Bring a Trailer
Meet the man uniting dreamers with their dream cars: Bring a Trailer’s Randy Nonnenberg, the used car tsar
Iam cruising around San Francisco’s Mission District in the passenger seat of a ’72 GMC Sierra Grande pick-up owned by Randy Nonnenberg. With a four-inch suspension lift, blue plaid cloth trim and sunshine pinging off the chrome, it’s not only a beautiful piece of Americana but an example of a rare misfire on Bring a Trailer – the car auction website 46-year-old Nonnenberg founded with a college friend in January 2007.
‘We never bid against the customer, we don’t think that’s right, but this truck came up 5000 bucks short of its reserve, so I reached out to the seller afterwards and said I’d love to buy from you at the number you wanted,’ remembers Nonnenberg; $46,000 sealed the deal.
Plenty of stuff does sell on Bring a Trailer (or BaT for short). In 2022 the website racked up $1.35bn in sales on 25,000 vehicles, up from $850m and 18,000 the previous years. It has transformed the way cars, motorbikes and trucks are bought and sold, with curated auctions, a passionate community of over a million registered users actively encouraged to comment on lots, and even alumni (cars previously sold on BaT) invited to special events.
BaT takes five per cent from each sale – $250 minimum, $5k max –which isn’t bad for a sideline founded by two college friends more as outlet than business plan.
Growing up in Northern California’s Bay Area, Nonnenberg had supercar posters on his wall, but put his own cash into compact trucks like International Scouts and Ford Broncos. ‘They were cheap, the tops came off for summer, that’s what my buddies and I drove,’ he explains as his truck spins heads on 17th Street.
At 14 Randy got his first ‘fixer’, worked on it with his dad and ended up graduating from Stanford University as a mechanical engineer. He went on to work for BMW in the US for a decade but in the evenings he’d wrench on his own automotive projects and trawl classified ads. Randy describes the stuff he found as ‘schizophrenic’ – campers, trucks, sports cars, muscle cars, all sorts.
‘Looking for cars online and hunting for parts was sort of therapeutic to me, almost a neurotic tendency. Then my co-founder [Gentry Underwood] said it’s such a shame you do all that legwork, then close down your computer and do it all over the next day,’ he explains. ‘We wanted to find a mechanism to share that with other people. There was no iPhone, no Instagram, but you could blog and you could start a website, so we’d hang out every Wednesday and work on this little project. There was certainly no ma
