Nuying Cars Then and Now, How GenX differs in Buying From Gen Z 254

Buying Cars Then and Now.mp3

00:00 Gary how buying cars secondhand has changed over the course of our lifetime. The gloves are off. Welcome to the authority in car talk. No driving gloves. From exotics to hot rods, I'll get to it someday. Experience, knowledge and controversy all ride in the same city. Buckle up and hang on for the ride. Now for your host of no driving gloves, John Viviani.

00:41 John How are you doing tonight, Brian? Not too bad. How are you doing?

00:46 Bryan Oh, I'm hanging in here trying to get back into this groove of making podcasts. I enjoy it so much, but it's definitely fighting to get it back in the schedule and such. Oh, I'm looking up something really quick I saw today and I want to get the details right because I tried to tell the story earlier and I kind of got it wrong. I thought it was an interesting thing that I drive a ton, so I listen to a ton of podcasts and I've kind of changed up the podcasts I've been listening to a little bit, a little bit less producing podcast podcasts and getting a little bit back more into cars and tech. And I'm listening to Kim Commando today and it turns out this story kind of hit the news back May 14th, 2020, but I imagine it slipped under a lot of people's radar. It's not what our topic is going to be tonight, but I just found this fascinating. Do you realize there is a, they call it an elite team of sniffers employed by Audi to ensure that their cars don't smell bad? I mean, I could see that. It's not totally out of the realm of what I believe the Germans are up to, but how exactly do they go about that? It's part of their quality control, I guess. Apparently they have, since 1985 Audi has employed chemists that claim to have extremely functional senses of smell. And they work on and smell the interior of Audi vehicles and basically focus on the new materials being introduced to make sure they fit well and work well with older materials to ensure that there's a new car smell. It's just odd. They do a grading scale. There's six levels from odorless to unbearable and they sniff everything that goes into a car. The glass, the ceramics, the metals, I guess fabrics. I guess you're going to throw in adhesives and everything else that is used. I just kind of found that a interesting job. Not something I never thought of in the automotive world. I've heard stories about there's people that are employed to eat dog food, to try dog food, and make sure the dog food tastes like, I guess, like they say it tastes or tastes like dog food. I'm not sure, but you know, these people, they smell things. All the pictures in these news articles are them sniffing steering wheels and seats and glove boxes or smelling things in jars. It's huffing outies. Yeah, I can't imagine the process for applying for that job. What exactly they'd be looking for in you, but how you prove that you're an elite sniffer. That's beyond me. This is getting a little off-car, but it's a little interesting to me because I don't know if you know how your nose functions. This is something I've learned in the cigar world that only one nostril of your nose technically is working at one point at one time. Each side can actually have a slightly different sense of smell or sensitivity to smell. And it's done so that whatever the smell receptors, I'm not a whatever you would call a smell doctor. One side of my nose, I really can't smell anything. I have no sense of smell in it. The other side, it does OK. And you know how it's tied to taste and everything. But this smell receptors tire. So as they tire, that side of the nose turns off and the other side turns on and it alternates throughout the day. And that's why when you sniff a cigar, you sniff it with both nostrils because you're never really sure which side, I guess, of your nose is working. And do these people have identical senses of smell in each nostril or can they only… Well, only my right nostril is working right now, so I need to take the next 20 minutes off until it swaps. You don't want to tire one out. Or maybe it's one of them is for more faint sense and one of them is conditioned for very strong sense. I don't know. It's like a sequential twin turbo system. One spools up at low RPM and the other is at high RPM. I think there's both supposed to be sensitive, you know, just don't work together. I don't know what automotive system that would be related to. But that's kind of weird stuff. I'll dive into here on No Driving Gloves. You can go to nodrivingloves.com, get some of the back episodes, find our store with some products to buy, subscribe to the podcast. Check us out on Facebook and Instagram. And eventually we're going to get some of this stuff rolling. And I'm going to ask the audience a question. I might have asked this a year or two ago and I'm going to get back to it. I'd said something on Facebook and got a lot of positive response and some comments back about going back to doing this day in automotive history. But I'm trying to decide, should I do that as a one minute podcast every single day? Would you mind getting a one minute podcast in your feed or should that be a different channel? No Driving Gloves so that you can subscribe to it or not? I don't know. Listeners, send us an email at producer at nodrivingloves.com. Let me know what you think of that.

06:41 John I'm definitely going to show up on social media, but I kind of would like to do it audio. Knock some of these things out, tell you a little story about this day in automotive history. So you had a topic you wanted to bring up tonight, Brian, and I instantly liked it. It goes to No Driving Gloves. As I said in a little introduction episode I did, we're trying to get back to these evergreen topics and discuss things. You want to fill us in and tell, explain to me exactly what your thought process was on it and we'll go from there. Things car related that's nearest to my heart is just window shopping endlessly. As far back as, you know, getting closer to driving age and going on Craigslist, seeing what's around, seeing what I thought my first car would be. I think at the time I wanted a, I think I wanted it like a 90s Jeep Cherokee of some sort. I thought that'd be my first car, but now it ended up being a Saturn. So, you know, take what you get.

