One Man’s Collection of 700 Unusual Cars Is Going Up for Auction

One retired trucking company owner in Norwalk, Ohio spent over 50 years quietly buying vehicles with no plan beyond “just one more,” and ended up with over 700 of them, including 250 Studebakers, a DeLorean, and a car that turns into a boat. Here’s what happened when the entire collection finally went up for auction.

Somewhere in Norwalk, Ohio, a man in his eighties spent over five decades quietly building one of the strangest and largest private car collections most people will never hear about, and then decided, almost matter-of-factly, that it was time to let it go. Ron Hackenberger didn’t set out to make headlines; he was a trucking company owner and cattle rancher who just kept buying vehicles, one at a time, since 1962, with a vague plan to eventually open a museum that never quite happened. When the entire collection finally hit the auction block, it wasn’t just cars up for grabs, it was buses, tractors, motorcycles, and even horse-drawn buggies. What does a collection like that actually contain after 50-plus years of never saying no?

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Fifty Years of Never Saying No

The scale alone sets the Hackenberger collection apart, more than 700 vehicles sold across a single no-reserve, weekend-long event in Norwalk, timed to coincide with the Blue Suede Cruise vintage drag racing event at nearby Summit Motorsports Park. The collection leaned heavily into one brand in particular: roughly 250 Studebakers, spanning Presidents, Commanders, Hawks, a 1963 Avanti, and assorted trucks, vans, and buses, making it one of the largest single-owner Studebaker holdings ever to go under the hammer.

The Oddities That Made It Unforgettable

Beyond the Studebakers, Hackenberger’s taste ran toward the genuinely unusual, a pair of Amphicar 770s (a car that doubles as a boat), a gullwing-doored DeLorean DMC-12, and a similarly styled Bricklin SV-1 all crossed the block. When the final tallies came in, cars, trucks, and motorcycles alone brought in roughly $1.67 million, with tractors, buggies, and memorabilia pushing the total closer to $2 million, a fitting number for a collection built one impulse buy at a time over half a century.

VanDerBrink’s Specialty Is Exactly This Kind of Sale

VanDerBrink Auctions has built its reputation specifically on liquidating large, decades-deep private collections rather than running conventional weekly consignment sales, taking on estates and hoarder-style accumulations that most auction houses would consider too unwieldy to handle in a single event. That specialization is exactly why a collection the size of Hackenberger’s ended up in their hands rather than going through a traditional dealer network or being broken up piecemeal over years.

A Collection Built the Hard Way

Unlike collections assembled through big-check purchases at marquee auctions, Hackenberger’s grew one car at a time over more than five decades, the kind of patient, opportunistic accumulation that produces genuinely odd inventory precisely because it wasn’t curated with resale value in mind. Buying whatever crossed his path, rather than chasing a specific theme, is exactly how a trucking company owner in rural Ohio ended up with one of the largest private Studebaker holdings in the country almost by accident.

Why Studebaker Dominated His Garage

The roughly 250 Studebakers in the collection, spanning Presidents, Commanders, and Hawks alongside a 1963 Avanti, reflect a brand loyalty that outlived Studebaker’s own production run by decades. Studebaker enthusiasts have long formed some of the most tight-knit owner communities in the old-car hobby, partly because the brand’s relatively small surviving population means parts and knowledge sharing matters more than it does for owners of a more common make.

No-Reserve Sales Draw a Different Kind of Bidder

Running the entire 700-plus lot sale without reserves meant every vehicle, no matter how obscure or rough, was guaranteed to sell to somebody, a structure that tends to attract bargain hunters and parts buyers alongside serious collectors chasing a specific model. For a collection this eclectic, buses and horse-drawn buggies included, that no-reserve format was likely the only realistic way to clear the entire inventory in a single weekend rather than dragging the process out over years.

Timing It With a Drag Racing Weekend Wasn’t an Accident

Scheduling the sale alongside the Blue Suede Cruise vintage drag racing event at nearby Summit Motorsports Park put the auction directly in front of an audience already primed to spend a weekend around old cars, a smart pairing that likely boosted both attendance and bidding activity beyond what a standalone sale in the same rural Ohio location could have drawn on its own.

What Happens to a Museum Dream That Never Materialized

Hackenberger’s original plan to eventually open a museum is a familiar story in the old-car hobby, plenty of lifelong collectors imagine a public home for their cars that never quite comes together, whether due to cost, permitting, or simply running out of time. Auctioning the collection instead ensured the cars found new owners and, in many cases, new roads to drive on, rather than sitting indefinitely in storage waiting for a museum that was never going to open.

What Happens to 700 Cars After the Gavel Falls

A dispersal sale this large doesn’t just distribute cars to individual collectors, it often feeds parts cars into restoration shops, sends project vehicles to hobbyists with the time and patience to finish what Hackenberger never got to, and occasionally reunites a specific model with a marque-specific club or museum that had been searching for exactly that example for years. The ripple effects of a single massive collection like this one can shape the parts and project-car market in a rural region for years afterward, long after the auction tent itself comes down.

A Reminder That Not Every Collection Is About Money

Ron Hackenberger’s five decades of buying suggests a collector motivated more by curiosity and accumulation than by investment strategy, a mindset that feels increasingly rare in a hobby where many newer buyers approach classic cars primarily as appreciating assets rather than objects worth owning simply because they’re interesting. Collections built that way tend to be stranger, more eclectic, and ultimately more memorable than ones assembled with resale value as the primary goal. It’s a mindset that made the eventual dispersal feel less like liquidating an investment portfolio and more like finally sharing a lifetime’s worth of finds with people who would actually appreciate driving them again for years to come.

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