Before we get into today’s market, there are two things I’ve been keeping an eye on that feel worth mentioning.

Billy Joel is selling more than 70 motorcycles from his collection with Gooding Christie’s at Rétromobile New York in November, and every one is going without reserve. We were asked to run Sam’s data against some of the headline bikes, and what stood out was how little celebrity premium appears to be built into the estimates. You can read what we had to say here in this article about the collection.

Basically Gooding seems to have priced most of these as motorcycles and left the room to decide what the Billy Joel name is actually worth. Because everything is selling no reserve, November should give us a pretty clean answer bike by bike, which is not something you get very often with celebrity provenance.

And if you have a car, auction, platform or market question where Sam’s data might help, don’t be afraid to ask. Some of the more interesting things we find start with somebody sending us a question we had not thought to ask ourselves.

The other thing I’m watching is eBay Live’s first vehicle auction with Exotic Knights and Tanner & Co., the cars are an M4 GTS, G 63 AMG, Shelby GT500 and Aston Martin Vantage F1 Edition.

This interests me because eBay Live is no longer some tiny experiment. eBay says Live is now one of its fastest-growing formats, and in the second quarter its GMV was up roughly eightfold year over year. Watches have already become a regular part of the format, with sellers running live Rolex, Omega, Breitling and other luxury-watch auctions.

Cars are an obvious next test. Online vehicle auctions have become huge, but most still use the same basic timed-auction model. eBay already has the audience, the seller infrastructure and the live-commerce technology, so combining all three around cars could become something much more interesting than a one-off event.

Maybe it goes nowhere. But after seeing how quickly eBay Live has grown in watches, collectibles and luxury, I would not dismiss this one.

What do you think?

We get asked this all the time. Where should I sell this car? Which site will get me the most money? And the honest answer is that it depends, because there are so many factors: the car, the miles, the condition, the time of year, whether you set a reserve. That's one of the reasons we built GoAskSam.com, a free tool that shows you where any car has actually sold, for how much, and where I'd take it. It gives you the full picture in seconds.

But in an article, we can go one step deeper on a single car. And one I've been asked about more than once lately is the E46 M3. So we fired up Sam’s data to analyze all E46 M3 sold on all US auction sites and analyzed sales over the last 2 years, and only counted any site that sold at least 10.

Only two made the cut. Not a surprise here, Bring a Trailer sold just under 300. Cars & Bids sold close to 150. Everyone else put together sold around a dozen, and no other site reached double figures. For this car, the US market is BaT and Cars & Bids, and nobody else is close.

On the top line, BaT wins comfortably. The typical E46 M3 sold for about $27,000 on BaT and about $22,000 on Cars & Bids. Roughly $5,000 more on BaT.

But you know me. Top-line numbers never tell the whole story. The Cars & Bids cars had more miles on them, typically in the high 80,000s against the mid 70,000s on BaT. So we compared the same model year with the same mileage, site against site.

Here's the surprise. For a low-mileage car, it makes no difference. Under 60,000 miles, an E46 M3 sold for the same on Cars & Bids as it did on BaT, less than half a percent in it.

The gap only opens up as the miles go up. Between 60,000 and 100,000 miles, the same car brought about 11% less on Cars & Bids. Over 100,000 miles, about 13% less. On a $20,000 car, that's $2,000 or more left on the table.

That turns the usual advice on its head. The received wisdom is that BaT is where you take your best car. For the E46 M3, the lowest-mileage cars did just as well on either site. It's the higher-mileage cars where BaT's crowd paid more.

And the gap is shrinking. We ran the same like-for-like comparison six months at a time. In the first half of 2025, the same E46 M3 was bringing around 20% less on Cars & Bids than on BaT. Over the last year, that's closed to somewhere between level and single digits. The numbers in each six months are small, so treat it as a direction rather than a verdict, but the direction is clear: Cars & Bids is catching up.

Why? We can see the pattern, not the cause. My guess: a low-mileage E46 M3 finds its buyer anywhere. A car with 110,000 miles needs more people looking to find the one who's comfortable with the miles, and BaT has more people looking.

And outside the US? Around 50 E46 M3s sold in the UK over the same two years, most of them on Collecting Cars (typically around £17,000), PistonHeads (around £15,000) and Car & Classic (around £14,000). Collecting Cars came out on top, but its cars also had the fewest miles, the same story as BaT and Cars & Bids. The priciest E46s of all sold in Europe, at RM Sotheby's and Broad Arrow for well over €100,000. Those are CSLs, the lightweight M3 America never got. Different market, different money, so we've kept them out of the head-to-head.

