Enthusiast car paradise is going through some trouble right now. This week, popular Doug DeMuro-founded auction site Cars & Bids laid off a substantial chunk of its workforce, with moderators, business development team members, accountants, and human resources all affected.
While a litany of online car auction sites have launched over the past few years, Cars & Bids is one of the few that seemed to break through the noise, gain real traction, and attract some semblance of stability. So what’s going on? While the true situation and reasoning will remain sealed behind boardroom doors, a deeper look into things paints a picture of an injection of cash, an enthusiast car market returning to Earth, and the possibility of reduced revenue.
This comedown arc seems to start in January 2023, when private equity firm The Chernin Group invested $37 million in Cars & Bids. Seeking investment can be a double-edged sword because, on the one hand, founders want to be rewarded for their work, but on the other, outside influence may not want to take things slow and steady, and may be looking for quick returns. At this point, the collector car market was starting the decline towards some semblance of normalcy following the bull market of 2021 and 2022, but it still had a way to fall.
At the time, Cars & Bids was averaging around 25 auctions closing each day, and while auction fees from that sort of churn can easily support a small crew if vehicle valuations are high enough, that number was going to have to increase in order to grow the business. Roughly 14 months later, Cars & Bids managed to increase daily auctions by a few units, not quite breaching the 30 auctions per day mark in early March. At the same time, the industry saw a shift in more vehicles failing to meet their reserves, and since Cars & Bids relies on buyer’s fees for revenue, it seems that some restructuring ended up taking place.
In March of 2024, Cars & Bids alumnus and Autopian contributor Alanis King replied to an Instagram comment, stating that “Unfortunately, Cars & Bids gutted its content team with no warning. I appreciate that you enjoyed my work there.” Along with King and several other team members, last year’s restructuring extended all the way up to CEO Rogelio Choy, who also parted ways with the auction site in March.
Flash forward to Feburary 2025, and daily closings on Cars & Bids seem to have slightly declined over the past two years, with many days in February falling short of 25 auctions coming to a close. What’s more, we aren’t seeing the same sort of craziness we saw in early 2023 when the capital injection happened. The days of flipping brand-new Rivians on the second-hand market are firmly over as people who bought at the top of the market don’t want to sell and lose money, and people who like what they have are more likely to hold onto it.
DeMuro elaborated on this during a recent episode of the Iced Coffee Hour podcast, stating:
End of ’21 was the absolute peak of the craziness, which is when all those COVID shutdowns had really stopped production of new cars, or heavily diminished production of new cars, and so used cars had gotten incredibly valuable, and at the same time, money was cheap. And so used cars were becoming more valuable, new cars were not available, people were getting incredibly low-interest loans, it was Thunderdome. We couldn’t put reserves on cars high enough. People would come in, ask for crazy reserves, we’d give it a shot, it would sell every single time, it was just crazy.
Things are different now. The supply and demand in the market has certainly caught up for most automakers, I would say. Some automakers are still in an undersupply situation that’s carried over from COVID and they’ve never dug out of it, but a lot of the automakers have caught back up. So new cars are cheaper now, capital is more expensive — getting loans is harder, more expensive to finance cars — and so that has made new cars cheaper, which in turn has pushed used car prices back down, and the market is considerably different now. We still have people clinging to values [from] two years ago when they’re submitting their cars, and it’s like uhh, there was a time, but it ain’t now.
As a result of the market swinging back towards normal, we’re seeing a lot of reasonably priced cars transact on Cars & Bids. While this is good for buyers, it means a whole bunch of cars aren’t even coming close to the 4.5 percent buyer’s fee cap of $4,500, and that likely has an impact on revenue.
For instance, Cars & Bids moved around $380,625 worth of sheetmetal on Feb. 11, bringing in what I estimate to be roughly $17,128.13 in buyer’s fees. Flash back to Feb. 10, 2023, and Cars & Bids moved roughly $627,742 worth of cars, good for around $28,248.39 in buyer’s fees. While the cyclical nature of the market makes it hard to directly compare dates, that’s a big swing in a relatively slow part of the selling season, and an overall market decline could be a key reason for the latest round of layoffs. While growth mentality might play a role here, there’s also a possibility that Cars & Bids may also be dealing with lower revenue.
When word of these layoffs hit, we reached out to Doug DeMuro for comment, and here’s his official response:
Cars & Bids is making changes to our organization to better support our buyers and sellers. Sometimes those are difficult decisions, and they never come easy — but we’re confident that the best is yet to come from Cars & Bids.
At this point, we’ll have to wait and see what the future holds. If the enthusiast car market continues to depreciate and Cars & Bids can’t compensate for that with significant additional volume, the online car auction landscape might look a bit different.
