Publishing content to the World Wide Web is a pretty time-consuming job. When I worked as the social media editor at Road & Track Magazine many years ago, half of my time was spent making sure stuff we wrote about was being shared as widely as possible, so that everyone who could see our stuff was seeing our stuff.
There are a bunch of tools that make sharing stuff online as a brand easier. Instead of having to log on to Facebook to share a new article, you can automate feeds, using third-party software, so that if something is published to your website, it automatically gets published to your Facebook account, too. In addition to Facebook, this software can work across all major social media, like X, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, and more.
Most of the time, this tech works seamlessly. You publish a post, and it gets sent out to all your social media channels for people to see. But every so often, things get borked. Images fail to load, text comes out garbled, or the link comes out wrong. In the case of online auction house Bring a Trailer’s automated X feed, it published a Tweet that claimed a Porsche Cayenne sold on its site for exactly $0. Users quickly took notice, and they have questions. And so do I.
Good On Them For Leaving It Up
The car itself is pretty neat, but not terribly notable. It’s a 2015 Porsche Cayenne Diesel painted Moonlight Blue Metallic, equipped with 22-inch BBS wheels and showing 107,000 miles on the clock. According to BaT’s actual website, it sold on Friday for $31,000 without much fanfare, one of 125 auctions to end on the site that day.
Sold: 2015 Porsche Cayenne Diesel for $0. https://t.co/rjKKaFyaf2 pic.twitter.com/wDPEkVy0gO
— Bring a Trailer (@Bringatrailer) February 19, 2026
The auction site’s automation tool clearly missed that last part, because according to its Twitter page, it actually sold for “$0.” Bring a Trailer has nearly 136,000 followers on X, so the errant message was sent out en masse to a bunch of people, causing lots of confusion. The replies are a good gauge of how I suspect most of the tweet’s 376,000 viewers reacted:
User reactions ranged from “huh?” to “makes sense,” and everywhere in between, with some people questioning whether the result was, in fact, accurate (one click to the website shows it very obviously wasn’t). Given how expensive it is to fix the emissions equipment in these modern VW Group diesel engines, people must have figured that the only way someone would own one of these Cayennes would be if it was literally given away.
I first saw this Tweet on Saturday morning and figured it’d be deleted well before this week began. Being a former social media manager myself, it’s the type of thing I would’ve panic-deleted immediately and issued a new Tweet with the correct information. No matter the case, it’s still up, which means all of the hilarious replies and quote tweets are still up and easy to find, too.
Don’t Forget The Memes
Along with the replies and quote Tweets, some quick-witted users also created some full-on memes that drive home the ridiculousness of a usually-serious organization like Bring a Trailer publishing (and not immediately deleting) something so odd. Weirdly, the most popular examples seem to be Spongebob Squarepants-related. Here’s my favorite, which has managed to rack up 3,600 likes and 76,000 views alone:
https://t.co/0XgseKTJkZ pic.twitter.com/Yud6Gq2bjg
— dank ???????????? (@notdank240) February 19, 2026
This one has been viewed even more widely, and it’s extremely funny to me for reasons I can’t quite understand:
https://t.co/MJu9MXEU1w pic.twitter.com/DywXsZISM1
— burge ✝️ (@burgeoisiee) February 20, 2026
Of course, there are numerous examples of more standard meme responses, such as the Vince McMahon money gif reaction:
https://t.co/gLYyj4Cpll pic.twitter.com/KM8WuFK9hQ
— Rbgb ???????????????? (@rbgb772) February 20, 2026
As far as mistakes go, this one leans far more innocently than BaT’s last oopsie, which involved the auction house unknowingly listing an AI-generated car for sale before pulling the auction and issuing an apology. While that incident was more worrying than entertaining, this one is pretty much harmless, except for maybe the new owner, who might have a few people thinking their new car is worth nothing. But other than that, all it’s done is create a bunch of friendly banter on the internet.
Either way, I reached out to a BaT representative to see what they have to say about the situation, but they haven’t gotten back to me. In a perfect world, the BaT team had no idea this Tweet even had a typo until I reached out, and they’re seeing all of this discourse in real time. If the Tweet ends up deleted in the next few hours, we’ll know the answer.
Top graphic images: Bring A Trailer; The Internet
People will get excited over anything.
AND IT WASN’T TO ME?!
