Warning, this is a long post on my recent ‘Bring a Trailer’ experience, and a lot on the environment that led up to it.
Summary:
Overall a good experience, but not without plenty of anxiety
Background:
- 2 years ago my Son talked me into buying a 2000 BMW M Roadster, basically an ‘M’d up Z-3
- I bought this locally from a small dealer, the BaT purchase comes later
- I never really wanted a BMW, but I got spammed by my Son weekly with used BMW ads, for all kinds of BMW performance models
- I finally liked an ad he forwarded for a blue 2000 M Roadster. We went to look at it, I liked it, I bought it
- I have driven it for 2 years and I enjoy it. It was a decent deal, 137,0000 miles, ~$12,000
- Plot twist, my son liked it too. So much so that he went and bought one for himself. Similar age, mileage, cost.
Locally purchased M Roadster in 2020; not the BaT subject car:
BaT Training Ground:
So @Snakesm13 runs the BaT Games on Oppo. I tried to guess the winning bid on a number of them. It’s humbling and it helped me track and understand the dynamics of the BaT bidding process. BaT has a great ‘results’ page that you can search and see what similar cars have recently sold for. So you can assess the market pretty well. There is some science of course to assessing how good or bad an individual car is, and all the amateur and professional subject matter experts on that particular car weigh in on the comments section on BaT, and love to share their opinion on that particular car. And then of course there is the complete randomness on how much bidders are willing to pay for said car.
My Experience with the M Roadster:
I like the M Roadster fine. But I’m not really a convertible kind of guy. I bought a hardtop for it, but it is still a bit noisy and the Roadster body and chassis has a reputation for being a bit flexible. The M Coupe however has a reputation for being much more solid. It also sells for about twice as much as a comparable Roadster. So when I bought the Roadster, an M Coupe didn’t seem to me to be a reasonable value.
The Coupe also looks goofy. So much so it’s earned the nickname ‘clown shoe’.
I found I can experience the flexibility of the Roadster when parking in the very back of my driveway. The driveway starts to slope down towards my back yard, but on the side closest to the house it also starts to slope towards the house. So there is a three dimensional aspect to the shape of that part of the driveway. I didn’t notice the Roadster’s flexibility until I added the hard top. You clamp down the hardtop pretty good with the fittings, but it’s a removable hardtop so you hit a bump and you can hear it wiggle a little bit. No surprise there. But I found when backing into the back part of my driveway, I could hear the top move as I reached the critical part of the driveway. The suspension was taking up plenty of the pitch and roll, but the body was flexing as well.
Still not the BaT subject car. Just another photo of my M Roadster, but with the added Hard Top:
So at that point I accepted the lore of the Roadster’s flexibility is more than just myth. Which brought me to the thought that I could consider buying an M Coupe. It would drive even nicer. That coupled with my current state in the human life cycle. I’m not yet retired, but I’m pretty darn free of things you have to save for. My kids are grown up and have their own careers and houses. My 401K and retirement set up is pretty solid despite the 2022 Stock Market impacts. So if I am going to be buying any more fun cars now is pretty much a good time. Ten years from now I may not find it as enjoyable. Non car loving people refer to that as a midlife crisis, but I prefer to view it as a midlife capability.
My M Coupe preferences:
So my M Roadster is a nice blue; Estoril Blue BMW calls it. That is a great color. But I have one of those, so I don’t want another Estoril Blue car. I don’t want black or red for the usual reasons. I don’t really want another silver car. My GTO is silver and I’m not getting rid of it anytime soon. These M Coupes are sort of rare and the specific colors that I just threw out of consideration narrowed my choices even further.
I also don’t really want a sunroof. Most of the Coupes have sunroofs, so I’m furthering my rarity problem.
Also, the Z3’s have some basic, safe, interior colors, but they went a bit loud with the M versions. They tended to bring in the exterior colors into the interior. My blue M roadster has a blue and black interior, which I am okay with. But if you get a tan interior, it’s this weird light tan and beige combo. If you get a white M Coupe or Green M Coupe, they typically have the tan interior, and I don’t want that. So here I am furthering my rarity requirements.
Here is an M Coupe with the Tan Interior that I am not a big fan of:
So despite my picky requirements, in November, a 2000 M Coupe that fit showed up on BaT. Oxford Green, Gray interior, no sunroof, low miles, one owner, California car. I discussed with my son what would be a reasonable budget to stay within and shared the potential financial damage with Wifey. There are some scratches in the paint, but I’m okay with that. It’s a 22 year old car.
