#ebay

GM was the first automaker to experiment with new-car sales on Ebay, in a grand experiment that resulted in an undisclosed number of sales (estimated at between 20 and 50 actually sold through eBay). GM’s Mark LaNeve insisted at the time that the program led to sales not logged through Ebay, but then he was booted from GM about a week after GM’s Ebay experiment fell apart. Which makes Tom Loveless, the head of Kia’s US sales operation a brave man; with only this single, discouraging precedent, Bloomberg reports that Kia is diving into Ebay sales… and unlike GM, it’s not limiting the experiment to California.

By the time the weekday TTAC crew rolls back into their cubicles/corner offices/gondola-of-the-“Zorin”-blimp-high-over-San-Francisco, the eBay auction for my 2009 Audi S5 will be crashing to a vaguely interesting end.

It had never occurred to me that my decision to sell a car would be “news”, but it probably never occurred to Elon Musk that he would have to explain his divorce to the readers of Jalopnik, either. Click the jump to find out why I’m selling, what the drooling morons of various BMW-oriented web forums think about it, and why I not-so-secretly hope it doesn’t meet the reserve…