Good morning Vroomers,

So let me give you a little bit of the analytics behind the scenes of GoAskSam.com

I pulled the numbers on what people have typed into GoAskSam so far, and the list is more telling than I expected. Top 20, in order:

A few things jump out. Porsche shows up four times in the top 20, more than any other marque, and BMW three times. It's a distinctly enthusiast list too, the S2000, the MX-5 and the 325i sitting comfortably alongside a Testarossa and a Ford GT says a lot about who's actually using this thing: people curious about their own daily-driven future classic just as much as people chasing something exotic.

Nothing scientific about this, it's just what's actually been typed in so far. But I'll keep an eye on it, and if the list moves around meaningfully as more of you use it, I'll let you know what's climbing and what's falling off.

If you haven't put your own car through it yet, here's what it actually does: tell Sam the year, make and model (or just paste a VIN if you've got one), and it comes back with where I'd sell it and why, a PowerSeller in your area if that's the better move for your car, all based on data. It's not AI guessing, it's algorithmic, the same rules run against real sales data, every time, for every car.

Go try it: GoAskSam.com. Takes less than a minute.

Yesterday I wrote about the rather complicated history behind the 330 GTO recreation currently on BaT, and judging by my inbox, plenty of you had thoughts.

First, I want to make one thing clear because I don't want this to turn into a BaT-bashing exercise. The chassis number issue isn't being hidden. The listing tells you that 5807 originally belonged to a 330 GT 2+2 that was parted out, and that the same number is also being used on another Ferrari recreation. The seller has been discussing the car openly in the comments as well.

And this isn't really a BaT-specific problem anyway. Cars with complicated identities, rebodies and questionable or duplicated chassis histories have been crossing auction blocks long before online auctions existed. One reader even pointed to a recent Bizzarrini offered by one of the major international auction houses with what he described as a similarly messy provenance.

So I think the question is narrower than perhaps I made it yesterday.

When something as fundamental as the identity of the car needs explaining, where should that explanation appear? Most of you thought the answer was right at the top.

Gary's response was probably the shortest: "DISCLOSURE, DISCLOSURE, DISCLOSURE!"

Another reader put it even better: "Honesty up front extinguishes questions at the end."

And several of you raised something beyond provenance entirely: what happens when two cars carrying the same number actually have to live in the real world? Registration, insurance, titles and eventually another sale. One reader asked the obvious question: "How do you register a car when there's another car already registered with the same VIN?"

But not everyone agreed with me. Karl argued that because the Ferrari is clearly being sold as a recreation, the donor chassis, engine and gearbox are essentially a footnote rather than the headline. Serious buyers are going to read the entire listing anyway, and if the identity becomes too problematic, give the recreation a new unrelated chassis number and title it accordingly.

I think that's a perfectly reasonable counterargument. Will, who runs an auction business himself, made another good point. Auction platforms need consistent listing formats, and maintaining the integrity of those listings takes a considerable amount of work. His company says it treats every listing the same regardless of value, questions sellers thoroughly and simply declines sellers who won't provide full disclosure.

That last part stuck with me because perhaps price shouldn't actually matter here. A $500,000 Ferrari deserves proper research, obviously, but so does a $20,000 car if the thing being questioned is its identity.

Then one reader went considerably further down the rabbit hole. He tried to establish exactly what happened to the original 5807 and found that even after all the disclosure in the listing, there are still some pretty big unanswered questions.

One account says a new chassis was fabricated for the GTO recreation while the original engine and gearbox from 5807 went into it, and the original chassis became the California Spyder recreation.

Except another historical source apparently records 5807 being offered for sale in 1988 without its engine or transmission. If that's correct, where did the engine and gearbox currently in this car come from?

He also questioned whether some of the documentation shown with the GTO recreation actually follows the California Spyder instead, because that car may be the one carrying the original chassis.

And this, to me, is where yesterday's story actually gets more interesting.

Nobody is suggesting this is some fake Ferrari being passed off as a real 330 GTO. Quite the opposite. It's clearly described as a recreation, it was built by people who knew what they were doing, and by all accounts it is an absolutely beautiful car. One reader saw it at Lime Rock last week and told me that, recreation or not, he'd "trade a kidney for it in a heartbeat." I can understand why.

But the more people investigate 5807, the more obvious it becomes that "recreation" isn't really the complicated part. The identity is.

Which brings me back to where I landed yesterday, perhaps with a little more sympathy for the other side.

I don't think BaT did anything particularly wrong here. They disclosed what they knew, the seller has engaged with questions, and the comment section is doing exactly what the best auction comment sections do. (assuming they are not heavily moderated)

I just think a duplicated or reused chassis number belongs in a different category of disclosure.

