The Daily Vroom
BaT Lets the Cars Do the Talking
We’ve featured quite a few collections lately, and one thing I’ve enjoyed is seeing how differently each platform chooses to present them.
Some go big on production. We’ve had Chris Harris videos, beautifully designed interactive catalogues, long-form storytelling and all sorts of ways of trying to turn a group of cars into an event.
Bring a Trailer does it rather differently. They basically put the cars in front of you and let them do the talking. And boy, do these cars talk.
The latest is The Iconic Collection from Private Collection Motors in Costa Mesa, a group assembled around rarity, design, performance and historical significance.
There’s a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing with a history stretching from German nobility to the U.S. and decades in the hands of a Gullwing Group member. There’s a RUF CTR-spec 1981 Porsche 911 Carrera Widebody, a 993 Turbo reimagined by Kaege Retro, a 210-mile 911 Sport Classic and a Carrera Panamericana class-winning 1967 911S.
And then it gets properly silly.
A 157-mile McLaren Speedtail, one of just 106 built. A Spyker C8 Laviolette with 171 kilometers. A Diablo VT 6.0 SE in Marrone Eklipsis, one of the tiny run built to represent “sunset.” An Aventador SVJ. A Skyline GT-R M-Spec Nür. An early E-Type. An NSX-T.
There isn’t really a weak link.
And this is where BaT’s approach works. It doesn’t need a huge cinematic introduction. Put a Gullwing, Speedtail, Diablo, Spyker and a stack of special Porsches on one page and most of us are going to keep going anyway.
I do have one gripe though, and maybe it is just me :)
For as many genuinely incredible collections as BaT gets, they are surprisingly hard to find as collections.
I eventually found this collection page, but not through some obvious Collections section in the main navigation. And once you get there, yes, all the cars are listed, but from which collection is which car?
I still think there is an opportunity here to help us users. Other platforms increasingly treat a collection as its own product. Give it a proper home. Tell me who assembled it, why these cars belong together, what makes the group interesting, then let me move through the individual auctions.
BaT mostly have a page with the collection written up as in this case, but they don’t have a collection page for example like C&B, which does look good.
Again, maybe that is deliberate. They are the billion-dollar company, not me, so clearly the system works for them.
But if you are going to attract collections this good, I’d love to see BaT make the collection itself easier to discover and give it a little more room to breathe.
Because this isn’t just a bunch of very good auctions happening around the same time.
It’s a collection. And when the cars are this good, that story deserves its own front door.

What do you think?
We spend a lot of time looking at what cars sell for, but not enough time talking about what it’s actually like to sell one.
So today I want to turn it around and ask you. How long is too long to wait for an auction to go live? Who should control the reserve? Should a platform hold your car back if similar ones are already running? And what do you actually want to know before deciding where to sell?
A few quick questions below. I’m especially interested in the answers because I suspect sellers have a lot more opinions about the process than the platforms probably realize.
How long is too long to wait after your car is accepted before the auction goes live?
Should a platform delay your auction because it already has similar cars live?
Who should ultimately control the reserve?
What frustrates you most before an auction even goes live?
Before choosing where to sell, what would you most want to know?
If you could fix one thing across collector-car selling platforms, what would it be?
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