07:40 Bryan I've never had a Saturn, but I've had a 90s Jeep Cherokee. Over here in this window, because I just found it the other day, I was looking for something on one of my old hard drives. I found the list up until 2012 of all the cars I've owned. I don't have the years I've owned it. I actually don't have it on this list. I'm going to have to add it in every day. And that's weird. I go back to these lists and because when I had my 03 Chevrolet S10 and it was so lowered, I did buy a Jeep Cherokee.

08:14 John I can't remember. It was a 97, I believe it was. Great, great little truck. I really enjoyed it. Hated the Wrangler we owned at the time also, but really like that Jeep. Sorry to interrupt you. No, no problem. But yeah, I mean, it's far back as my lifetime goes. It's all been pretty much internet based, I would say. Besides that, you know, looking through maybe a Hemings catalog someone gave me at times, but it's mostly, you know, Craigslist. Facebook Marketplace wasn't until later, but it was Craigslist and at the time eBay auctions. That was the premier car auction, which seems kind of tough to see today. I mean, a lot of cars in there are, you know, five or six pictures, a one paragraph description.

09:05 Bryan And it kind of seems crazy to me that, you know, you'd consider spending a large amount of money on something with so little detail over the internet compared to what we have now, you know, a lot of other online auctions. Bring a trailer or if you don't have 500 pictures, you're not going to get a listing. You know, if there's not, you know, 37 pictures of the undercarriage, someone's going to be like, there's rust in the spot, I know it. And just hamper your entire auction. I find that interesting because you said back before I was driving and I was looking for my first car and you're checking Craigslist and that. Back when you were checking Craigslist, I was in college for a, this was 95-ish. I was in college for my modern automotive technology degree and had a teacher, a professor, John Thorpe drove a 86 Dodge, not Dodge, Chrysler laser in the purple over gray, real cool car at the time. Still a few years old at that point. He said he wanted us to do a paper using the internet because he really felt the internet was something that was going to catch on and become important. You haven't lived a day of your life without the internet, right? Not really. I can tell you. It was probably 14 or 15. I think when I really got into quote shopping for cars. Yep. And for me, it was this thing called the trading post. They were 50 cents. They were, you know, 40 pages long. They came out once a week, either on Tuesday or Wednesday. They, nothing but classified ads printed on newsprint. That's what they used to print newspapers on those really young listening to the show. And there was always a section. The trading post was always the cars and you'd go, you know, model years and you find the model. There was no, I want a Dodge ramp page and, you know, typing it in and they just all appear. Now you had to look through all the 82s and you had to look through all the 83s and you had to look through all the 84s. And then you had to go to the truck section and look for all, see if it was in the trucks. And then if it wasn't in the trucks, then you'd go to, you know, custom vehicles or on classified vehicles. And it definitely was a different world. And you say you go to eBay and there's six pictures in one paragraph. The trading post was one picture and 20 words, anything more than 20 words cost you 10 or 15 cents per word. And one of those words was your phone number, probably seven digits at the time. And you called the phone number and you made an appointment and you go, you know, you go see people kind of like, I guess, Craigslist people do and Facebook Marketplace people do. But you actually went and met the person. It's not like you made the appointment and didn't show up. Yeah. Every now and then you miss an appointment. It wasn't the ramped when I was something on Facebook Marketplace now. I sold a couple of filing cabinets and I gave them away. But the catch was if you wanted them, you had to send me PayPal me $10 to make the appointment and I would give you $10 on the spot when you came back. And believe it or not, I got three or four people to do it. I'm not going to stand them up and keep their 40 bucks. You know, so it helped guarantee that people would show up. Yeah. And of course, the first person bought them, blah, blah, blah. And I refunded everybody else their money. It's definitely changed a little bit. I went from this trade in post thing to 86, 87, I guess. It was that way for me until I bought this thing called the Web TV, which access the Internet and eBay. eBay really wasn't there. I spent a lot of time on the CRX discussion forums and there were cars for sale. And, you know, you go to your discussion forums and these were things that were line after line after line of how do I change the distributor on my CRX? And then 40 different people reply. And then there's another topic. And if you didn't check it every day, you'd lose tons of information. They were horrible on searching and things like that.

