I field a fair number of “What’s this 2002 worth?” questions through my Roundel email address and Facebook presence.
When these are posted for general feedback on the Facebook 2002 forum, and when, reading between the lines, it looks like the person asking the question just picked up the car, doesn’t know much about 2002s, includes bad pictures, none of the undercarriage, no mention of the rust, and sounds like they’re looking to flip it… I’ll admit that I can get a bit curt in my response. I’m far more patient and sympathetic with folks who badly want to buy their first 2002 and are trying to learn what’s what. It’s still ludicrous to think anyone can value a car from a few cell phone pics without inspecting it in person.
My response to one such recent post was, “I know you’re looking for helpful information, but these kinds of “what might this car be worth” posts are rarely productive. People who don’t know enough or think the car is for sale and the seller can be lowballed throw out numbers that are too low, and people who own similar cars they want to sell throw out numbers that no one has offered them yet. Really, the only way to do this is to meticulously inspect the cars, determine if they have zero rust, minor rust, or oh crap rust, determine if the paint and interior are oh-my-god gorgeous, can be made presentable with elbow grease, or can’t-get-there-from-here, determine whether the dashboard and instrument cluster and seats all match the year of the car or whether some liberal parts swapping has been done, determine whether the presence or absence of a detailed engine compartment and undercarriage plusses the value of the car up into that of most-desirable, drive it and determine what mechanical work it needs, and then search Bring a Trailer and completed listings on eBay for what similar cars have actually sold for, and be brutally honest whether the car in question is, in fact, a “similar car.” ”
That having been said, a few weeks ago someone asked me the “what’s this 2002 worth” question and included a link to not one but two round taillight 2002tiis.—a Malaga ’72 and an Agave ’73. As soon as I clicked on the link, I realized that these were, in fact, the same cars that I had answered the question about on Facebook above. Now, I could see them in their actual auction context with their descriptions and all of their photos.
It was an estate sale in southern Virginia for what was listed as “Historic Estate of the Bell Family – Dublin, VA.” Civil war memorabilia was mentioned prominently, but the description featured “Vehicles include two antique BMW sedans, one 1973 and one 1972.” The estate sale had an online auction format. The descriptions were short and clearly not written by car people, much less vintage BMW people. Not only were there no undercarriage photographs, but there were also none of the fender bottoms, rocker panels, or rear shock towers. VINs were included, and in this big web-enabled world of small communities, searching for them led to posts on bmw2002faq.com from the deceased owner. There weren’t many, but “jimmyb” sounded like an affable guy. Auction terms listed a stiff 19% fee to the winning bidder and some restrictive removal requirements.
As the fellow requested, I looked at the descriptions and photos and sent him my feedback on the two cars.
The Agave car’s auction description was “VIN# 2763817: color Green. Does not run. Clear title present. Air intake missing, damage to right front tire. Undercarriage shows rust. Buyers are encouraged to come and see in person during the preview. Odometer reading 77,893. Actual mileage unknown.” It was then amended to include “NOTICE: POSSIBLE BACK SEAT AND TRUNK FLOOR BOARDS LOCATED AND WILL BE INCLUDED WITH THIS LOT. SEE last two pictures located on lot number 773.” (Lot 773 was an assortment of BMW parts.)
Looks kind of like my tii Louie, if Louie was a ’73.
Incomplete non-matching interior, tired and incomplete engine compartment.
My comments were that the paint and chrome looked tired and faded, the car had the correct spaced-out bumpers and pointy front bumper overriders for a ’73, the tires were all flat but were mounted on correct rare 5-inch-wide 2002tii-specific steel wheels, the center console was missing but had a VDO gauge pod on the badly-cracked dash, the car had a “snorkel” nose (a nose from a carbureted 2002) indicating collision or rust work, the engine compartment matched the tired condition of the exterior, and the likely re-upholstered front and rear seats didn’t match the tobacco door cards. The fact that the car had a title was a big plus, but the combination of the three-word description “undercarriage shows rust,” the complete absence of any photos of said rust, and the fact that the car did not run created a boatload of risk. From a logistical standpoint, a long-dormant, non-running car with flat tires is a pain to purchase. If you can’t get a roll-back flatbed tow truck within winching distance, loading the car turns into a project all its own that’s difficult to execute with a rented U-Haul trailer.
The Malaga ’72 was described as “VIN # 2762386, two-door, Red color, garage kept. Starts and runs. Body in good condition. Paint is good. Interior is in good condition. Radio is missing. Issues with the clutch. Odometer reads 23,653. Actual mileage unknown. Uses gas.”
This one looked more promising.
I liked the look of the interior.
Tidy engine compartment.
To me, the Malaga car was far more interesting and appealing. I commented that the paint and chrome appeared shiny, and the interior generally looked tidy, original (including the desirable chrome seat hinges), and complete, except for the console missing the radio and the ashtray. The few small cracks in the dashboard looked minor. It had the correct close-in bumpers and flat front bumperettes for a ’72 2002. The engine’s metal intake plenums threw me at first, as most 72 tiis have black plastic intake plenums. I remembered that, according to the original parts books, in ’72, they started with the black plastic plenums and the 121 head, switched to metal plenums and the E12 head, switched back to plastic/121, then switched back to metal/E12 and stayed there. Looking at bmw2002faq, I believe that the VIN of this car makes it fall into the latter category.
However, a collector would be very disturbed by the fact that the car was apparently originally Golf (yellow), as verified by the sticker next to the VIN tag and the yellow paint showing between two other decals on the underside of the hood.
