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85 P-type for $17,350 on BaT

1K views 4 replies 5 participants last post by  pdupler 
#1 ·
#3 ·
The BAT people are insane I wouldn't use them as a bellwether for anything. Almost everything on there sells for 4x what it would anywhere else just scroll thru the completed auctions there. It seems like almost every car price is through the roof nowadays. I saw this one posted on another site;


$15k for base model car that needs tens of thousands in work to be presentable just has me scratching my head.
 
#5 ·
You are so right. I bid on a car on BAT a few weeks ago. It needed about $2000 worth of paint repairs but you couldn't see in the online pictures the horrendously huge chunks of paint that were missing and had been touched up or the cracks in the paint from a previous repair on the right rear quarter. The driver side window would roll up completely out of the door if you didn't let go of the button (and had taken a chunk out of the A-pillar paint). The power seats were non-functional but that wasn't disclosed either. But the worst thing was that every time I stepped on the gas, it would hesitate pretty bad before it would get going. I didn't have time to do any diagnosis but rather had to assume that it could be something pretty expensive. They had posted a video showing the car driving and talking about how wonderfully it drove. Well, you couldn't tell from watching a video that the engine hesitated at every start. You had to drive it to feel it.

I figured I was conservatively going to have to put another $5,000 in it to get it ready for next car show season. I was actually going to be OK to pay a couple of thousand over value because it was a very rare car, one of 200, it was here, now, local, I wouldn't have to fly anywhere or ship it and frankly I wasn't going to have to eat ramen noodles for the next year if I paid a couple thousand too much. But sure enough, I logged back in the last 30 minutes to see if I would need to bid again and the bidders had already pushed it all the way to what it should have been worth if it had been as presented. I sure wasn't going to pay top dollar plus $5,000 in repairs. And the seller admitted to me, that I was the only one who'd come to see it and I saw it the morning of the day the auction ended because the seller hadn't responded to anything over the previous weekend.

My uncle ran an upholstery shop doing low-quality work. It was literally in his business plan that having a sofa re-upholstered is not something that people purchase very often, likely once in a lifetime, therefore it was pointless to try and do high quality work in hopes of getting repeat business. Rather his business plan called for continuous heavy advertising touting low prices to bring a constant stream of first-time customers. My mom on the other hand ran an upholstery shop nearby catering to the wealthy and even famous people likeTerry Bradshaw and many of our local sports figures wives and she relied on wealthy women who redecorated every few years. My uncle became very wealthy while my mom did just OK. I kind of would like to get a peak at BAT's original business plan. I wonder if it explicitly states like my uncle did that there are plenty of gullible people in this world with enough money to gamble, and that it wouldn't matter if a few got burned because they only ever buy their dream car once and probably never going to bid on another classic car again anyway.
 
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