13:47 John But cars would pop up for sale on there. And then I guess, you know, I do remember by 98 when I moved to Kansas, I was doing the eBay thing. What do you remember about those early days of eBay other than five pictures in a paragraph? Is that really your first introduction to online car buying? Yeah. Yeah. As far as just, well, that was more just like window shopping, dreaming. You'd go on eBay and you'd be like, all right, let's look at E30M3s. Let's look at a 70 Camaro Z28. And it'd usually be somewhere you'd look at it and be like, oh, this is some sky high price that no one's ever going to pay. But it's just kind of putting it out there. There was that. And then I actually my 3000 GT VR4 that I have currently, the previous owner, I think, bought it on eBay in 2008 or 2009. And he had like printed out what the listing looked like. And it was, yeah, literally five pictures, a short paragraph. And they're all just, you know, horrible photos from nowhere near the car at all. And it's funny trying to imagine guessing at the time what the paint condition was and what the interior was like and the engine bay. And you really have no idea, much less, you know, an undercarriage picture to see if it's rusty or what. When he do you know when he bought that car on eBay, was this a car he was buying out of Nevada or Iowa or Mississippi? Or was it still reasonably local that he could go look at it before he purchased it? I would say it was a little too far out of the range of looking at it. It was probably like four or five hours from Buffalo where he lived and where I live. So he definitely, I don't think he looked at it at all before buying it. And I don't know exactly what he paid because, you know, he took a picture when it was still showing reserve not met. Because that's the other thing with eBay. As soon as the auction's over, you just have the screen showing the car, maybe what it sold for in one picture and then all the description and that is gone.

15:49 Bryan Unlike, you know, a lot of brand trailer auctions and other similar websites today. I haven't looked at a bring a trailer auction recently after it's concluded. But I remember back on eBay that you wait even after it was concluded, you go back and search and the whole listing was still there. I'm sure I'm thinking 2000, 2001. But I'm sure now that would be just so much data for them if they kept every listing from eBay for the existence of eBay, that'd be 28 years of data. That's one of the big things I remember when I would get on eBay back in 98 and I would get on eBay every single night and had my computer in one corner of the living room and my ex wife would sit on the couch watching TV. Probably one reason she's my ex wife and I would go through every single listing under Lotus buying all this collectible Lotus stuff. The opening page on eBay would be we have over 2 million items and then it was we have over 2.5 million items and 2.9 million items. Now I probably could go search Lotus and there'd be 2 million items in Lotus alone instead of the entire site. It was, you know, to me, it's interesting how it grew. I mean, I bought a lot of stuff on eBay, but I don't think I ever bought a car on eBay. I lusted after a bunch of cars on eBay. I did bid on, I know I bid on the 1976 Chevette Woody that was on there. Oh yeah. And I got out at $4,700 and ended up selling for like $6,100 or something like that. Low mileage, 1976 Chevette Woody. I thought that would be cool. That was just my introduction to, you know, internet shopping was eBay. I didn't even think Craigslist was around at that point. We were going to swap meets and you mentioned Hemings Motor News. And, you know, Hemings originally started out as a magazine for Model Ts and Model As. And then somebody had the radical idea of let's expand it to everything. And in its heyday, 95, even 2000, you know, it's a 400 page book you got every month and nothing but cars for sale. You know, now you get it and it's 200 pages maybe. And half of it is color glossy magazine articles. And nobody lists their car in Hemings anymore because it was, you know, it was always a process. I'm going to sell my car. And then you take a picture and you write your description. And again, you're buying it with one or two pictures are listing it. Even if you did that, I think a picture cost extra. Or you could buy an eighth page ad or a quarter page ad or a really, really fancy people could buy a full page ad. And you describe the car. And then, of course, you get a phone call and you discuss it. And then maybe you could go look at it or you get a buddy to go look at it. And everything's done by phone and, you know, digital cameras. I got my first digital camera in 98. So not everybody had digital cameras at that point in time. Email pictures. So you had to wait for, you know, regular pictures, but you list the car. You send everything into Hemings. And then three months later, your ad comes out. I don't even know how you could wait three months. I mean, right now I had a buddy today post. He's a realtor and stuff. And he put his many countrymen up for sale. And within six hours, it was sold. Yeah. Yeah. If you had even done the trading post, you would have decided, oh, I'm going to sell it. Come up with your ad. You got to wait a week for it to come out. You know, there's none of this six hour sales. And I had another friend sold his Mustang GT in two hours. Put a post up on Facebook. Hey, I've decided it's gone. Another friend. And it's really odd. He's got some interesting cars. And he put his. Now, it's a really rare car. And he was looking to be the exclusive importer of this little sports. Or Zenos or Zenos. Yeah, I know. And he had like the first one in the country. And he popped it, you know, finally decided it's got to go. He's got a Rivian SUV, clear up some garage space. So he sold that. Again, he just said it on Facebook in the morning. And by early afternoon, somebody had bought it. And now he's done the same thing with his Lotus Elise. Okay, this is what I got. This is the condition it's in. It's pretty cheap because it needs a ton of work. Three hours later. Now, it's everything's instant anymore. It's just incomprehensible. And you grew up with the Internet. So I don't think you even can you even comprehend the idea of waiting three months for your car had to come out or waiting a week for your car had to come out or instead now if you decided, oh, no, I need $15,000 tomorrow. You pop your 3000 GT up on Facebook or something and pop probably have it tomorrow as opposed to I really I really need the money in 48 hours. But this ad is not going to come out for three months.

