A rare Acura NSX auction took a bizarre turn after a six-figure bidding typo. Bring A Trailer stepped in after a mistaken six-figure bid changed everything. The final result solved the problem, but not everyone may agree with it. We all make mistakes, but there are the kind you quietly ignore and the kind that add a cool $100,000 to an auction bid. Somewhere between a missed comma and posting a video of yourself doing triple the speed limit sits a Bring a Trailer bidder who managed to turn a bidding war into full-blown auction drama. And it was all over a rare low-mileage Acura NSX. Read: AMG G63 Seller Shill Bids On His Own Car And Accidentally Wins It, Pays $4,300 For Nothing First brought to our attention by The Autopian, this wasn’t just any NSX. It was a unicorn-spec, one-owner 2005 Acura NSX-T with just 4,200 miles (6,759 km) and a six-speed manual, finished in Rio Yellow Pearl over yellow leather. Acura reportedly built only six examples in this exact configuration, which partly explains how this whole thing ended. But let’s start at the beginning. A Hundred Grand Oopsie The auction started normally enough. Bidding climbed from $42,000 to over $200,000, then kept rising into serious collector territory. Things got interesting around the $293,000 mark. That’s when one bidder suddenly dropped a hammer: $394,000. Just moments later came the online equivalent of hearing tires screech. “Typo, $294,000,” the bidder commented. At this stage, there were a lot of pitchforks claiming conspiracy or that alcohol was involved. On Bring A Trailer, bids go through a two-step process in part to avoid exactly this kind of situation. Commenters believed the bidder was trying to use the figure to gain exclusive negotiating rights with the seller or to stop the clock. That said, the error isn’t totally hard to understand. Sure, $294,000 and $394,000 are a hundred grand apart at the bank, but on the keyboard, they’re one digit apart. More importantly, the error is only part of the story. What happened afterward is just as important. Instead of simply rerunning the auction, Bring A Trailer didn’t comment for a couple of days. How Bring A Trailer Settled It According to the site’s Head of Auctions, the company determined the bid was a legitimate mistake and worked with the involved parties offline. The seller was given options, including reopening bidding or negotiating with the affected bidders. Eventually, the car was sold to another bidder for $310,000 but not without controversy there as well. Auctions are supposed to work because everyone competes under the same rules. And if there were multiple bidders circling around the high-$200,000 range, handling everything privately afterward creates a pretty obvious question. What about everyone else? That said, there’s good news here too. Should you ever fat-finger a six-figure typo on Bring A Trailer, you probably won’t ever have to talk to your accountant about it. Photos BaT
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