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BCA are looking at opening a very restricted type of sale , one buyer per account & masked up , but its looking like the type of sale thats for the cheapie stuff just one day a week or two weeks . Thats from the horses mouth when i collected a car from our local BCA and talking to the manager , confirmed by another guy same day too . Online is far to easy for them isnt it Less admin people , less cleaners , No drivers. Cars dont need moving , More car park space , The staff arent in uniform , No Vendors to take care of creeping about . Just too easy at present

Guessing this idea will be scrapped now for the time being with the 6 people rule?

prefer it online, just used to go to local bca to me , now buy from 3 or 4 more , which i wouldn't do if they was physical.

The electrics on these can be dodgy. If the fan is not working at all then it may not be the resistor pack. It could be the connector on the fan. Remove the glovebox to get at it. A common 208 heater fault is melted wiring. In the passenger foot well there is a small panel at the front end of the centre console just in front of the heater outlet. It is held on with a single screw and clip.Behind this there is a small inline connector which has a grey wire and a green/yellow wire in one side and a red wire and green/yellow out the other side. This plug can melt inside causing high resistance. It is the 12V supply and ground to the resistor pack.

No one is really going to be able to diagnose that over the internet, as the chaps have already mentioned resistor is one option, if you have no speeds at all could be the blower itself or the plug on the blower, i find most of our resistor faults allow one speed.

@David Horgan will be the cheapy sales that open up first makes sense. Buying more expensive cars and newer cars online is a bit less risk anyway. I haven't bought in person for a long time.

For us long in the tooth traders there is no substitute for seeing and hearing cars in the flesh. You develop a good eye for sorting the wheat from the chaff. Online just doesn't cut it. And no, I don't trust the gradings. The savings and efficiencies benefit the auction house, not the buyer.

Think it suits them fine to keep the sites closed so they will stick with it as long as they can. Possibly sell off or build on unprofitable/break even sites. The fact that they are still selling a large amount of sight unseen metal online will have made them re think the business model. The compromise would be to allow pre-booked inspection slots but all auctions seem resistant to this except Aston Barclay. BCA are not even allowing pre viewing of Caravans so I dont think they will be changing soon.

I started off thinking they would miss the revenue from the cafe's the private buyers who get run up and pay eye watering fees, however on there flip side the trade seem to be paying way into and more often than not over cap clean so i guess with half your staff off its a very close numbers game and there clear lack of urgency to reopen it just could be the final nail in the coffin.

Online greatly benefits the auction co's. They will strongly resist a return to physical auctions - no doubt about that!