21:32 John Yeah, cars are a lot more of a liquid asset now, you know, collector cars probably than they've ever been. But yeah, nothing nothing good really lasts on Craigslist or Facebook for more than a day or so. I think I bought my my ninety nine forerunner I have right now that I saw posted. I think it was posted 30 minutes before I saw it and it was a good price. And I just immediately called up the person who was selling it. It was an older gentleman. And I'm just like, yep, I'm going to come and look at it.

22:01 Bryan He's like, wow, that was that was quick. I'm like, oh, yeah. You can't hesitate. I mean, I think we were talking when we were talking a little bit. And I told you, you know, I had this ninety seven Jeep Cherokee. I bought that on Craigslist and it was one of those things I had been looking for a winter car to drive instead of my lowered S10. And, you know, I just popped it on Craigslist call on it. Oh, get right over there to buy it. I think it cost me eight hundred dollars. I had to put an exhaust on it. I had like thirteen hundred bucks into the whole thing. Austin brakes and thing ran great. Sold it from spring rolled around. Probably should have kept it. Sold it to the woodworker at the restoration shop. I was working at an e-drove it for years. I bought my CR my silver CRX off of Craigslist. And that was another one that CRX is even at that point, whatever that was. Two thousand five, two thousand six. I'm really sitting here thinking, boy, I did end up buying a lot of stuff. I listed when I sold my Europa, I listed it on. Remember, it was Craigslist or eBay, but ended up I was in D.C. and I ended up selling it to northern Pennsylvania. And that guy's done a gorgeous, fabulous restoration to that car. Took him five years to do. But we've obviously stayed in touch. But got my catering. My ex-wife sent me something off of a Lotus Forum. Ironically, it might be the same Lotus Forum that was founded by the guy that we just talked about. Son of a Zenos and his Lotus. But, you know, she sent me this thing with the kind of a joke statement. And I told her a couple of days. I think she told me about it on Monday or Tuesday. And I said, I think Thursday I flew from D.C. to Fort Lauderdale to look at the car. And, you know, you said, it might have been a four or five hour drive, just a little bit out of the, you know, I've always believed that on the Internet, you know, you've got to go look at it. And if you don't have time to go look at it, I for years worked with a national company when I was doing appraisals and that. And I did a lot of pre-purchase inspections for people that didn't have the time to. You're looking at, I don't care if it's a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand dollar car, or if it's a twenty thousand dollar car. It's worth three hundred bucks for somebody to go look at it. Independent third party to go look at it. Because twenty thousand, the guy spending twenty thousand dollars, that's a lot of money to him. The guy spending two hundred thousand dollars, that's still a lot of money to him. I don't care how much money you have.

24:42 John I always believe in the pre-purchase and checking out all this stuff online because. Sure. Where did you where did you say you found your three thousand or did you? My first one I got on Craigslist and that was I had my Saturn for a few years at the time. I had a 2002 Saturn SL1 that my uncle gave me because it broke on him. Something pretty minor and I fixed it and that was the that was my first car in a beater. But I kind of got to the point where I was in my second year of college. I had saved up a decent amount of money just working in like a warehouse in the summer. And I just I didn't really want anything particular, but I kind of just kept an eye out for whatever popped up on Craigslist. And that was my first one was he was a 94 SL five speed came up. And I think it had been on there for a while at six thousand dollars and they dropped it to forty five hundred bucks. And that's when I saw it. And like that day, I kind of went and looked at it. Didn't even really know how to drive stick. So it was more learning how to drive stick on the test drive at the time. But that was a good car. And that's where that one came from. The second one was found in a much more old way because I just heard from word of mouth that someone had one that they wanted to sell. I had sold my SL and about a month later I heard that from some other gentleman in the ACA that had had a 91 SL that he bought new. That's a super clean car. He's like, yeah, one of my friends went to buy some old car parts from this one guy and he saw in his garage that he had a Dodge Stealth and two or three thousand GTs. He didn't really know the trim or the condition or anything about him. But he just told him about it and ended up giving me the contact information. And it turned out to be a perfect car that I was looking for. But I don't I don't know how many cars sell from his word of mouth or someone's like, yeah, maybe I'll be ready to sell it. Yeah, you know, for the right amount of money before I put it online. I don't know how much of that there is anymore unless you're someone you're really close with.

