The Vibe Is Shifting For Wealthy Vintage Car Collectors
Car influencers, paparazzi and TikTok stars are rewriting the face of Pebble Beach and its famed auctions.
The 1937 Mercedes-Benz 540K Special Roadster won Best in Show at the 2023 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in Pebble Beach, California. Since 1950, the annual Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance has hosted the world's most beautiful and expensive collectible cars for a week of lavish parties, blue-chip auctions, glamorous rallies and exclusive high-roller meetings.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergHi, Hannah Elliott again, coming off five days of covering all the cars you could ever hope to see in one place, also known as Monterey Car Week.
I’ve been trying to remember how many years I’ve attended the annual orgy of auto auctions, shows, rallies, parades, races and debuts centered around Carmel, California, and leading up to the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance held on the third Sunday of August. I know it’s been at least since 2009, the earliest I could find photos from covering it when I worked at Forbes. That’s 14 years, minus the one we canceled in 2020 on account of Covid-19.
This is the first year the Quail Motorsports Gathering eclipsed the Pebble Beach concours as the place everyone wanted to be. It’s not only because it has become a defacto auto show, as I reported in 2018; this year it felt like the halo event, period, of Monterey Car Week.