KR200 on ebay

[Bob Purton]

I'm sure it did really sell but I was thinking that a seller could still arrange bogus bids even behond the reserve and if it stopped on one of there 'arranged' bids they could wait a fortnight, declare it an unpaid item and get away with just paying the insersion fee! The more one thinks about it the more one realizes how open to abuse ebay really is!

[P50]

Looking at the questions posed there was much interest. This was (will be) a kosher bonefide sale.

Supply and demand drives prices north. If you want a decent morris minor then you wait 3days.  Want a schmitt? You'd be lucky in 3 months.  Might be a year..

Ebay is to blame for all this.  So taking the above into account you'd be mad to sell a decent car as how will you get another? Too much of a risk..

This all perpetuates the cycle.  Apply this logic to a P50 of which 18 real ones are left and you do, to use modern US parlance, 'The Math'.

Ho hum..   


One last thought,  fossil fuel's never going to be cheap. Our contraptions whilst having filthy emmisions pro rata per CC are very good to the gallon. Perhaps in a decade or two's time these frugal toys will be de-riguer even more due to tiny engines.  Food for thought... 

[Bob Purton]

I thought the posted questions were very suspect. e.g. " Ive got a TG500 four wheeler, very rare blar blar, make sure you dont let it go for less than £15K" who would write in such a 'question'? I can see why a dodgy vendor would. Maybe I'm get too cynical.

[P50]

I thought that. But plenty of other questions appeared honest.

Lets keep eyes peeled for pos feedback. Early,Mid teens for a Schmitt appears to be the norm. Bummer if you aint got one. If you're selling good news. If you're keeping utterly immaterial...  I'll be buried in mine.

[Rusty Chrome (Malcolm Parker)]

The car is worth whatever someone wants to pay for it, but unless you happen to be the vendor (or the purchaser) there is no way to tell if this car sold. All you can say for certain is that it was listed on ebay and the bidding went to £13650. Anyone who owns a similar car can point to the auction to show that their car is worth at least that and anyone who wants to buy one will think they've got a bargain if they can find one for less than £10000. Because user id is protected, you can't even tell if there were more than two bidders involved. Ebay isn't to blame, it's still a very useful tool for finding lots of obscure stuff. As long as money is plentiful, storage space is available and cheap reproductions of popular microcars aren't available , prices will go up. If only the Tata Nano had been a Messerschmitt lookalike!

[Bob Purton]

You make an interesting point about how thankfully there are not plentiful replicas on ebay to muddy the waters. This really would screw up the market, I know because this is exactly whats happen to the field that is my depressed livelihood. For decades I happily dealt in antique scientific instruments, you know , sextants, microscopes, telescopes ect ect. All my fellows smugly concluded that our market was safe from all the repros that were ruining all the other areas of the antiques market because these instruments were complicated and would be far to expensive for anyone to fake wholesale, there would be no money in it. One day about fifteen years ago a crate turned up at Portobello road full of repro sextants, I use the word repro loosely because they were not a faithful copy of anything real, some old boy in Bombay have made them from imagination, This was the opening of the floodgates, they now make astrolabes, equinoctial dials, reflecting circles, you name it!  Now if you look up antique sextant on ebay I assure you that 99% of them are school of Bombay and many being offed as genuine antiques by either liars or people that just don't know the real thing from the scrap. The result is a well and truly stuffed up market where the punters are so confused about it all they have just stopped buying the stuff. Sorry to rant so about things not microcar but can you see what happens when replicas fall into the criminal hands of the masses, lets hope the peel situation stays under control!

[blob]

My sentiments exactly, I keep banging on about replicas but I

[P50]

A copy Monet is worth pennies to a true collector.
When there is not enough to go round of an item prices shift. If proper monied overseas types become aware generally and get wind of the really rare stuff then indeed say bye bye to seeing it as the NMR show. It will ALL gardually go abroad like fine art. Then probably come back in time..  England's a very rich island.

To build a rep of a micro would cost in most cases (not Peel) more than the real thing.  If something's cheap to copy and have huge intrinsic value then skulduggery will always ensue.  No rhyme or reason to desireability however..  Schmitts are worth more than Tro's or Zettas because (i think) they look better. Just like an S1 E-type's worth more than a S3V12 2+2.  

After all the hulabaloo about the just listed TG it raised shy of £20k. Which proves that whilst they're rare most puntas want a complete sorted example.

[Bob Purton]

I'm not opposed to all replicas though. For example I will never be able to afford a TG500 but I could build one up from parts and power it with say a Trabant motor, everything under the lid would be of my own design. This car would never be passed off as a right one and I would enjoy building it and enjoy driving it, I cant see any harm and neither can most, after all the Heather brothers were given a trophy for doing it at the last NMR. The greatest pleasure it would give me though would be that it would really wind up all the TG500 owners! Peels are a different story though, you could build a replica and if you could source the correct engine, leave to patinate for a few years and hey presto, one genuine peel!

[P50]

You'd be doing well to trick any Peel cognocenti with a rep. Devil's in the detail... Even the engine number's are unique to the Peel cars.   Mind, a fool and his money are easily parted!