26:38 Bryan I think there's a lot more of it than we're aware of. And that's where the deals are had. I've had opportunities. Yeah, go do appraisals and go do it on a collection that the family is looking to get rid of. And then they've got that information. OK, now I know what a fair price is. And they they hint to a couple of friends that, you know, always said, hey, I really would like this car. I really like that car. You just just always keep your ear to the ground. It's like my sixty two Chrysler. It's for sale. I don't have it advertised anywhere in that. But if the right person hears about it and calls me up, gives me the right number, which isn't a lot of money if anybody's interested. It'll go just I haven't got around to listing it for sale anywhere. I think there I think there's a lot of cars like that that people just don't know. They're either too old to list. They don't comprehend. They don't want to deal with it. It's I'll get around to it. They tell somebody and it eventually lands in the right lap. It's like I think it's Derek's peerless is, you know, he was sitting at home or maybe he was at work not doing anything and got a phone call. From a collector who was looking at this collection who said, hey, I'm standing here in front of this car. I don't want it, but it'd be the perfect car for you. And, you know, that's how Derek ended up buying his this collector restorer was contacted. I'm not using any names. I can't. I think Derek's used names before. And, you know, pretty famous guy in that. And but he knew this is was up Derek's alley and it was probably going to be in Derek. Maybe he knew the price, you know, be Derek's price range. I don't know if this gentleman knew Derek's budget or not, but it would be the perfect car, you know, down. Derek owns it. And there's a couple other cars and, you know, even Derek's collection that he's gotten through word of mouth as opposed to, you know, finding it online or whatever. I think people started to grow a little bit comfortable with eBay and that. But I still think there was some hesitation. Craigslist kind of went its own way. Facebook Marketplace got popular. But now you get on Facebook Marketplace and you look up something and all of a sudden this, you know, 2023 Corvette ZO6 is a, you know, you can pick it up for three grand. You know, there's so many things listed like that or, you know, fishing, hacking, scamming stuff. Facebook really needs to patrol. That's a whole nother conversation for something else. But but what's really got me irritates me. I used to go to this website and I don't know if you did. It might have been when you were, it would have been, you would have been a teenager at the time. Did you go to bring a trailer prior to the auctions?

29:43 John Not quite. I was like just in the time of when they started their auctions, probably around like 2015 or so. But it still was like half the website was them posting links from Craigslist and eBay. So had a little bit of that.

29:57 Bryan So, yeah, they when they first started, they had four or five cars for sale. Then they and then everything else was like you said, links from they literally were cars that you needed to bring a trailer for. Now, they're cars that you literally need to bring a trailer for. But they're perfect examples as opposed to the worst examples. Yeah, it's a brand new Corvette. Someone's flipping or something like that. It's amazing to me how that site has exploded. I've sold a few cars through bring a trailer for clients. And that was pre pandemic. I haven't done anything post pandemic, but I've got a scheme going on right now. To me, it was OK. There were 20 cars and they would post, you know, put up 20 cars every other day and 60 cars to keep track of. Now they've got what 300 cars at any given time they're selling. And, you know, I just heard an interview with Randy and they did over a billion dollars in sales last year. They just sold their hundred thousandth car. The 240 bring a trailer on 240 that they sold was 100,000 car listed on bring a trailer. I mean, it's absolutely exploded. It's nothing like it was before. And I really miss the old bring a trailer website. I wish somebody could bring back that. I can't remember. There was another one that they never went the auction route, but I get the daily email and it was those Craigslist posts and things like that. Yeah, there's like a barn finds dot com. I think that's what I was thinking of is barn finds. And of course, Chris Harris has started his auction site over Allah bring a trailer over in Europe. Obviously, we can buy here, but most of his cars are primarily European and Doug Demuro Miro on YouTube. He's got cars and bids that he just took 30 million dollars of VC money. And I just heard an interview with him why he did it and things and it just made it easier for his life to manage the business and things. And now all of a sudden he's popped up that he owns his dream cars, Porsche, CGT. These sites, I mean, the money that people are paying for cars that they don't see and the archive that's being created in, you know, you post your car and then experts on that car comment on that car and previous owners of that car comment on that car. And what's his name? Vin Wickie. Oh, I can't think of his name, even though he's not selling cars. I mean, Vin Wickie, I know is a YouTube channel, but Vin Wickie is actually an app, which is a Wikipedia of VID numbers on exotics. And what can be done with that and comparing it, you know, using it to search cars on bring a trailer or cars and bids or I can't remember what Chris Harris's is called. And, you know, you can go in there and you enter the VIN number and then you can find out, well, it was on bring a trailer here and then it was on eBay here and then it was at this dealer here. And, you know, it's a good this. What's your feeling on it? Is the information that's available to the consumer or the buyer that much better that people are more comfortable spending the money or is the quality of car or have the sites that you're going to buy?

