Car and Classic

[GTK]

 

Always found Car and Classic[.co.uk] a great place to keep up with the classic car market, reference marques and models and generally comb through whilst daydreaming about whatever car is tickling my fancy from one week to the next. The site has been acquired by someone and they've obviously got plans to grow it and it's business because they've been buying ad space on Instagram [if not elsewhere] and emails have been landing in my inbox for a while now, where before I'd never heard from Car and Classic at all. The latest is a message offering an investment opportunity in the site or parent company. 

Don't have any opinion on it either way only to have a small worry that it'll change in some way, but I thought the cross section of interesting cars they included at the bottom of today's email was actually interesting...

 

[LotusLeftLotusRight]

I've been checking it on and off since it started. The problem I have is that it still looks and functions like it did back then. Rubbish search facility, limited number of small and often distorted photos, now all intermingled with annoying e-Bay ads.

Take the "era" search facility. If the production run of car you're looking for straddled two decades, you have to search twice. I just find the site very primitive and frustrating. I don't know how it got to be so successful with such little investment.

[GTK]

The answer to that is because it was/is honest. That very lack of functionality has been almost a benchmark for the true classic car guy because you weren't going on there unless you were either desperate to buy or sell a classic car. 

You're right about the search, and the annoying ebay ads, but I never even consider those things until you got me thinking about it. Had gotten used to them as I suspect all the other users had. They're the compromise you make for access to a large classic marketplace that is pretty much devoid of spam. Yep, you need to make sure your cursor isn't going to stray into the ebay ads section while you scroll down, and that's a pain, but that ebay section is even better than a direct search on ebay. It somehow collates every current ad whilst ebay's own search somehow won't throw up all current ads for a specific model.

This is what I worry about, if they make it all slick and [relatively] easy to use, it'll probably just fill up with dickheads flogging modern alloy wheels and rubbish air fresheners, ad nauseum, if you'll pardon the expression 

[LotusLeftLotusRight]

One other Carandclassic memory involved a private seller of a Jensen Interceptor. It was autumn 2017 and the vendor was about 100 miles away, so I decided to take the whole family along for the weekend and we booked in to a local Premier Inn on the Saturday evening, with the viewing booked for the Sunday morning. I called him from the hotel on the Sunday morning and he told me that it was no longer convenient, because he'd forgotten that he had to go to his In-Laws wedding anniversary party. He might be back late afternoon though. I told him to forget it and we just drove straight home.

We'd wasted the best part of the weekend and a couple of hundred quid on travel and never even got to see the car.

Turned out for the best though, because I bought a Ferrari instead!