It’s a well-known fact that Ford CEO Jim Farley is an avid car enthusiast, not to mention a part-time vintage racer, and he owns some pretty cool vehicles, too. A couple of years ago, Farley also admitted that he peruses the online collector car auction website known as Bring a Trailer on a regular basis, though back then, he was monitoring Ford F-150 Lightning prices. However, as it turns out, Jim Farley is also an active bidder on that same website, though he apparently isn’t very successful in actually winning car auctions.
“I’m actually FordMan21, so you guys can look at my negotiation habits. I tend to be not a good negotiator,” Farley revealed during a recent appearance on the Bring a Trailer podcast. “I would say I kind of like show my hand a little too early, and then I wait until the very end and then I – give myself like a number and I can’t go by the number and I think that’s a good policy.”
Jim Farley is certainly telling the truth here, as we can see from his official Bring a Trailer profile. The executive has thus far bid on a total of 32 different vehicles listed for sale at that site, and yet, has only actually won one of them – a 1972 DeTomaso Pantera, which he secured for $121,000 back in June 2024.
Otherwise, the list of vehicles that Jim Farley has bid on and not won at auction is quite long, and filled with some notable Blue Oval machinery. That list includes vehicles such as a 1991 Ford Mustang LX 5.0, a 1988 Ford Mustang GT, a 1987 Ford Mustang GT, and a 1987 Ford Sierra RS Cosworth, to name just a few. There are also a wide variety of other vehicles on Farley’s radar, including a 1958 Lancia Aurelia B20S GT, and even a 2006 BMW M3 Coupe Competition Package.
Comments
In this case, Mr. Farley has good business sense. Any car worth buying on BAT sells for a stupid price. I’m sure BAT is making good money, but it is coming at the expense of the broader auto enthusiast community by driving the prices to unattainable levels (just like new cars, houses, and everything else).
Sign of the times when the CEO of Ford can’t even afford a used car?
Failure Farley is trying to buy these cars as cheap as possible, which is buy he’s usually not the successful bidder, also Failure Farley is still terrible when it comes to quality control.
He’s also bad at running Ford. So not surprising.
In fact what he is good ??? Doing podcasts ohhh yeeee …
It’s an auction. Buyers control the market. Plain and simple
Maybe it’s me, but for all the serious issues at Ford right now, I’m not seeing Mr. Farley “sweat”.
Pumping resources into race cars, singing praises for Chinese EV’s and P.R. pieces telling us he’s not a good negotiator when buying a car seem to be on the top of his agenda….all while there’s existential quality problems with arguably the only profitable product they produce.
Respectfully, I’m not convinced He’s understands the magnitude of it all, let alone demonstrating how He’s leading “Team Ford” to correct it.