💰 The figures shared below don’t count any other sales such as car seats, memorabilia etc… All online auction sites are analyzed to put this leaderboard together.

I only include websites that have sold 5+ vehicles in the chart below.

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

If one of today's cars has caught your eye, don't just look at the hammer price.

Importing? Check here the true landed cost.

Buying within the U.S.? Get a free shipping quote (with our tool) in under a minute. No email. No phone number. No sales calls.

I wrote about Dutch Auto Auctions when they first appeared because, quite frankly, launching another online auction platform takes some guts these days. There are already plenty of established places to sell a car, and they were asking people to try something most of us had never experienced before.

For anyone who missed it, the concept is pretty simple. Rather than starting low and watching bidders push the price higher, the car starts at a high price and the number keeps falling. If at any point you're prepared to buy it at the price on the screen, you stop the auction and the car is yours.

It's never easy starting a new platform, especially when you're also asking buyers and sellers to get comfortable with a completely different way of doing things. But they've now had a few sales, which is great to see, and what interests me more is that people outside the platform are starting to give it a go.

There's currently a privately owned 1930 Ford Model A hot rod nicknamed Alumi-Rod live on the site. It's a completely mad hand-formed aluminum creation with an LT1 V8 and six-speed manual, and when I looked, its falling price had already moved from $75,000 to just over $63,000.

Whether this particular car sells isn't really why I'm mentioning it.

Someone has looked at a relatively new platform, looked at a completely unfamiliar way of selling a car and decided, I'll give it a go.

That's a good sign. And there's another one coming that caught my attention even more. RK Motors has consigned this 1953 Ford F-100, a pretty serious Roadster Shop build with a supercharged 509ci V8 producing around 750hp, a five-speed manual and just 13 miles showing since completion. Its Dutch auction is due to start at $185,000.

RK Motors isn't someone clearing an old car out of the garage. It's an established collector-car business with plenty of other ways to sell a car, so seeing them willing to try the format is another encouraging little step.

I'm certainly not declaring Dutch auctions the future of selling collector cars. They're still incredibly new, and ultimately they'll face exactly the same challenge every auction platform faces: can they consistently bring enough buyers and sellers together to make the marketplace work?

But this is exactly what I wanted to watch after I first wrote about them.

Would anyone actually give it a go? A few cars have now sold. Private sellers are listing cars. And RK Motors, an established collector-car business with plenty of other ways to sell, is putting a serious six-figure F-100 into the format.

None of that guarantees where Dutch Auto Auctions goes from here, but for a new platform trying to convince people to sell cars in a completely unfamiliar way, I'd say those are some pretty encouraging signs.

Now let's see if the buyers follow.

Yesterday I had a bit of a go at Barrett-Jackson's new Digital Select online offering. I questioned the launch, the user journey and, particularly, the decision to charge a 10% buyer's premium and 8% or 10% to the seller when some of the biggest online platforms are charging considerably less.

I thought I'd get some pushback. Instead, 87% of Vroomers said online fees should be competitive, and judging by the comments, quite a few of you felt even more strongly about it than I did.

One Vroomer questioned why they would pay those fees when there are already proven alternatives charging substantially less. Another said Barrett-Jackson would have to offer considerably more than they've shown so far to succeed in a big way, while another summed up the competitive landscape rather nicely: “Competition breeds a sharpened pencil.”

There were also plenty of comments about AutoHunter, the number of alternatives now available and whether live commentary at the close is enough to make Digital Select meaningfully different. Some of you were considerably less polite than that!

But after reading all of your comments, along with the emails and messages that followed yesterday's article, I've actually found myself thinking less about the fees and more about something else. (And just on those fees, since they haven’t been published, I think they may change them to make them more palatable, lets wait and see.)

Is Barrett-Jackson thinking big enough about digital in the first place?

This is one of the biggest names in the collector-car world. They've spent decades building an enormous audience, relationships across the industry, a huge amount of data and a brand known by people who probably couldn't name five other collector-car auction companies.

And the big digital idea is another auction platform? That's the bit I'm struggling with.

There are now lots of places to sell an enthusiast car online, and some of them are exceptionally good at it. Buyers and sellers have more choice than they've ever had, the technology has moved forward enormously and the best platforms have built substantial communities of their own.

So if you're Barrett-Jackson, why think only about where the transaction happens?

I'd be asking a much bigger question: what can we build that makes owning, buying and selling collector cars better?

Maybe it's tools that help owners understand what's happening in the market. Maybe it's something that helps them decide when and where to sell. Maybe it's finding genuinely useful ways of opening up decades of auction data. Shipping, importing, ownership, insurance, market intelligence, there are problems everywhere you look in this industry that technology can make easier.

And perhaps this is why I find the whole thing particularly difficult to understand.

I'm a newsletter owner. We don't have anything remotely resembling Barrett-Jackson's resources, but over the last year we've quietly started building tools because I keep coming across problems in this industry that I think somebody ought to solve.

We built an Import Calculator because importing a car is unnecessarily confusing. We built a live shipping tool because getting a straightforward idea of what it costs to move a car across the country shouldn't require handing over your email address and phone number.

We've now built GoAskSam to help owners work out where and how to sell their cars, and we're nowhere near finished.

There's a roadmap of other tools we're working on, all built around the same basic idea: make the collector-car world easier to navigate. I'm not saying any of that to pat ourselves on the back. I'm saying it because we're a newsletter with a small team.

Imagine what Barrett-Jackson could build. They have the brand, the resources, the data, the relationships and the audience to create things that could become genuinely useful parts of the collector-car world. Things owners use throughout the year, not simply when they happen to have a car going across a Barrett-Jackson auction block.

Barrett-Jackson is fantastic at the physical auction. They've created an experience around buying and selling cars that is unmistakably theirs, and they've built an enormous business around it. But technology gives them the opportunity to extend that relationship far beyond the few days someone happens to be buying or selling a car.

Help me understand the market. Help me work out where my car fits within it. Help me move it. Help me import it. Help me decide what to do with it. Give me a reason to interact with Barrett-Jackson when I'm not currently buying or selling at Barrett-Jackson.

Do that properly and something very interesting happens. Barrett-Jackson stops simply being somewhere I occasionally transact and starts becoming somewhere I regularly go for help. And when I eventually am ready to buy or sell, they've been part of that journey all along.

That's the opportunity I think is much bigger than another online auction. And there's another reason I think this matters.

The collector-car audience is changing. The baby-boomer generation that helped build businesses like Barrett-Jackson isn't going to be the dominant force forever, and the next generation of collectors is going to interact with this industry very differently.

Moving auctions online is part of that evolution, and Digital Select could absolutely be an important stepping stone. But surely that's just the beginning.

Barrett-Jackson has the brand, the data, the audience and the resources to look at the next ten or twenty years and ask what role it wants to play in the entire collector-car journey, not simply how it can conduct more auctions online.

That's the opportunity I think is staring them in the face. Because Barrett-Jackson has spent decades building one of the biggest brands in this industry. If they really embrace where technology and the collector-car audience are heading, there's an opportunity to build far more than another successful auction platform.

Digital Select could be the first step. I just hope they're thinking about all the steps that could come after it.

Over to you, BJ.

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