33:46 John Or have the sites become that trustworthy or people just back careless with their money now? What's your thoughts? Yeah, it could be a little bit everything. I remember the name. It's Ed Bolian. That's the that's the guy's name. But yeah, it's definitely a combination of it all. I mean, bring a trailer. It's even besides, you know, the money thing self run there. It's crazy how just useful the resource it is for anyone just looking for a car. I mean, you can go back through their old auctions. They have it plotted out the sale prices and things that didn't hit reserve. And then every car that's on there is still on there. So you can go on there and look through hundreds of pictures, read all the comments. You know, a car gets posted. People are immediately like, oh, this car didn't meet reserve at Mecham Auctions like two months ago or something like that. And particularly with like a lot of it's become a big thing with imported cars like our thirty four, the final generation Skyline GTRs. There's a lot of them that have got posted on there. And then within, you know, I don't know, the first day of auctions, you'll see people come in and be like, this car was like salvaged and every single body panel on it was changed out from this Japan auction sheet. And they post the link to some form page of something and everyone's like, whoa. So I think it is a place to be pretty comfortable knowing there's a week and that, you know, sometimes the comments can get pretty, you know, pretty vicious if in particular situations. So it does seem like a pretty comfortable place to buy a car. But I think people are also careless with their money. There's there's definitely that. I mean, it's I remember one of the big ones that stuck out to me is I don't know if it was like probably twenty twenty one. There was like those eighties Toyota Corolla's they call me, you know, the eighty eighty six. Mm hmm. There was one of those and I think it's still one of the highest selling ones in that site. It sold for forty grand and I had like one hundred fifty thousand miles. It was like visibly rusty. And it's one of those you look at and you're like, why? Someone's like, oh, I'm going to restore it.

35:43 Bryan I'm like, well, OK, you're going to spend one hundred thousand dollars restoring one of these. It's like. It's crazy. But people definitely get out of hand and you look at some of them were like, oh, it was just a bid between three different people for half the final sale price of what it was. And that's one thing I do like about bring a trailer. And I assume the other auctions have that. And that's the if there's a bid in the last three, what is it, three minutes or something, the auction gets extended and gets extended. I had a snipe program on eBay. I'll be honest. It got to be you had to have a sniping program on eBay to to win anything worth a damn because all the good bids came in with three seconds left. And I always petition eBay. You need to be able to extend the auction. And they might have picked up a little bit there. But you're right. That's the community that's on bring a trailer and watches that and passionately handles it and. No, you know, knows the cars. The problem is, of course, you get the one guy on there that thinks he knows the car and he can totally screw up somebody's auction on a legit car. There's something to be said. And I mean, it gives the auction companies a big run for their money. And that's another thing that's changed. I interned at Barrett Jackson in the early 2000s in Arizona. And at the time I was doing it, it had just it might have been the first time I did it. You know, first time I did it was 2000. And I think they they started broadcasting Barrett Jackson in like 98 on Speed Vision. That and starting to televise Barrett Jackson, I think helped explore, explode and increase collector car values. And of course, they did it at the right time with the home prices escalating. And I always called, you know, the blue chip collectibles, the Ferrari GTOs and McLaren F1s, the 250 Narts Maserati birdcages. They've always been there. They're dues and dues and burks. But you saw a real solid buildup of muscle cars and that. And the people were going, well, that people are coming in, you know, coming of age. I mean, they're turning 50, they're retiring. They're also just about paying their house off or the equity in their home has went up. And I always call them home equity cars because it wasn't such a big deal to borrow. You know, I don't take another hundred, you know, borrow 100 grand against the house to buy this car. And I think that helped inflate the prices. And then, of course, everything collapsed and everything came back. But as you know, Barry Jackson, you know, just just every January for two or three years, and then they would have another auction televised, then another auction televised. And now. You can't turn on Motor Trend TV a lot of the time without having, you know, a meekum auction on or something. So I think televising of the auctions is helped. It's sure a different world to buy a used car. But what I guess I'm going to say, I think it's a little bit odd. One thing eBay did is they proved rare things aren't rare. You know, it's like the is it the blue label or gold label or something? Disney VHS tapes that prior to eBay were just tremendously expensive. And for the first few years of eBay, they were expensive. But then it got to be the point. You can always go on eBay and always search for them and always find a whole collection. So they weren't rare. They just immediate circle of 10 friends didn't own them. And when you saw, oh, I got to have these and did the same thing with whatever the little glass figurines. I can't think of what they're called or certain Emmet Kelly clowns, say. I mean, it's just massive production. But you only got one friend who's a clown collector. I mean, so that's rare or something. And eBay, you know, eBay did that with all all these collectibles. But with all these online car auctions and ways to buy a car and listings. I mean, you can get on and you can go to Country Classics in southern Illinois, just outside of St. Louis. I can't think of town starts with an ass. You can go there. He's got a thousand cars any time, always a cool dealership to drive by. And it's been hit by a tornado in the last five years and burned down in the last five years. But he's still got this massive inventory and now he's got carports almost over everything. I guess I don't know what that's going to do. This is expecting a hail storm. I guess where I'm going is even cars that we thought were rare and have turned out to be there everywhere. They're still increasing in value. I mean, how many twin turbo Supras? I don't care if you're are out there and people are paying crazy money for how many. You know, you see in my world, you see a low mileage CRX for sale. And then it turns out, guess what? There's another one with fewer, you know, fewer and fewer and fewer miles. I have yet to see a zero mile CRX for sale anywhere. But 10,000, 15,000 mile CRXs are pretty common now. I would think that would hurt the value. What was it? The Integra Type R. And it actually sold at a physical auction for $141,000 and blew away the record price from bringing trailer. And I'm sitting here thinking I could have bought one of those things for $23,000 brand new. I mean, I was sitting in the thing at the, you know, on the Acura lot back in 02 when they were new.

