Bring a Trailer, an online auction site for collectible cars, owns a formidable internet presence. Boasting 45,000 auctions and total sales exceeding $1.5 billion in 2024, the site and corresponding app are basking in evident success. On any given day, the BaT site features an assortment of carefully vetted vehicles for sale that appeal to a wide variety of buyers.
You might not be interested in a 2001 Audi S4 with a twin-turbocharged 2.7-liter V6 and RS4 hybrid turbochargers, for instance, or a quirky 1990 FASA-Renault 4 Furgoneta. But for someone else out there, that’s their dream car.
When he started BaT, co-founder and president Randy Nonnenberg was an engineer for BMW. Nearly two decades later, Nonnenberg had undoubtedly reshaped the collector car world with his site.
Bring A Trailer: Grass Roots Beginnings
Today, BaT—through the site and corresponding app—has a solid command of its rotating for-sale offerings. However, it started off on the analog side.
Bring A Trailer was launched way back in January of 2007, when the online world of accessing information was a very different place. Facebook and Twitter (now X) were both in the process of going global, and the Kindle e-reader was launched that same year, with more revelations to come. BaT was right in the middle of it all.
“We launched the site six months before the iPhone debuted,” Nonnenberg observes.
It all started when Nonnenberg started finding special cars for friends on request. He discovered he had an aptitude for vehicles and a knack for sourcing, so Nonnenberg started a blog with a friend to feature the coolest car he could find that day.
“When I was a kid, I’d look at the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle and the middle pages of AutoWeek for sale listings,” he remembers. “I’d go to Barnes and Noble on my bike and read.”
The BaT founder learned how to use search tools on the internet to find what he wanted. Then he started scouring Craig’s List and other selling sites. About a year into Nonnenberg’s journey with BaT, potential sellers started contacting him to ask how they could list their car on his site. Teamed up with his friend Gentry Underwood, the two came up with what they thought was an honest and fair business model.
Leading Bring A Trailer With Honesty And Integrity
BaT was just a hobby, a side project for Nonnenberg until 2010. At that point, he quit his day job as a BMW engineer to see where BaT could go.
“BMW was my dream job,” Nonnenberg says. “I worked there from 2000 to 2010, starting right out of college. I learned about cars and the car business and was troubleshooting problems, which taught me a lot about customer satisfaction and sophisticated customers.”
That experience proved helpful, as he says 2000-2021 was a “golden era” for BMW. As Nonnenberg carried his passion for the German brand to BaT, he could ascertain which of the BMW models would sell well. The BaT president’s knowledge lent itself perfectly to that cross-section of the collector car market, and a commitment to transparency and communication filled in for the rest.
“It’s important on both sides of a car transaction for a buyer to be able to ask questions before and after the listing that lets the buyer know what they’re getting,” Nonnenberg says. “With a brand new car, you know what you’re getting. But if you buy a ’65 Mustang and it has 60 years of question marks, there are a million variables. Being able to get your questions adressesd is key. Before BaT, there might be a 3-sentence description and you’d go see it in person and there might be some uncertainty there.”
BaT grew steadily for 13 years before the company was sold to publishing juggernaut Hearst, which also owns car-related titles like Road & Track as well as Car and Driver. That doesn’t mean Nonnenberg is out of the picture. On the contrary, he’s still very much involved and actively helping to make the site better than ever. For him, it’s all about honesty and integrity, and he knows he is the face of that for BaT.
“A lot of people focus on how many millions of dollars go through Bring a Trailer,” he says. “There’s a real answer about why we’re different. If you just tell the truth, you’re doing 80 percent better than the rest of the competition.”