Supercar Blondie Is Going Into the Auction Business

Social media personality Supercar Blondie, a London-based Australian whose real name is Alex Hirschi, found her niche posting automotive eyecandy for eager viewers rather accidentally.

“I started out as a journalist, and I just fell into cars through my radio show,” says Hirschi.

For someone who “fell into” cars, they’ve certainly been good to her—the Supercar Blondie network of social channels that includes Supercarblondie.com has 110 million subscribers, including 18.4 million on YouTube and 56 million on Facebook. The content has 2 billion views per month, according to the company.

Alex and Nik Hirschi, the Supercar Blondie couple, in Las Vegas.
Jim Motavalli photo

Hirschi, whose first car was a lowly Mitsubishi Lancer, produces the Supercar Blondie content with her husband, Nik Hirschi, who is Swiss. The radio show was on the Arabian Radio Network in Dubai from 2012 to 2017. Dubai is full of supercars, and Hirschi, then known as “Radio Blondie,” said it was a natural fit to drive some of them—Bentleys, McLarens, Ferraris—for on-air features. The independent Supercar Blondie content creation company was launched in Dubai (where Nik Hirschi worked at Bloomberg, Barclays, and Thomson Reuters) in 2017 and has been growing ever since.

“I just loved supercars, and what started out as a hobby after I was loaned a Bentley Flying Spur to drive around Dubai eventually got more serious,” Alex Hirschi says. “We started filming my encounters with cars and uploading the video to our channel.” These days the couple travels 300 days a year; Penta first caught up with them at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The Tyde Icon electric hydrofoil uses BMW batteries.
SBX Cars Photo

And now SB Media Group, based in London with 65 employees, Nik as CEO and Alex as the co-founder and on-air talent, is going into the auto auction business. SBX Cars, based in California, launched this week. The inaugural inventory goes beyond cars, and includes an electric Tyde hydrofoil yacht designed by BMW. There’s also a no-reserve Tesla Cybertruck, a one-of-nine Lamborghini Veneno Roadster, and a one-of-three Lamborghini Veneno Coupe. Likely attracting attention will be the first public auctions of the Mercedes-AMG One and the Hyperion XP-1 hydrogen-powered prototype. There were three LaFerrari prototypes, and one will be auctioned by SBX Cars.

A collection of John Player Special Lotus F1 racing cars will also be auctioned, as well as Lotus transporters, and founder Colin Chapman’s personal plane and some vehicles from his garage. Other high-dollar items include a Mercedes 300SL “Gullwing,” a Lamborghini Miura, a BMW 507, and an Aston Martin DB5. The estimated valuation of the auction lots consigned is US$100 million.

The Mercedes-AMG One was limited to 275 units.
SBX Cars Photo

The auctions will be online, but there could be some in-person events in the future. “We’re going to be the only digital auction site that focuses on the high end,” Nik Hirschi says. “We will focus on cars that are super-cool, with many that are one-of-a-kind, and we’re going to be attracting collectors from all over the world. Every car will be represented on the site with 200 photographs, taken by our global network.” Video will also be available.

SBX Cars says it will speed up the process for consignors, with just a few weeks until their cars become available on the site. Once up, the vehicles will remain available for one to two weeks. SBX Cars Auction Director Lance Butler, a Bonhams veteran, said in a statement that the auction “introduces our clients to a far easier buying and selling process, all while accessing one of the world’s largest global audiences by way of Supercar Blondie.”

The prototype Hyperion XP-1.
SBX Cars Photo

Mercedes 300SLs, Aston Martin DB5s, and BMW 507s are frequently auctioned around the globe, but SBX features some true exotics.

As tech leaders race to bring Windows systems back online after Friday’s software update by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crashed around 8.5 million machines worldwide, experts share with CIO Journal their takeaways for preparing for the next major information technology outage.

Be familiar with how vendors develop, test and release their software

IT leaders should hold vendors deeply integrated within IT systems, such as CrowdStrike , to a “very high standard” of development, release quality and assurance, said Neil MacDonald , a Gartner vice president.

“Any security vendor has a responsibility to do extensive regression testing on all versions of Windows before an update is rolled out,” he said.

That involves asking existing vendors to explain how they write software, what testing they do and whether customers may choose how quickly to roll out an update.

“Incidents like this remind all of us in the CIO community of the importance of ensuring availability, reliability and security by prioritizing guardrails such as deployment and testing procedures and practices,” said Amy Farrow, chief information officer of IT automation and security company Infoblox.

Re-evaluate how your firm accepts software updates from ‘trusted’ vendors

While automatically accepting software updates has become the norm—and a recommended security practice—the CrowdStrike outage is a reminder to take a pause, some CIOs said.

“We still should be doing the full testing of packages and upgrades and new features,” said Paul Davis, a field chief information security officer at software development platform maker JFrog . undefined undefined Though it’s not feasible to test every update, especially for as many as hundreds of software vendors, Davis said he makes it a priority to test software patches according to their potential severity and size.

Automation, and maybe even artificial intelligence-based IT tools, can help.

“Humans are not very good at catching errors in thousands of lines of code,” said Jack Hidary, chief executive of AI and quantum company SandboxAQ. “We need AI trained to look for the interdependence of new software updates with the existing stack of software.”

Develop a disaster recovery plan

An incident rendering Windows computers unusable is similar to a natural disaster with systems knocked offline, said Gartner’s MacDonald. That’s why businesses should consider natural disaster recovery plans for maintaining the resiliency of their operations.

One way to do that is to set up a “clean room,” or an environment isolated from other systems, to use to bring critical systems back online, according to Chirag Mehta, a cybersecurity analyst at Constellation Research.

Businesses should also hold tabletop exercises to simulate risk scenarios, including IT outages and potential cyber threats, Mehta said.

Companies that back up data regularly were likely less impacted by the CrowdStrike outage, according to Victor Zyamzin, chief business officer of security company Qrator Labs. “Another suggestion for companies, and we’ve been saying that again and again for decades, is that you should have some backup procedure applied, running and regularly tested,” he said.

Review vendor and insurance contracts

For any vendor with a significant impact on company operations , MacDonald said companies can review their contracts and look for clauses indicating the vendors must provide reliable and stable software.

“That’s where you may have an advantage to say, if an update causes an outage, is there a clause in the contract that would cover that?” he said.

If it doesn’t, tech leaders can aim to negotiate a discount serving as a form of compensation at renewal time, MacDonald added.

The outage also highlights the importance of insurance in providing companies with bottom-line protection against cyber risks, said Peter Halprin, a partner with law firm Haynes Boone focused on cyber insurance.

This coverage can include protection against business income losses, such as those associated with an outage, whether caused by the insured company or a service provider, Halprin said.

Weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the various platforms

The CrowdStrike update affected only devices running Microsoft Windows-based systems , prompting fresh questions over whether enterprises should rely on Windows computers.

CrowdStrike runs on Windows devices through access to the kernel, the part of an operating system containing a computer’s core functions. That’s not the same for Apple ’s Mac operating system and Linux, which don’t allow the same level of access, said Mehta.

Some businesses have converted to Chromebooks , simple laptops developed by Alphabet -owned Google that run on the Chrome operating system . “Not all of them require deeper access to things,” Mehta said. “What are you doing on your laptop that actually requires Windows?”