Put it in the listing, absolutely. Give us all the history and documentation further down. But I'd still put one simple sentence near the top:

Chassis number 5807 is also carried by another Ferrari recreation. See below for the full history. That's it.

It doesn't condemn the car. It doesn't accuse the seller of anything. It certainly doesn't make this gorgeous recreation any less gorgeous.

It just makes sure nobody has to discover the most unusual thing about the car after they've already fallen in love with it.

And judging by your responses yesterday, most of you seem to agree.

A couple of weeks ago I had a bit of a go at Barrett-Jackson's new Digital Select online auctions, particularly the decision to charge buyers 10% while sellers would pay either 8% or 10%. I thought I might get some pushback from Vroomers given the strength of the Barrett-Jackson brand, but 87% of you who responded thought online fees should be competitive with the other online platforms, and quite a few of you were considerably stronger about it than I was.

At the time, though, the fees hadn't actually been published anywhere on the site that I could find. I'd had to email Barrett-Jackson to get them, and I even wrote that perhaps they might change before the first auction once everything was properly launched.

Well, we now have a proper landing page for the first Digital Select auction, which runs November 5-12, so I went back to have another look.

There's certainly more information there now. We're told there will be a curated selection of collector vehicles and automobilia, backed by Barrett-Jackson's expertise, worldwide reach and first-class service, and they're still using the rather bold line that Digital Select will establish a "new standard for buying and selling collector vehicles online."

What I still couldn't find anywhere obvious was what it was actually going to cost me to buy something.

Maybe it's somewhere on the site and I've missed it, but given how much we'd discussed the fees last time, I was curious to see whether they'd changed them. So I did what any normal person writing a collector-car newsletter on a Sunday afternoon would do and went through the process of actually registering for the auction.

It took me through the usual Barrett-Jackson registration process rather than anything that felt particularly designed for an online bidder, and eventually, on the last page, I got to the agreement. Buried in there was the answer I'd been looking for: the buyer's premium is still 10% on cars and 17% on automobilia, and I couldn't see any cap.

So I did the work so you don't have to :)

And yes, I know Barrett-Jackson is perfectly entitled to charge whatever it wants. They appear to be treating Digital Select much more like a regular Barrett-Jackson auction that happens to take place online rather than trying to compete directly with the fee structures of the online-native platforms, and perhaps that's exactly what they intend to do.

I just wonder whether regular online bidders are going to see it the same way, particularly when you put some numbers against it.

Buy a $50k car on BaT and you're paying a $2,500 buyer's fee. Buy a $50k car on Digital Select and you're paying $5,000. That's obviously a difference, but it's when you get into the more expensive cars that it becomes much more noticeable. Buy something for $250k on BaT and, because of its $7,500 cap, that's your fee. At Barrett-Jackson, assuming there isn't a cap somewhere that I've failed to find, you're paying $25,000.

That's $17,500 more on the same hammer price, which means either the deals are going to have to be spectacular or Barrett-Jackson is going to have to give buyers a very good reason to decide that paying substantially more is worth it.

And perhaps they will. If a car that would cost me $250k somewhere else can be bought for $225k on Digital Select, I don't particularly care that the buyer's premium is higher because ultimately I'm interested in what the car cost me. Likewise, if Barrett-Jackson's enormous audience brings sellers better results, perhaps they'll happily pay their side of the equation as well. We won't really know any of that until the first auction actually happens.

But after going through all of this again, I find myself coming back to something I wrote after the original article. Why couldn't Barrett-Jackson have been just a little more creative with this?

I don't mean they needed to reinvent online auctions. Put a cap on the buyer's premium. Try a different fee for the first few auctions. Give sellers some reason to take a chance on the new platform. Come up with one or two things that make people who already use BaT, Cars & Bids, Collecting Cars and all the others think there is something genuinely different going on here.

Even the new landing page left me feeling the same way. This is Barrett-Jackson, a company that knows how to put on a collector-car event better than almost anyone, yet the imagery and presentation for this new product feel surprisingly basic to me. There's plenty of language about trust, confidence, curation and setting a new standard, but I'm still struggling to see what the actual new standard is.

And I don't say any of this hoping it fails. Quite the opposite. I want more serious competition in online auctions because competition is good for buyers, sellers and ultimately all of us who follow this market. Barrett-Jackson has the brand, audience, history and resources to become a major player online, and maybe November arrives with 50 fantastic cars, bidding goes crazy and everyone decides the fees don't matter. If that happens, good luck to them, and I genuinely mean it.

I just think that's why I'm being harder on them than I might be on some small startup entering this market. Barrett-Jackson didn't start with a blank sheet of paper and no advantages. They started with almost every advantage you could ask for, which gave them an opportunity to do something genuinely interesting with online auctions.

So far, I'm still waiting to see what that is.

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