If you’re even slightly enthusiastic about cars, it’s nearly guaranteed that you’re familiar with the online auction site Bring a Trailer. What started as a small website run by enthusiasts for enthusiasts has brought the auto auction biz into the limelight, complete with knock-offs, true competitors, and even buyouts and acquisitions. It all adds up to a banner year for Bring a Trailer, which celebrated its third consecutive year passing $1 billion in annual sales.
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Big winners: The top five most expensive listings of 2024 total $13.5 million
Bring a Trailer sold a number of big dollar vehicles throughout 2024, but at the top of the heap is a 2022 Bugatti Chiron Pur Sport. With a $4.1 million final sale price, that Pur Sport handily surpassed its original MSRP of $4.07 million, which included $371,300 in options. The big B handily dominates the top two spots, with the aforementioned Pur Sport and a 2018 Chiron selling for more than the other three top-price cars combined.
Bring a Trailer
A bigger winner you won’t see on that graphic is Hearst Autos, the company that scooped up Bring a Trailer just five years ago for several undisclosed millions of dollars. That said, the site’s original vision is still very much intact. Randy Nonnenburg, one of the site’s founders, still serves as the site’s President. Is that all that remains of the old BaT?
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Bring a Trailer’s early years focused on auctioning vehicles that literally required a trailer
It wasn’t always like this. Bring a Trailer began as a bunch of friends highlighting cool and weird finds on the internet. Eventually, they branched into “BaT Exclusives,” which was a dedicated marketplace area of the site. After listing nearly 1,000 vehicles, many of which actually required the buyer to bring a trailer to pick it up, the site expanded to include “BaT Auctions,” which largely exists in the format you see today.
Part of the initial pitch for BaT Auctions included a curation process. To quote the press release from 2014: “We select only the cars we’d want to own ourselves, and those offered at realistic prices.” While that’s still mostly true, it’s easy to feel that the sentiment rings a bit more hollow when you’re talking about million-dollar Ferraris compared to, say, a busted and rusted C10.
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Bring a Trailer occasionally still means bringing your own trailer
But BaT still lives up to its name, even ten years on. The site says they listed over 600 vehicles they consider “projects” in 2024, including a tank, locomotive, and an alloy-bodied Lamborghini 350 GT. Admittedly, the top five sellers combined barely pass $700,000, hardly making them the site’s bread and butter.
Bring a Trailer
And it’s not at all just factory-fresh vehicles dealers are trying to flip or make a buck on, either. Most cars on the site hail from the 2000s, according to the site. In 2024, the most listed model years in order of volume were 2006, 2004, 2007, 2008, and 2005.
Final thoughts
It’s hard to find an honest buck these days, but Bring a Trailer seems to have done a pretty darn good job of it. The service still exists to serve the enthusiast community, its fee structure has remained almost completely unchanged since its introduction, and it still curates what gets listed.
With over a million registered users and just-announced plans to expand into Europe, the future still seems bright for BaT. They’ve earned it.
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