believe in.

Either way, I hope they keep doing them. In a market where it's becoming increasingly difficult for auction sites to feel genuinely different from one another, giving people another reason to browse rather than simply arrive for a specific car and leave again certainly isn't a bad thing.

Sticking with the idea of giving people a reason to browse rather than simply turning up for one particular car, Collecting Cars is doing something that I think is pretty clever.

They're calling it Supercar Sunday V, and rather than a collection in the traditional sense, they've brought together 67 supercars from around the world with their auctions all ending on Sunday. There are cars in Australia, the UK, Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere, with everything from McLarens and Ferraris to Lamborghinis, Porsches, Aston Martins and a Ford GT.

The bit I like isn't necessarily any individual car, although there are plenty I'd happily have. It's the idea of turning what would otherwise be 67 separate online auctions into an actual event. You can land on one page and spend far too long working your way through a 675LT in New Zealand, an F40 in Australia, a Testarossa in the UK and a Murciélago somewhere else entirely.

And with cars spread around the world, this is also exactly the sort of page where I inevitably start wondering what it would actually cost to bring one home. So if you're doing the same thing, our Import Calculator will work out the current U.S. import duties and tariffs before you get too carried away bidding on something sitting on the other side of the world. Try the Import Calculator here.

We've talked quite a bit recently about online auction platforms needing to give people a reason to come back even when they're not actively buying a car, and I think things like this help. The cars don't need to belong to one person or have some shared provenance. The theme itself is enough to tie them together and give Collecting Cars something much bigger to promote than 67 individual listings.

Between Hagerty leaning into collections and Collecting Cars creating themed auction events like this, perhaps that's where some of the more interesting experimentation is happening right now. The basic online auction format is pretty well established. The next question is how you package those auctions in a way that actually makes people want to turn up and have a look.

And Supercar Sunday is a pretty good excuse to do exactly that.

Enjoying The Daily Vroom?

Pay it forward by sharing this newsletter with an automotive aficionado in your circles. Your endorsement allows us to accelerate our growth.