Busted.
Busted a second time.
But the oddest thing was the presence of two posts, amalgams of metal, rubber, and hose clamps, proudly standing between the flat sections between the hood latch bar and the firewall. I could not tell what these were, what they were for, or how they were mounted. I wondered if they were some sort of hood pin mounting, but I could find no photos online of anything similar.
What the heck?
The other side.
The fact that the description said the car ran was certainly a plus, but the fact that it did not say “clear title present,” as was included in the description of the Agave car, was concerning. “Issues with clutch” could be as simple as enough brake fluid has leaked out of the reservoir that the level fell below that of the clutch line shown on the right side of the reservoir in the photo above. I’ve gotten leaky clutch hydraulics on dormant 2002s to work well enough to drive the car up onto a U-Haul trailer by filling up the reservoir, taking a cardboard box full of newspapers under the clutch slave to catch the spill, and opening up the bleed valve to run fluid through it. What “uses gas” meant, I didn’t know; maybe it leaked fuel. A minor issue was the slotted steel wheels the car was sitting on, which were from a big-bumper square taillight 2002. Original 5-inch tii-specific steel wheels as the Agave car, had would’ve been far more desirable.
So, my advice to the fellow who’d contacted me was that the titled Agave car possessed less legal ownership risk but more condition risk. In contrast, the Malaga car was clearly in far better condition inside and out and even ran. However, it had non-trivial risk from the lack of a stated title and the odd under-hood post-like objects, and its value was capped by its visibly apparent color change. I also added that, if it were me, I wouldn’t bid more than four figures on either of them without visually inspecting them personally or having someone I know and trust look at them. If he did get to inspect them, I advised looking at the usual 2002 rust spots (both sides of the frame rails, shock towers, rockers, floors, attachment points of the rear subframe under the back seat) and on the Malaga car, to see whether yellow paint was visible in the trunk, door jambs, and bottoms, and under the dash.
Of course, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t think, “Wonder what it would take for me to get down there, inspect them, and bag and drag one of them home?”
I thought about the logistics. Dublin VA is about 710 miles from Boston, about an hour further south than Roanoke, on the I-78 to I-81 route I’ve run over a dozen times going to The Vintage. I used to run down to Winston-Salem in a day, but now that kind of mileage totally mashes me into the ground and would be worse in my lumbering Nissan Armada tow vehicle hauling a rented U-Haul auto transporter. The description said that the 2002s could be inspected at an open house preview on Sunday, February 9th, from 1 to 3 pm. The auction closed the following day at 6 pm, with 10 lots closing every 3 minutes. Payment was specified as cash or cashier’s check. It was the “item removal” description that was toughest: “Pick-up times will be assigned in alphabetical order following the auction. PICK-UP DATES AND TIMES ARE FIRM. THERE WILL BE NO OPPORTUNITY TO PICK UP ANY ITEMS AFTER THE SCHEDULED REMOVAL DATE” (emphasis theirs). It seemed like driving down there, inspecting the cars, waiting around until the auction closed, then again until my assigned pick-up time, and then driving home would realistically be a four-day commitment if everything went off like clockwork. Nor was there an easy way to do things remotely, as even the running car reportedly had a non-functional clutch, and contracting for shipping of vehicles in “inop” condition gets complicated.
So I let them go, as I do many cars whose logistics don’t satisfy my left brain.
But I kept the page open and watched the auction. I believe that the day before the auction closed, the high bids for the Malaga car were about six grand, less for the Agave car.
After the close of the auction, I checked on the results and was surprised:
- The Malaga ’72 car (the pretty shiny running one without a title and a functioning clutch and with the color change) sold for $15,000 ($17,850 with a 19% winning bidder’s fee).
- The Agave car (the tired-looking, non-running one with a title, a snorkel nose, and “has undercarriage rust” in the description) sold for more—$16,500 ($19,365 with a 19% winning bidder’s fee).
So, as Flaky Foont asked, “Mr. Natural, what does it all mean?”
My mantra of “ignore every online valuation guide—to know what a car is really worth, you have to look at what cars in the same condition actually sell for” does have some holes in it. My impression is that values on Bring a Trailer tend to skew high if a car has a powder-coated or vapor-honed undercarriage that gives it the impression that it’s a finished product, causing two moneyed bidders to get into a bidding war over it. It doesn’t mean the same car is going to bring that if it’s posted on Facebook Marketplace. Conversely, I think that imperfect cars that make their way onto BaT tend to skew low because the peanut gallery chimes in, points out its flaws, and proffers the calculus that “If you pay X for it and sink Y into it, it won’t be worth Z,” and people get scared off.
That being said, I find both sale prices surprisingly high. Much has been written about the sinking of the classic car values in general and 2002 values in particular. Both of these cars were under-described and under-photographed. My feeling has always been that uncertainty creates risk, which drives away buyers, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here. Regarding the Malaga car, it’s tougher to register a titleless car than it used to be. I suppose you could infer that the lack of a stated title held the value down, but still, $17,850 wasn’t a fire-sale price for a color-changed not-immediately-drivable tii with an odd under-hood modification.
I wonder if the buyers were people in the area who knew the previous owner and the true condition of the cars, as that would go a long way to reducing risk. Or if the buyers did, in fact, conduct inspections. Does anyone know who snagged these?
—Rob Siegel
____________________________________
All eight of Rob’s books are available on Amazon. Signed, personally inscribed copies can be ordered directly from Rob here.