Someone call Stef!
WHERE IS MY FREE CAYENNE?!
Well, if a car doesn’t have stone floormats and two shift levers, is it really worth anything these days?
I wouldn’t believe a word any online auction site ever said. I recently sold a car on C&B and they absolutely screwed me out of thousands of dollars. A pox on all their houses.
I’ve noticed you commented like this before on another “auction-related” thread. Can you give us more details or are you under NDA? More information would be useful and ideally help others before having the same issue.
The answer is the same (as follows). Seller beware.
Sure. Half way thru my auction some idiot created a brand new account and posted a comment on my auction that he “knew my car and it had been in an accident.” That was a lie of course, obviously designed to keep the auction price down. C&B left the comment up for hours before taking it down and refused to restart the auction or even make my listing one of their highlighted auctions. Both of those things would have cost them NOTHING.
Instead, the auction went on and not a single bidder that bid before the offending comment made a higher bid AFTER the comment. The interest dried up almost totally.
THEN, when the highest bid came in under the reserve, C&B made up the difference so the car sold at the reserve. Of course, when you list it, they pressure you to keep the reserve low.
The customer service chuds were useless and just kept blathering on about how “we’re still super excited about your auction and think it will end really well!!!”. BS.
And this was on an expensive car, they cost me thousands. Screw them. No one should use that site. End of rant. Thank you
Thank you! I was curious how this would have all gone down. It’s amazing that one bad apple could do that a tank an entire auction.
I’m really sorry to hear about that experience, it’s a fair amount of work to get all the auction stuff together, then to have that happen. Ugh.
Thanks for letting me know, I’ve done a couple of auctions and was wondering what could have happened and how I could mitigate it. The answer is probably “you can’t”.
It was a lot of work and expense. Getting the car detailed, having the Lemon Squad inspection done, then the professional pictures…
My advice to people is sell to a private party, even if takes longer and you have to meet lots of sketchy time wasting people. It’s better to stay in control of the process. C&B sucks.
Other complaint is that if the seller backs out, they get banned. If the buyer backs out, they get banned and lose the buyers fee.
Both parties should risk a financial stake if they back out.
I just wish they had a way I cold simply click “delete” on the auction I sent but sold the car locally the next day. Thankfully before I sent them the listing fee.
By Grabthar’s Hammer…what a savings.
Hero
Wow, that’s a deep cut! I instantly read that in Alan Rickman’s voice.
I agree: nice color, but the wheels are too big and dainty. It’d be cool to have a Cayenne diesel, but $30K+ is too rich for my blood given the miles/risk.
The auction actually stated that the OE 19″ wheels came with the car too. $30k is about market rate for a 958.2 diesel, even with over 100k miles. Those 19″ porsche wheels and center caps are about a $1000 bonus over the 22″ BBS wheels (which I agree are too large).
Well, in that case, I’m sold. 😉
I’ve driven Cayennes and like them, but don’t really need one. I also drove a diesel (TDI Golf) for 20+ years, and like diesel. By the time these come down to a price I could rationalize, they’ll be far too risky for me to consider, in terms of the cost of maintenance and big repairs. But plenty of folks spend more than I do on cars, so I’m sure the buyer of this one is jazzed. 🙂
The funny thing about these tweets is they are trying to market their site to either buyer or seller. The mistake did neither correctly. Should have owned it immediately, but that would require someone to actually check what they were doing.
So now we really know who’s running BaT now
https://www.hearst.com/-/hearst-and-openai-announce-strategic-content-partnership
You would think it would be easy to capitalise on the commentariat for this whilst still addressing that it was an obvious mistake.
I’ve owned two of these diesels and followed this auction. No way in the world it ever sells for less than $15k regardless of miles (if you have been on BaT in the last 2 years, you’d know these have a cult following), but BaT is sloppy as shit these days. They really don’t seem to have the staff to manage the listings nor have sufficient checks in place to justify their 5% buyer’s fees.
Considering Howard Swig is Head of Auctions – it’s no wonder the business is poorly run.
His Father couldn’t run a business to save his life.
Like Father like Son.
It has already sold for $31K as noted in the article.
Oh, right, that AI Cadillac story made it onto NPR comedy news quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” A couple weeks ago. I wonder if this technical oopsie will as well.
Ha! I love Wait Wait. That’s hilarious that it broke car-person containment.