Right now, my thoughts are with the employees who were downsized, as working alongside enthusiast cars often requires passion, and having a steady gig involving something you’re passionate about disappear is gut-wrenching.
(Lead photo credit: Cars & Bids)
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Since he sold out to private equity, I’m sure he doesn’t have much say in the actual day to day
Yeah, my guess is Doug is there as the spiritual leader but he isn’t the boss and probably only has some say in decision making. Still, it sucks to hear this and I hope Cars and Bids continues on. They may have to start charging listing fees again, like they did in the beginning, but undercutting BaT by a bit. I think having both sites is worth it, especially since C&B is focused on the more recent end of the market.
It’s not just the enthusiast car market. Revenue is down everywhere for companies that sell stuff to people, both ecommerce and retail. People are just not spending money right now.
I hope Doug got to keep his Ford GT and Carerra GT and Lamborghini Countach.
Ah…private equity/venture capital! There really isn’t much needed to say beyond that nugget in the opener. “Give us XX% ROI or else….the else is up to you, but you know what you have to do.”
“THIS….is corporate restructure, and today I’m going to take you on a tour of the first corporate restructure for Cars & Bids, and then I’m going to take it out for a test drive, adter that, I’m going to give it a Doug score.”
Don’t forget to go in depth about the many quirks and features of PI.
The new Doug’s contract won’t allow him to do that. My guess is since C&B’s listings have dropped that the PE guys are not too happy (boo-hoo) with Doug, but since Doug is seen as the public face of C&B, they’re kind of stuck with him. The online car auction business model also doesn’t give them much room for improvement. The best the PE guys can hope for is to copy BaT, but C&B has already established itself as the low rent BaT where there are less clicks. More importantly, there’s a BaT community for many different car models or manufacturers that C&B has failed to replicate.
I’m guessing Doug exits as soon as his contract is done, does a teary mea culpa video, and says he just wants to get back to his roots, so he starts buying hoopties to review. I think his brand equity is way less than it used to be, but he has his millions so I don’t think he really cares. The other scenario, which could happen soon, is he sticks it out with C&B, right up until the PE guys pull the plug.
Collector car markets have always been cyclical, so it’s no surprise we’re entering a down period.
I always liked C&B because it was a respite from the BaT crowd who just wanted to flaunt how much they paid, and featured more normal and/or accessible cars. But the last couple of years, it sure seems like they have chased the higher end. That obviously gives them a higher return, but has really driven me away from the site, so just like BaT, it just doesn’t draw me in like it used to. If I want to see interesting cars now, I’ll look at the auctions on Hemmings
It’s funny, I’m actually thinking more about buying a classic car now. I’m afraid to dump cash in investments; I know nothing about that, so I’m thinking rather than have my cash continue to lose value in the bank, I should buy a squarebody Chevy or similar that is likely to only increase in value.
I missed bidding on a sweet squarebody Burb on BaT last week, I kind of regret it.
Keep your money in the bank.
Probably sound advice.
Check out Sports Car Market. Hugely interesting auction recaps. Recent issues show a good part of the audience for that squarebody is…uh…”leaving the marketplace,” so “only increase in value” is unlikely.
good news!
I don’t have any social media and the Autopian is one of three sites I visit regularly, so I didn’t know about Alanis till this moment and I’m bummed. I’ve always had this impossible dream of the whole band being back together under the Autopian banner, though. I’ll even swear off bothering MH to let me work on the (software side of the) site for twel… Six months if Alanis joins as contributor or editor.
I feel pretty lucky that Autopian is and continues to be a going concern with so many of the people I liked and respected from The Old Site, and it feels special that even the ones not on staff come around anyway (can you really call it a car site without Puffalumps?).
While I view C&B’s content offerings as distinct from the actual product, I have to say that Doug’s friends don’t make for interesting content. Alanis was and is awesome, but can’t stand the rest of his crew. I think the real challenge to differentiate C&B is how to detach itself from Doug and grow beyond his audience….
That said I love Doug.
Dougs friends are absolutely boring. Id rather see him make videos with Hoovie and he isnt that great either.
I am really bummed by this news. I enjoy Doug and C&B videos, and the C&B team seemed pretty good. I am often browsing and commenting on C&B and even applied to work there (DODGED THAT BULLET!).
I their case, the massive influx of cash mixed with the used car bubble pushed them to grow too fast. When it popped, the finances didn’t quite make sense anymore. I once heard a quote in business school that went “you cut to survive, but you can’t cut to thrive”.
I really don’t blame Doug for any of this. It seems like the business had to cut to survive. I really do hope that C&B continues and even grows. My heart goes out to all of the folks affected by the layoffs, as that is a scary thing in any economy.
