A lot of you have owned one, wanted one, or still have one under a cover. So I took a look through ‘Sam’s Data’ and here’s what E46 M3s have actually sold for over the last year in online auctions in the US and Canada. CSLs and Competition Package cars are set aside, because they’re their own market.

The typical E46 M3 coupe sold between $22,500 and $44,000.

Everyone talks about the manual premium. The sales tell a simpler story. Of the coupes 57 of 62 were six-speed manuals. Only five SMG coupes sold all year, between $13,000 and $34,750. That’s too few to put a fair price gap on.

So the honest answer isn’t “manuals bring X more.” The manual simply is the E46 M3 market now.

Only six manual coupes with under 30,000 miles sold in the last year. The cheapest brought $44,750. The most expensive brought $102,000.

Above 30,000 miles, the typical manual coupe sold between $23,000 and $41,000.

Read that again: the cheapest low-mile car beat the top of the typical range for everything else. If yours has low miles, you’re not in the same market as most E46 M3s.

Same model, same gearbox, nearly $80,000 apart.

More E46 M3 convertibles sold than coupes: 90 of them. The typical one went for $16,500 to $27,500, and the best brought $63,000. If you want the S54 and the sound for less, this is where to look.

A year earlier, the typical coupe sold between $20,000 and $33,000. This year’s band sits higher. But this year’s cars were a better bunch: median miles dropped from 98,000 to 86,000, and fewer of them were SMGs. So it’s better cars changing hands, not proof that the same car is worth more.

On Bring a Trailer, the median E46 M3 sale ran between $21,125 and $29,750 a quarter. On Cars & Bids it ran between $16,175 and $24,500.

Same car on paper, different cars in practice. Every Bring a Trailer E46 M3 with a gearbox recorded was a manual. On Cars & Bids, anywhere from a third to four fifths were manuals, and the miles often ran higher. So the gap says more about which cars went where than about what either platform pays.The bigger picture

Across cars sold on Bring a Trailer, the median sale this September was $26,000, up from $22,250 a year earlier. The average was $57,400, up from $44,100. The average runs at more than double the median, so a handful of big sales are doing a lot of the lifting.

On Cars & Bids, the median has barely moved in two years. It sat between $16,000 and $18,000 almost every month.

It’s tempting to look at rising prices and declare the market is getting stronger, but as we’ve seen, what actually sold matters just as much as what it sold for. And with these cars ranging from $11,900 daily drivers to a $102,000 garage queen, the details really do make all the difference.

You know how much I love a good collection, and Hagerty really does seem to have made a specialty of them. We've written about several recently, but another one caught my eye this morning, and this time it's Burnyzz, the Florida-based classic car business owned by NHRA Top Fuel driver Josh Hart and his wife Brittanie.

Burnyzz has been around since 2010 and operates out of a rather impressive 100,000-square-foot facility, handling everything from classic car sales and restorations to detailing and servicing. They've brought collections to Hagerty before, and clearly they like the experience because they're back with another 20 cars. And here's the best bit for buyers: 19 of the 20 are being offered at no reserve.

It's quite an assortment too. There's a gorgeous black 1969 Camaro RS/SS 396 Convertible, a yellow 1967 Chevelle SS 396 with a 427 under the hood, and a 1967 Corvette Convertible with the mighty L71 427/435 and a four-speed manual. That Corvette was already sitting at $118,750 when I looked, and I suspect it'll attract plenty more attention before the hammer falls.

But what I particularly like about this collection is how varied it is. Alongside the American muscle, you've got a 1932 Ford Custom Pickup, a lovely 1938 Packard Super Eight Coupe, a 1957 Buick Roadmaster Convertible and a 1935 DeSoto Airflow Coupe. There's even a supercharged 2017 Mustang GT, a 2002 Camaro SS Convertible with just 8,000 miles, and, just to make sure nobody gets too comfortable in the 1960s, a bright orange 2024 Hummer EV.

It's exactly why I enjoy these collections. I might arrive for the Corvette or Camaro, but before long I'm looking at a 1950 Packard Eight or a 1939 Ford street rod that I probably wouldn't have searched for otherwise. And with nearly everything offered without reserve, every one of those cars is going to find a new home, assuming the auctions run to completion.

What I find equally interesting is that Burnyzz keeps coming back to Hagerty. Clearly there's something about the relationship and the format that works for them, and putting 19 of these 20 cars up without reserve is quite a commitment. For Hagerty, having sellers return with fresh collections is exactly the sort of thing you'd want to see, and for buyers, it's another great excuse to spend far too long browsing cars they probably weren't planning to buy.

I've said before that Hagerty seems to understand the appeal of selling cars as collections better than most online platforms. Rather than simply listing 20 unrelated vehicles, there's a name, a story and a reason to browse the whole lot. And when the cars are this varied, that's half the fun.

Good luck to Burnyzz and Hagerty. I'll be watching how these 20 finish, especially that Corvette.

We've just been talking about Hagerty and its collections, but Collecting Cars has one coming up that I think is particularly clever, and for a completely different reason.

It's called The Porsche GT Collection, featuring five rather lovely Porsches, all going live on November 1. There's a 2004 996 GT3 RS in Belgium, a 2015 GT3 in Abu Dhabi, a 2017 GT3 in the UK, a 2022 GT3 Clubsport in Australia and a 2023 GT3 Touring Techart in Romania.

Five cars in five different countries. Think about that for a moment.

This is where Collecting Cars has an advantage that very few online auction platforms can match. They've built an international marketplace, and rather than needing five cars sitting in one showroom or belonging to one collector, they can bring together cars from completely different parts of the world and present them as one collection.

And potentially, that's five different local audiences being introduced to the same event. Someone in Australia might arrive to look at the Clubsport and end up browsing the GT3 RS in Belgium, while a Porsche enthusiast in the UK might find themselves looking at a car in Abu Dhabi. Of course, whether that translates into international bidding is another question, but the opportunity to put all those buyers in front of the same five cars is fascinating.

We've seen Collecting Cars do something similar with Supercar Sunday, but I actually think this smaller, more focused collection shows off their international reach particularly well. It's not about having hundreds of cars. It's about being able to find five interesting examples of a very specific type of car, wherever they happen to be in the world, and bring them together.

I struggle to think of another auction platform that could pull together this particular collection quite so naturally. And if Collecting Cars can do it with Porsche GT cars, imagine the possibilities with Ferraris, air-cooled 911s, Japanese performance cars or just about any other category with a passionate international following.

I really like this one, and I'll be interested to see not just what the cars sell for, but whether bringing them together attracts buyers who might otherwise never have discovered them.

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