Yes, yes, finally, the actual BaT car up for auction:
The 2001 and 2002 M Coupes have the S54 engine instead of the S52. So this 2000 model is not ‘peak’ M Coupe valuable, as the S54 is more popular. But I enjoy the S52 in my M Roadster and was well aware of what I might have to pay to get the M Coupe, and how much more an S54 might be.
Researching the competitors:
Looking at specifically who bid on prior M Coupes of this price range I could see some appeared to be dealers and some appear to be private buyers. I made a spreadsheet of the last 5 sales and tracked who bid. You can internet stalk a bit on the bidders on BaT and see what cars they bid on and how high they chased it. The dealer participation intimidated me a bit at first, but then I figured they pretty much have to pay wholesale. They likely have to ship the car too, and then maybe spend some money on making the car perfect, so they can sell it for a perfect, or nearly so, retail price. There is also a 5% fee that the buyer pays BaT upon winning. So the dealers need to find a good bargain.
I am a retail buyer. I am prepared to pay a retail price. Although the dealers have much deeper pockets than I, I figured they would drop out before me. And they did. There was also a recent bidder that had bid on and won a Z8, for $250k. That’s way outside my field of play, so I mentally prepared myself that if he jumped in, and he really wants the car, I need to stick to my planned budget, accept the reality, and step aside.
Registering to bid:
So I picked the BaT user name ‘BadDecsisonsJohn’. There’s a slight tactic there that if a competitor bidder is contemplating another bid above me, he may have to live with the fact that he paid more than ‘BadDecisionsJohn’ decided to pay. Not sure that got me anything, but I felt at least it was a better tactic than the opposite path, going with ‘BargainBasementJohn’, or DirtBallBidderJohn’, and potentially shaming a competitor into outbidding me.
So, Nov 23rd, the auction closes, and I win!
https://bringatrailer.com/listing/2000-bmw-m-coupe-75/
On BaT when the auction gets to 2 minutes from the end and someone bids, they extend the bid for another 2 minutes. I decided that I wasn’t going to play the 2 minutes down to the last few seconds. I didn’t want an internet anomaly fouling my bid. So when I got outbid, I immediately responded. I don’t know if that helps or hurts, but it’s the way I did it. You also need to provide a minimum bid above your competitor. For my price range it was $250. When it came to the contest I just upped my bid to the nearest $1,000 each time. Again, I don’t know if that helped or hurt. But that’s what I did. I noticed that the dealers appeared to just put in the minimum bid. I expect they have their price point they need to stay within and just operate very mechanically up to it. It was stressful being a complete newb at this so I just stuck with upping it to the nearest $1,000 each time. If the auction has $10,000 more to go between two bidders and it’s all minimum bids that’s 20 bids from each bidder. I didn’t want to mess with that. Perhaps I could have saved $500 if I was more patient and more experienced.
My competitor did minimum bids and ran it down to the last 10 or 20 seconds each time. That was within the rules, but was a bit annoying.
Anxiety Sets In:
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Did I pay too much?
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Now I have to ‘wire’ a car purchase amount of money, to some guy I met on the internet
So BaT just facilitates the connection between the buyer and the seller. From reading others comments it’s still totally a ‘buyer beware’ transaction. I’m sure BaT would facilitate you trashing some seller’s reputation if they cheated you, but that’s not going to get your money back if you get set up on a scam. And if it’s a scam, the scammers are going to set themselves up to where they don’t care about their faux reputation getting trashed. None-the-less BaT seems to have a vetting process and a system that works well, and at least in my case it worked well. But still, I had plenty of anxiety getting through the process.
We have a local friend that has a car transport business so I went to him for the shipment. Although BaT will help set that up if you so desire. I wired the money to ‘the guy I met on the internet’, and the car got picked up. Once I got confirmation it got picked up there was a large sense of relief. If nothing else, at least I was going to get a car with a VIN.
The car got delivered to me in Atlanta, Dec 5th. It took a bit to get the emissions checked and the title done. But here I sit with the title, registration, and functioning BaT purchased car.
Summary:
Did I pay too much? For now I’m good with it. Apparently I was willing to pay more for this car than anyone else on the planet, or at least in North America. So from that measure I must have paid too much. But here we are. I didn’t compromise on my requirements. I was patient and waited for this one to surface. I like the car. I developed a taste for the goofy look over the last two years, and I plan to have a lot of fun with it.
<Looks at the 3 cars that I purchased on BaT>
And the 911 should help as well.
