The perils of the Emirates Auction site

Having left Dubai, sold off my Karmann Ghia and Lotus Esprit and moved my life, family and worldly goods to Dallas… 6 months later I find myself back in Dubai, car-less.

Well not entirely true, a nice Cayenne turbo for my wife and a Raptor for me, replicating the Cayenne and Raptor we briefly had in Dallas, took care of the daily drives, but with the Interceptor being worked on in the US for the foreseeable there was a gaping hole in the garage. A nice sizeable garage too, not the glorified shed we left behind in Dubai before.

And so my mind wandered to Emirates Auctions – I’d heard horror stories, but thought it can’t be that bad and to be honest it wasn’t.  What it also isn’t is ‘just like ebay’ but more of that later. There is usually a long list of non-descript modern cars in there – ex-fleet and ex-bank, but often tucked away at the end of a chronological search there are a few more interesting cars, well interesting to masochists like me.

That is where I stumbled across the listing of a nice looking 1976 Porsche 356 with AC… yes I know! A quick VIN check and it is of course a 1963 356B-T6, and clearly no AC from the pics. Not a lot of interest and a low price, I duly lodged a deposit so I could bid – upto AED100k (you lodge 10%) and waited for the end of the auction to bid at the last minute, a la ebay. Well imagine my surprise then with 20 seconds to go and priced at around 60k I throw in my 75k bid… only to see the price jump to my 75k and 4 extra minutes added to the auction. More bids and more minutes saw my 100k limit tested so I lodged another 100k to cover myself if I had a rush of blood to the head. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to play in an auction and watch someone outbid you by AED100, about £20, and add another 4 minutes to the auction, over and over again. So about 35 minutes later, at 130k and 312 bids in, I decided I’d had enough and to end it… tap, tap, tap – bang 170k, I won.