Digital dismay

▶ It was chaos at a UK car auction the other week. Either the auction house’s usually very good website had gone down or the broadband to the site had. As per everything else in this world, the whole auction process is now digitally dependent. Buying a car was difficult for both the staff and us poor souls who had made the effort to attend the sale in person.

Yonks ago, only severe bad weather could kill a sale and it was generally to the benefit of those who’d managed to attend. Bad weather of not, the paperwork was always in order, so the sale went ahead. If you couldn’t make it, it was hard lines – or you’d try and find somebody you knew who was attending the sale.

Now of course, you cannot book a car in for sale, value a car, list, sell or pay for a car without using a digital platform. You can’t even drive the car out of the compound as it needs the barcode scanned. I suppose it stops mind-blowing blunders.

One that springs to mind was the event where an unfortunate auctioneer – who shall remain anonymous – had to sell a Vatfree minibus among the cars. Unaccustomed to such tackle, he glanced at the paperwork, so I’m told, and thought it was worth £2k. It was actually £20k. So, he thought he did very well dropping the hammer at £3.5k. The audience was puzzled by it all as we didn’t have commercial guides on us, but could instinctively feel something wasn’t right. These days of course, we have a range of prices available to us; from the book prices, to average prices achieved by similar vehicles in auction (with the accompanying sample size) and it takes just a minute to see what prices similar vehicles are up for online.

So yes, I got what I went for that day, but it was touch-and-go and rather frustrating. To think BCA Brighouse, Nottingham and Newcastle would post me their catalogues (sometimes with a breakfast voucher) a full week in advance of the sale. It’s hard to imagine that these days. All it took to buy in the analogue age was a nod of the head from me, and a scrawl on the paperwork from the auctioneer, a cheque to the admin team and a chitty to the yard man and you’d be on your way.