Venture capital strikes again. They really are vampires sucking the life force of anything they touch dry and leaving the undead sites to wander the bowels of the internet. Bummer indeed.
What exactly did the VC’s do that was so evil?
They gave a bunch of money to the owner(s) of a fledgling business, so that the business could expand and try to take on the market leader. This did not work out, so the owner(s) of said business are laying off people, trying to get their fixed costs under control while the organization is still financially solvent.
Damn vampires! You’re evil and are ruining the world! How dare you invest in businesses, but not continue to throw good money after bad when a business fails to grow? Bloodsuckers!
The PE guys were dumb, dumb, dumb. $37 million for a site that auctions 20-30 cars per day? OMG was that dumb.
Plus it’s obvious that a late starting competitor like C&B was never going to seriously compete with BaT. I’ll bet that BaT pays almost no attention to what C&B does.
why are you and many others acting like this is the nail in the coffin for cars & bids? layoffs happen, scaling back does not mean theyre done for good.
I wish C&B nothing but the best and hope that there are no more layoffs. Also kudos to Doug to building a business and cashing out.
However, the money C&B is making on 20-30 auctions per day is not going to give the PE guys the return they’re looking for. This is just a math issue for the Chernin group that owns C&B. They have stakes in many companies, and if there’s a long term sub standard forecast in the returns for C&B, they’ll move on. I’m sure they’re evaluating their portfolio and deployment of capital all of the time. Maybe they had visions of challenging BaT, but I think it’s clear that C&B is never going to. It’s really not a good situation for the people who work there who didn’t get millions like Doug.
It is the nature of the world. Not everything ends up roses, but Doug took his shot which is still better than 99.9% of the population. It may weather the coming financial correction, but there will be more blood spilled before we get into a growth cycle again.
Doug is in the “don’t meet your heros stage” He went from a goofy guy who does good reviews and jumped into the deep end of business and now is on that side.
It happens, and I don’t begrudge it. Make that money boo boo, someone new will come along soon.
Doug’s PR statement is sad.
You can almost see the leash around his neck.
So, so bad. I can’t believe “unlocking value” wasn’t in there.
So the bid for a Ford powered kit car of the Ferris Buhler Ferrari is $62.5k?
Methinks the floor is yet to come.
Juat learning now that Alanis and Doug has parted professional ways sometime back. Always thought her YT channel is like an offshoot/spin-off of Doug’s or Cars and Bids’s respective channels.
A while back Alanis alluded to her departure on a video and was vague about it. The vibe I got is that she was better off on her own and had more creative control. She seems to be doing well and watch her videos all the time. The C&B in-studio vids, not so much, as I cannot relate to the rich fancy cars stuff and don’t have much interest. I do like the car spotting videos though.
So will we be getting a video on the Quirks & Features of accepting Private Equity money?
As someone who has been adjacent to and in the startup world for most of my career, the only defense to the investors, private equity or not, is to be inextricably linked to the future success of the business. The safest is to have really valuable intellectual property that you control tightly, but being too valuable to lose(e.g. Sam Altman) or having retained enough ownership control to keep yourself safe are also options.
These situations are usually not the case, and once the suits get involved the visionaries and creatives find themselves on the curb.
I do appreciate the very sincere response to my complete non sequitur. But yeah, I was a few years at a startup that was going from seed to series A rounds and it was fascinating to watch. It wasn’t massive PE amounts of injection, but boy did the owner keep a tight leash. I hated him, but I’ll give credit – he was the product’s designer whilst leading the rounds and maintained enough control to still be in the driver’s seat
luckily for Doug, IF cars & bids were to fail and get completely taken over by the suits, it was never what truely defined him as a content creator.
I bought a car off Cars and Bids in late 2023. The current economic market has me completely spooked, and I will not be buying anything new or used until 2029 at the earliest. I’m very good at spending cash when times are good and equally good at hoarding cash when the economic outlook is f***ked
I didn’t really follow behind the scenes but dang that sucks. The way it was presented was Doug wasn’t all that keen on running a business so had the investors come in that supposedly were, giving him a big payday so he could buy his Porsche and Countach. Should’ve realized when that all went down and they ditched Alanis and brought in his 2 BMW bros there was shennanigans afoot.
I did always kind of see BaT and C&B as the Uber/Lift version of Mecum and Barret Jackson’s limousine style services. Yeah it may seem more accessible, but not the same.
Never heard of it, but the name lacks creativity.
Is that a quirk or a feature?
Doug Dimiro plus PE was just a ticking time bomb. Not sure how much room there is in that space in any case. It seems like the legacy guys keep on going. It was ultimately a tech startup they appeared to have some higher operating costs that headquarters couldn’t have been cheap. It seems like alot the YouTube guys are downsizing or getting out right now. I guess money is drying up.
