The Cars I Missed

I've been into cars since the day I was born. It's the longest-running thing in my life. So watching the collector market shift over the last ten years has been less analysis and more pattern recognition by feel. The Mercedes SLS AMG. The manual Murciélago. Manual V12s in general. The SRT-10. I watched a lot of cars go from "you can get one" to "you can't" while I was still working on being able to get one.

Future Garage is my attempt to call those moves before they happen. Not by feel anymore. By model. An AI platform that looks at the signals — auction sales, supply trends, parts availability, generational shifts, forum momentum, cultural nostalgia — and tries to surface the cars that are about to do what manual V10s and V12s have already done.

The hard part isn't getting the data. I've pulled hundreds of thousands of historical sales. The hard part is getting the data to behave. A #1 concours-condition 911 isn't the same car as a #3 driver, and any model that treats them as equal is wrong by thirty percent. A Bring a Trailer no-reserve isn't the same data point as a curated Monterey sale. Survivorship skews everything — the cars selling today are the ones that survived, not the average example.

The real wall is integration. Sorting 100,000+ sales into something an algorithm can reason about. Sync the condition with the spec, the spec with the comp source, the comp source with the year-over-year market backdrop, and do all of it across every model line. Skip any layer and the predictions become noise. I'm sitting in the middle of that problem right now.

I'm building this as a passion project, separate from the rest of what I'm working on. The car industry is one of the few I'd actually want a job in — and I'd rather get there through something I built than a résumé. This is my way in. Through the side door that says I can build something useful for the market, not the front door that says I drove a lot of cars.

There's something different about working on a problem that's been quietly running in the back of my head my whole life. Every car I watched go up. Every one I didn't catch. Future Garage is what happens when you stop just watching.