If you find yourself having to sell a car, skip the classifieds drama. The best buyer is one who's in your contacts list.

SELLING A CAR is a terrible experience. If buying a car is your first day at Walt Disney World, selling one is the long drive home. List a car for sale and you'll soon see why people amass car collections. Jay Leno probably only likes about five of his cars; he just doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life answering questions about the service history of Doble E-20 piston valves.

- EZRA DYER

Likely the least aggravating way to sell a car is through a vehicle auction site, and even that presents challenges. If your car is special enough to be accepted by a premium auction site like Bring a Trailer, you must prepare for unimaginable pedantry from the bidders: “Please provide the exact build date for this car because I’m concerned that the eruption of the Eyjafjalla-jökull volcano in 2010 might have caused particulate contamination of the clear-coat. Also, there’s a technical service bulletin on the passenger’s-side rear headrest, so I'll need to see if that’s been addressed and all bolts torqued to spec before I enter my bid of $6969.”

Most of us with less-than-perfect cars use Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, both of which are great ways to hear from people who'd like to pay a third of what you're asking. Meta, corporate overlord of Marketplace, is worth almost $2 trillion and yet still tees up listing interactions with the infuriatingly nonsensical “Hi, is this available?” When I list a car, it's available to everyone except the people who ask if it’s available.