Clearly “bummers” means very different things in English and American.
I just spit my drink a little
Same thing with “rodder.” Ask an American and you get the answer “An old guy with a shiny old car.” Ask a British or Northern Irish person what that is and you get uh…
Service personel?
Not that vulgar. It’s like the British version of “Twink” except with more “girls love gay guys” mixed in.
THIS….is your last day at Cars & Bids.
HARSH! (But funny!)
Someone had to say it. Surprised no one else did yet!
You just made my day!
THE ARMS ARE MOVING SO QUICKLY IT’S JUST A BLUR!
The moment “private equity firm” gets mentioned you know it’s going to be a story about bad decisions and people losing their jobs.
I don’t begrudge the founders for taking the payday, but you are so very right about what types of storms follow the private equity winds. The only very slight silver lining is the possibility of the private equity firm losing money. Not that they care; it wasn’t their money anyway.
You should begrudge the owners
Screwed over their workers to cash out themselves
I don’t begrudge the begrudgingly either.
I have worked for small businesses and start-ups, and if the ownership was honest with people about taking private equity and spent a meaningful amount of it to hire people, it is possible that everyone got at least some of the PE money.
The entire business might well just not be viable; it wouldn’t be surprising. Whether the owners were bastards or not isn’t completely clear. If further info shows that they likely were. I have no issues bringing a whole truckload of begrudge to the town square..
I’m not sure the business model of plowing that much money into a car auction website
Theres lots of competition, the market really is limited (private sellers and buyers willing to put up with the time and risks involved in that kind of transaction, limited availability of desirable cars, etc)
I’d guess most buyers and sellers don’t want to deal with any of that, hence why used car dealers stay in business.
Craigslist/marketplaces for junk cars
Automated auction sites like eBay for normal cars
BAT and consignments for rare things.
Just looks to me like Doug realized that and cashed out to some rich chumps. He does have an economics education.
Yeah. I have never watched a video by Doug. Three words in, and I need to turn it off. His voice is genuinely like nails on a chalkboard. So I have zero opinion on his content of him personally. I know I dislike the Tavarish, Hoovie, and Ed folks that seem to be in his orbit. It all comes across as vapid and more about buying and selling than anything else. The terrible Top Gear attempts are just cringy.
The auction site always felt like a strange effort. I don’t know the business model, but it seems like the only way to make it work would be to keep upkeep costs to an absolute minimum and be a bit selective in what you take. That helps ensure you are making the best use of the labor you are paying. So often the issue for a startup comes when they try to ramp up to capture every potential bit of action and end up needing to support an infrastructure built to support peak demand that is very rare. Which means that for 95% of the time they aren’t making the money they need to make.
Whether that happened or not, I don’t know. If it did, whether it was out of true hopefulness or because the owners wanted to make it attractive to a PE group so they can cash out I don’t know. It sucks for the people that lost their jobs for sure. And as is typical in this country, the owners and PE folks won’t get hurt a bit.
Not to mention incessant twirling of his peyronie-fingered hands. He did a review of Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, and the car swayed a lot while he talked and twirled his hands (try playing this video at 2x speed…).
I’m getting nauseous just thinking about it.
This was very well said. Hoovie is one of the first people I have unsubscribed from on youtube.
Unrelated: I tried to re-read A Confederacy of Dunces recently and couldn’t get through it. The protagonist really reads like a proto- neckbearded incel and I just couldn’t get back into it.
He is that, there is no doubt. I love absurdist fiction. It is able to hold a mirror up to the ridiculous nature of humanity. Confederacy of Dunces was a book in a long time that reminded me of Candide, which I loved. I also like storytelling that splits human nature into various characters to reflect our internal conflicts. Dunces also reminded me of stuff written by Twain.
I watched a couple of his videos early on, before he really blew up, and they always felt like someone reading a script of generic/popular opinions about the car. Other people’s opinions.
Like he wasn’t reviewing a car but reading off highlights from Wikipedia, car forums and actual auto journalists.
The vapid stink of “influencer” I guess, before the term got popular.
And the early format of “this dealer let me borrow a car for a couple hours to promote themselves” only allows such a shallow test, which only further confuses me about his popularity.
Probably some data sales going on in background to help the bottom line, like every other company these days.
When the words “private equity” come in it’s like the trope of the one character who’s had no development suddenly talking about how much they love their wife/husband and kids. The death brand has been placed upon them.
Ah Private Equity
Sounds like corporate greed backfired and the employees get left with the cheque.
How much did Doug get out of the deal, I wonder.
$37 million, I believe