42:03 John It's opened up this world of buying cars. I'm going to ask you the question. Got to get you more talkative and comfortable learning how to shut me up. Has it made the world a better place for buying cars? It's made a little tougher in a lot of cases. I think, you know, you'd see one car that has a good result. I think what you're talking, there's like one, the first like low mileage condition, anything to come out of the water work. It'll have some crazy result. And then everyone in the comments like, oh, I'm going to up my policy on my classic car insurance. And then you got everyone thinking that their car that's not nearly in the same condition or not the same rare color trim level or something along that thinks their car is worth way more. So it does. It does make it tougher for cars be affordable in a lot of cases, especially more attainable stuff. But I think in general, it probably makes more cars survive. I think, you know, people see these large results and they're less likely to be like, oh, this car is not worth anything. I'm going to scrap it. I'm going to not care about it.

43:09 Bryan So I think in that aspect, it's made things better. But for affordability, it's it's made things a little tough. Do you think with what you just said, I don't know the answer and I don't know how I would answer this question. So if you say, I don't know if the circumstances were the same economically, if we did cash for clunkers now with this explosion of all this online collector car stuff, as opposed to doing cash for clunkers back in 07 08. When we did it, do you think it would be as well received as it was? Do you think a lot of the cars that were turned into bricks of metal, I mean, turned in turned in as clunkers would have been turned in? I mean, the guy that turned in the Buick GNX as a cash for clunkers car. Do you think it might have prevented that car from being killed?

44:17 John Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think there was a lot of stuff that hadn't quite reached the age of being collectible from like the 80s and 90s that definitely was killed off by that. So I, I think for sure that'd be highly unlikely. Now, I mean, I could see a lot more mundane things, you know, being turned in now. But, you know, I don't think it'd be anything that I would really miss, you know, another 10 years down the line. But for sure, you're saying things would go way different. Kia Rios and Cavaliers, Kia Rio, Nissan Altima, you know, something more regular rental cars. Yes. Yeah. Fleet vehicles, for lack of a better term. I think there's so many more. Yeah, there are so many more like just rare, obscure vehicles in the 80s and 90s, like one year only performance versions of cars like, I don't know, an Azusa Impulse RS Turbo. I don't know if you know what that is. Absolutely. I'm a huge Azusa guy. They made them one year and they probably were all just winter beaters in the Northeast. And by that point, everyone's like, well, I get $3,000 for this. I'll just turn it in. I don't know if it's a problem with the driver. It's too much of a pain.

