Caradise Project Car: Cars & Bids Said No, eBay Sucked, so now what?

Our Caradise Project Car – The 1986 BMW E30 325e, Manual, coupe, continues to happily run after one last batch of fixes. However, our selling attempts fell flat hard this last week.

As you recall, we finally had completed our mission and gotten the car smog legal. Nevertheless, our plans to auction the car at Cars & Bids fell thru, as the car was deemed to rough in ‘appearance’ – One man’s patina is another man’s rough looks. Despite promising to use a decent photographer, and to be honest, the car photos look way better than in person. Is a good Instagram car.  The paint is original and the patina is too. Other than that, the car runs better than ever.

Still last week, the AC stopped working. No blowing at all after a hot day of working well. The guilty party was the blower resistor. So I sourced one and did the work to replace it. With success! AC finally came back, the repair went well, so now we are ready for the hot summer weather.

Also, I took off the cluster, to do some repairs. And managed to get one of the 2 cluster lights to work again and stop the flickering on the oil pressure light. That, plus finding 2-3 blown fuses that needed replacement made the effort worth it.

When did eBay became so bad at selling cars? I remember it being somewhat capable to sell a car as a last resort.  I’m not sure if this is a consequence of the specialist car auction websites stealing the best examples away, and FB Marketplace eating the rest. But eBay is not what it used to be when you need to auction a car.  We put our project car there. 10 days, we paid eBay $70… and all we got was 10 bids and $2,275 was the best offer….

This was so embarrassing:

So, what’s next? I ruminate about painting the car to complete the restoration, but that would be money I’m not getting back in a sale. We’ll sell it on CL and FB Marketplace, but if not sold by June 30th, then we shall bring it to #Radwood!