So where should you sell yours? Under 60,000 miles, pick the site you prefer on fees and timing. Over 60,000, the data points to BaT. And if the trend holds, that advice may not last. For your own car, with your miles and your state, put it into GoAskSam.com and it'll tell you.

And the most expensive E46 M3 of all? A 2003 CSL with just 4,698 km, sold by RM Sotheby's in Munich in November 2022 for €325,625. That's the highest price we've seen an E46 M3 bring at auction.

What car would you like us to analyze next?

Yesterday’s piece on reserve versus no reserve generated a lot of feedback, and after reading through the responses I think there is another part of this debate worth talking about, because the numbers only tell half the story.

We asked readers what they would do if they were selling a car on Bring a Trailer tomorrow. 49% said they would use a reserve because they wanted their number, while the rest were almost evenly split between going no reserve and letting the data decide.

What interested me more was why people chose what they did.

Our original analysis showed that once we matched the same make, model and year, no-reserve cars attracted more watchers and slightly more bids, but brought less money. At the same time, roughly one in three reserve cars across the wider BaT dataset did not sell. On paper, that looks like a fairly simple trade: no reserve gives you certainty of a sale, while reserve gives you protection on price.

But several readers pointed out something we had not really addressed: the risk is not the same for every seller.

One reader made the point that a wealthy collector or dealer can afford to take a chance with no reserve because they can absorb a disappointing result. Somebody selling a $20,000, $30,000 or $40,000 car may be in a very different position. Coming up $5,000 or $10,000 short might actually matter, yet those lower-priced cars can also be the ones where the pressure to go no reserve is greatest.

That is where the incentives become interesting.

The auction house wants the car sold. A no-reserve listing guarantees that happens, which means another completed transaction and another fee. The seller, meanwhile, is the one accepting whatever number happens to be on the screen when the auction ends.

One reader summed it up perfectly:

“The only guaranteed winner in a no reserve auction is the house.”

I think that is right.

Another reader who chose reserve said: “I don’t NEED to sell it, but if I do, I want top dollar.” That probably gets to the heart of the divide better than almost anything else I read.

If your priority is simply getting the car sold, no reserve makes sense. If your priority is selling only when the market reaches a number you are comfortable with, reserve makes sense. The problem comes when somebody chooses no reserve but is not genuinely prepared for the possibility that the result may be well below what they had in mind.

One reader mentioned a Mazda REPU that was reportedly listed no reserve, failed to bring what the sellers expected, and the sale was then not honored. Whether or not we know every detail of that particular case, the broader lesson is obvious: if you are going no reserve, you need to be willing to accept the number the market gives you that day.

That becomes even more important with unusual cars.

If you are selling something obscure and there may only be a handful of serious buyers in the country, no reserve means betting that at least two of them are paying attention at exactly the same time. If one is on vacation, one has already bought something else and another simply misses the auction, you do not get to rewind the clock because the “right buyers” were not there.

The flip side, of course, is that a reserve can kill a transaction entirely. Our earlier numbers showed that the chance of that happening varies enormously by marque. A reserve on a Lexus did not carry anything like the same no-sale risk as a reserve on a Jaguar. That is exactly why I still think the right answer is not “always reserve” or “always no reserve.” It depends on what you are selling and what matters most to you.

The feedback also produced some good questions beyond reserve versus no reserve.

One reader asked whether using a BaT Local Partner actually produces a better result after accounting for the additional cost. That one we can already help with. Sam tracks the performance of the Local Partners we recommend on GoAskSam, and those numbers update daily, so if you are considering using one, we can show you the actual results rather than relying on the sales pitch. Just like reserve versus no reserve, the answer is not the same for every car or every partner.

Another reader raised a question I think is worth digging into further: when a reserve car fails to sell, does it still attract a higher final bid than the same car would have brought at no reserve? In other words, does the presence of the reserve itself change bidding behavior even when there is no completed transaction?

That is a harder question, but it gets closer to what sellers really want to know.

The more I think about this, the less reserve versus no reserve looks like a pricing decision and the more it looks like a risk decision.

With no reserve, the auction house knows the car will sell and the seller carries the risk on price. With a reserve, the seller protects the downside but accepts the risk that the car may not sell at all.

Neither choice is automatically right, but the incentives are very different.

And based on the feedback, plenty of you would rather protect your number.

I suspect the auction platforms would rather you didn’t.

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