45:29 Bryan But stuff like that, I could definitely see being much more likely to be preserved now. I think people are just a lot more passionate in general about cars like that. It's much, I guess it's much easier to go, well, I've got this Azusa Impulse RS Turbo. The government will give me three grand for it. What's it worth? And now you can search it and all of a sudden it pops up on Bring a Trailer. I paid for it. Oh, wait, I got $38,000 for one on Bring a Trailer. Mine's got to be worth $45,000 even though it doesn't run. The tree's laying across it. It's like every used car at the very end of January, beginning of February, is priced what it sold for at Barry Jackson. Of course, some of the Barry Jackson prices aren't becoming really reasonable on the Monday, Tuesdays of the auction. Kind of covered a lot of scope today. There's a lot of, the world has definitely changed on used cars and used car availability and the knowledge base. Go back 07, 08. Podcasting was only three years old. I mean, there weren't really podcasts. There weren't. YouTube didn't. When did YouTube come out? 2008? Yeah, that sounds about right. So there wasn't all these car things on YouTube. And, you know, we talk about it from cars. I'm sure this explodes into everything else from Teddy Ruxpin bears to knitting needles to, I don't know, I want to say looms or farm equipment. I'm sure this conversation, you could just replace some of the stuff we've said with whatever collectible you're into. You know, it's definitely changed a lot. I know what I think. As a kind of ask this question, you said it made it a little bit rougher. I think it's changed things for the better. Yes, the prices are up there. They're exaggerated. You've got to have, you know, stupid monies being paid for some things. At some point, maybe some sanity will come back to this. I also think insane money was being paid before. It just wasn't as public. Yeah. So I'm going to go back to November 1993. A gentleman in town where I used to live got his 93 Viper. Oh, November 1993. My dad got his 94 Viper delivered a week before Thanksgiving. Let the dealership keep it for two weeks to display it behind ropes. Then he took delivery of it. The same week he took delivery of it, a guy in town got his 93 Viper, bought used, you know, 100, 200 miles on it, paid a hundred grand for it. You know, he drove it a little bit more than my dad drove his. He drove a hell of a lot more. But he paid, my dad paid, got a discount off sticker because he was such a regular customer at his Dodge dealer. Got his car three weeks before this other gentleman bought his for almost double stickers. Sticker on the cars were 56,750, I think, at the time. And, you know, my dad's car is still in the family. People were paying stupid money for cars back then. You know, there was always the first car I remember stupid money is the Buick GNX and my best subscription to AutoWeek. And the number of them that were in the back was zero miles. And I can't remember if they were 50, 35,000 cars for 50. I think that had to be it. 25 or 30,000 cars and people were asking 50 and $60,000 for them. And that's what they were worth for 30 years. And they finally got a little bit of a bump. That's the first car I remember big money being paid for. Then the Viper and the original Corvette ZR1. And it seems as we've went on more, you know, we had an episode a year ago about adjusted markups from dealership, which now everything has. Oh, yeah. I think the whole story there was saying, I think the stupid money has always been there. It's just I've always said expense is proportionate to income. And the way I break it down is if you make 100 grand a year and you drive a $50,000 Lexus, if there's such a thing, even a $50,000 used Lexus, you've spent 50% of your yearly income on your transportation. If you make a million dollars a year and you go out and you buy a $400,000 Ferrari… Buffet, I think. You've only spent 40%. You've spent less of your yearly income on a car. Yeah, that's expenses proportionate to income. The more you make, the more you can spend, and less of an impact, really. Ferrari, I still got 600 grand to buy a house and eggs. Lexus, I've got 50 grand to spend for a house and eggs. You've really made me think, and when you pop that topic up to discuss, that's a lot of… There's a lot of change there. The funny thing is prior to the internet, we bought and sold cars basically the same from 1920 to then. We bought and sold cars differently from the time they were new to about the 20s, because the 20s, cars were one of the first things after homes to be able to be financed officially on a big scale. So that changed the way you could really buy a car.

52:00 John Probably Henry Ford's doing and being able to… That's why he did the $5 a day wage, as he wanted his employees to be able to afford his car. Do you have anything to add to this, since it was your topic and of course dominated? Not really. I have noticed things are settling down on that front a lot, especially when you look at like how to bring a trailer

52:22 Bryan once you start getting to like the cars and bids, Doug DiMiro's site. Things are selling for a more reasonable price, generally speaking. You think they're selling for more reasonable on Doug's site as opposed to bring a trailer just because Doug's site doesn't have the following yet?

52:37 John Yeah, I think there's just a different group of cars people look for on that site. I know his is it's 80s and up, 80s to brand new, but there still is several hundred thousand dollar cars. But at the same time, if you're looking to buy, I don't know, a used like 10 year old Golf GTI, Civic Si, Subaru WX, you know, more common, attainable stuff. What I see prices list for on like marketplace, things like that. I'm like, why do people still want so much money for that? And you see what they actually sell for like, oh, OK, that person just has way too high of an asking price.

53:10 Bryan Well, there's that's something that's always been the same. Yeah, there's the asking price and there's a selling price. Yeah, the the no low ballers. I know what I have. It would be nice. And that's something I think Vin, Vin Wiki does. You're able to track what the car is sold for, not what they asked for, what they actually sold for. And that's something obviously bring a trailer does too, is this is what it sold for. And I think that's why people really like buying their cars at these collector car auctions is because they're selling for just about what they're worth. I always believe a car is worth the second highest bid. Yeah, I think we'll wrap it up there. A great time chatting with you tonight. And I guess I'm out of here.

53:59 Gary Yeah, sure thing, John. Same to you. OK. This show was a part of the No Driving Gloves Network produced and edited by John Viviani, a Magic City podcast with voice work by Gary Conger. So until the next exit. We'll see you then.