A toddler purchases a car on eBay.
Last month, Sorella Stoute, a resident of Portland, Oregon, logged onto eBay using a cellphone app, placed a bid for $225 for a 1962 Austin Healey Sprite, and won the auction, effectively buying the car online. Sounds like something that happens every day, right? The difference with Stoute, however, is that 1) the smartphone wasn’t her’s, it was her father’s, and 2) she’s not old enough to drive. In fact, she’s not even close: Stone is a 14-month old toddler.
The father, Paul Stoute, was none the wiser to his daughter’s purchase until an email from eBay arrived in his inbox, congratulating him on winning the auction and purchasing a new car. Turns out, when Sorella started playing with his phone, she opened the eBay app and somehow ended up stumbling across an antique car model.
“She decided to open the eBay app, and started clicking around and one thing led to another and we own a car,” Paul Stoute told a news station.
Paul and Sorella’s mother initially panicked, worrying about not being able to afford the car. But since the price wasn’t too steep, and since Sorella’s accidental purchase had every hallmark of being a great story to tell somewhere down the road, the parents decided to keep the car. Call it a purchase for posterity’s sake. After all, $225 is a solid bargain for a car, and as Paul Stoute noted, things could have been much worse.
“I’m just glad she didn’t buy the $38,000 Porsche I was looking at,” he said.
With the help of Sorella’s grandparents, the Stoutes purchased the car and picked it up from the previous owner. As fortune would have it, the car was in Tualatin, Oregon, just 15 minutes and 11.5 miles down the highway from Portland. The seller could just as easily have easily lived on the east coast, but maybe Sorella was just shopping locally.
Either way, the car is now living at the grandparents’ house while the Stoutes try to figure out what to do with it. Paul Stoute expressed interest in restoring the car, possibly as a gift for Sorello when she turns 16 or graduates from high school. The father said that he has had some experience doing body work on cars in the past, but called the antique Austin Healey Sprite “another realm entirely.” Luckily, he’s got about 14 years before the car needs to be ready to go.
In the meantime, Paul Stoute is done taking chances on his eBay app. He’s added a new PIN code to his account to make sure that accidental purchases don’t happen again in the future, and has even activated the app’s facial recognition technology.
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