Top Relatable Cars Highlighted on New Website

It’s not exactly newsworthy to note that the collector car world contains a few people of the Type-A persuasion. Car collecting is competitive in everything from auctions to concours accolades and even slots at the best restoration shops. The corollary to this is the observation that this world can also be, at times, ego-driven. Everyone craves validation—just look at the face of a supercar owner when someone rolls into cars and coffee with a humble little Nissan Figaro and instantly peels the crowd away from his or her new Lamborgotti Fasterossa. The creators of the new site (of which, full disclosure, I am one), “Best One on the Planet” ( bestoneontheplanet.com ) decided to harness these competitive tendencies in the collector car world to build a site that allows users to submit almost any car and find out whether it’s the best of the best, or not.

“Everyone involved in creating the site has been going to all of the big car events for the better part of two decades,” says site co-founder Matt Lewis, “and while we’ve all looked forward to seeing what’s on the lawn on Sunday, we’ve been equally captivated by the cars that we’ve seen street parked in places like Amelia Island and Monterey. Over the years, we made a sport of collecting and trading photos and opinions about the interesting but relatable cars that we encountered by happenstance. It got to be a competition among a group of friends to find examples of what we believed were best one on the planet examples of the cars we could afford, like the BMW Z3 coupe, or a Mk 2 VW Golf GTI.” The idea of organizing an informal “parking lot concours” eventually morphed into doing something more scalable, and over the course of several years, in the founders’ spare time, Best One on the Planet was born.

What makes the site unique and entertaining is the fact that anyone can submit a car, and it can be—but doesn’t necessarily have to be—for sale. The editorial team vets each submission to determine if it has a certain level of baseline credibility, and at that point, it goes up on the site where users and the Best One on the Planet Jury weigh in. The Jury is made up of well-known concours judges, restorers, collectors, and automotive journalists. They weigh in on the submissions, and the consensus opinion determines whether a car will be deemed the Best One on the Planet. Chief Judge Dave Kinney (creator of the Hagerty Price Guide) has the god-like power to overrule the consensus when he sees fit. Occasionally, guest judges like Motor Trend’s Jonny Lieberman will pop in with their own personal submissions.

Unlike other sites where you don’t know who the real experts are, here you do, and users get to interact with them, agreeing, disagreeing and calling them out and challenging them. Best One on the Planet winners reign until a better one is found, and incidentally, there are numerous calls-to-action on the site for users to challenge the status quo. This is where that competitive aspect of car collecting comes in.

“The sweet spot of the site isn’t found in splitting hairs between one perfectly restored Ferrari Dino or the other—the super-fine details that elevate one high-dollar restoration above the aren’t necessarily found in a series of detailed photos—but we can darn sure tell if we’re looking at the best Isuzu Impulse on the planet. In point of fact, we have, and it’s amazing ,” says Lewis. He also said that the site isn’t fixated on cars with freakishly low miles: “Pickled cars don’t really interest us, the usual suspects like ’78 Pace Car Corvettes and ’76 Eldorado convertibles are pretty easy to find with delivery miles, and one of these cars is pretty much like the next.” Far more interesting are cars like the 39,000-mile 1980 Toyota Celica GT Liftback recently auctioned on Hagerty Marketplace. The Best One on the Planet judges found the car in its unique U.S. Grand Prix livery to be utterly captivating and shockingly well-preserved. It currently reigns as the best 1980 Celica on planet Earth.

At the moment, Best One on the Planet is content to build an audience in the collector car space, but the plan is to quickly move into other car-adjacent interests like motorcycles, watches, and guitars. Eventually, the founders see the site as something that can dive into virtually any niche and become a less opaque, and more accessible/retail-facing version of The Michelin Guide or JD Power, creating expert juries for nearly anything. As Franklin Roosevelt was fond of saying, “There are as many opinions as there are experts.” Indeed there are.

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