The buyer has his hand on the winged Bentley badge on the trunk lid, pressing it the way the car is supposed to open. Nothing happens. “You’re supposed to be able to push the Bentley button and it should open the trunk,” he says. “No, that’s not gonna work.” The banner across the top of the video reads “I Bought A Cheap 90K Mile Bentley Continental GTC From Auction Sight Unseen.”

The clip was posted on TikTok by @thuanbuomxuoigio69, an account that shares it with a string of hashtags (#AutoAuction, #fixmycar, #carshopping) and does not name the man doing the talking. The clip ends before any of the problems are solved.

He tries power next. “There’s two ways of starting this car,” he explains. “You can take your blade key, you can put it in the ignition and you can crank it on, or the other way to do it is come over here and push the start stop.” The dash lights up with a list. “We’re immediately greeted with a light bulb,” he says, then counts the rest: “We have a check engine light right there. It says the hood is open.” A beat later: “We also got a parking brake failure.”

The Trunk, the Fuel Door and an Eighth of a Tank

With the ignition on, he finds a trunk button and tries again. “That doesn’t work either,” he laughs. Then the bigger problem lands. “The fuel door doesn’t work either,” he says. “So are you telling me we can’t put gas in this? We can’t open the trunk, we can’t open the fuel door, we can’t put gas in it. That is going to be a huge problem.”

He shuts the car off and tries the key fob. “The trunk still doesn’t open and neither does the fuel door.” The timing is bad, he explains: “It just so happens the car has got an eighth of a tank of gas, and being that it’s a W12, it’s probably going to need gas very, very soon.” He had wanted to take viewers for a ride, but the gas station is “quite a ways away.”

The Second Key

His next theory is the key itself. “I went and I grabbed the other key,” he says. “I thought maybe there’s something wrong with the transponder in the key fob.” Of the spare, he says: “It’s very worn out. You can tell that this key has been used for this car for a long time.” With his foot on the brake, the car reports “several keys found,” and the dash now says the hood, trunk and doors are open.

So he goes looking for a manual release. “I would assume there’s an emergency gas tank release in here somewhere,” he says. He finds the battery but “nothing for releasing the fuel tank.” His plan, in his words: “We’re gonna have to get in there,” or “do some pretty quick googling.” The clip ends with him testing the hood one more time. Whether the fuel door ever opened is not shown in this part.

What His Dashboard Was Telling Him

The check engine warning he read out has a plain meaning. The California Air Resources Board explains in its OBD II fact sheet that the onboard diagnostic system turns on a warning light, often labeled “Check Engine,” when it detects a malfunction, and stores fault information so a technician can find the problem. CARB says a steady light means a malfunction has been detected and the car should be serviced as soon as convenient, while a blinking light signals an active problem that could be harming the catalytic converter. OBD II applies to all 1996 and newer gasoline passenger cars, which covers any Continental GTC.

Before You Bid on a Luxury Car You Have Never Seen

Bring a scan tool to pickup. The fault codes CARB describes are stored in the car, so reading them on the spot tells you whether that check engine light is a loose sensor or something larger before you load it.

Ask for every key and test each one. In this video, the buyer tried the worn second key to rule out a bad transponder in the first. Count the keys you receive and try lock, unlock, trunk and start functions with each.

Check fuel level and fuel door access before leaving the lot. He was stuck with an eighth of a tank in a W12 and no way to refill it. If the fuel door or trunk is electrically operated, find the manual release in the owner’s handbook before you need it.

Run the VIN through NHTSA’s recall lookup. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says the 17 character search shows unrepaired safety recalls from participating manufacturers, but not recalls more than 15 years old unless the manufacturer offers more coverage, so an older car needs a call to a dealer as well.

Budget for the unknown. A buyer who bids sight unseen, as the banner says this one did, is taking on whatever the listing photos did not show, and his first few minutes on camera turned up a check engine light, a parking brake warning, and a trunk and fuel door that would not open.