Cars & Coffee - how a parking-lot ritual became a global phenomenon

There is this energy a good Cars & Coffee generates on a Sunday morning — and even we, who have been running the format for years, can barely put it into words. Anyone who has been there understands it without further explanation. Anyone who hasn't can't be reached by the best description. That is the first, least dramatic truth of this story.

It begins in the early 2000s in Newport Beach, California — a handful of sportscar owners, a coffee shop, a parking lot, no plan. Within a decade, the same format existed in London, Milan, Zurich, Vienna, Hamburg. No one had licensed it, no one owned it. That was precisely its strength.

The person who brought it to Germany was a man who at the time worked full-time for an automotive supplier: Daniel Kurpik. On paper, far away from the end product — and even further from the people who buy it. But Daniel had always been what we'd call in German a Menschenfänger — a people magnet. Someone who attracts people and brings them together, instinctively, without ever seeming calculating. He had understood, intrinsically, that an extraordinary car is a strangely precise occasion for placing people in front of each other who would otherwise never have met. Sometimes even he found it hard to verbalize what made the energy at these events what it was. But anyone who had been once understood.

In the summer of 2016, Daniel organized the first big Cars & Coffee in Düsseldorf, at the Rheinturm. More cars showed up than even he had expected. The concept landed immediately.

The call from reception

At that time I was on the other side of the table. At Ferrari in Düsseldorf, in marketing — and more specifically, in retail. A position that taught me brand work but offered little room to drive an idea of my own. Ferrari was still cautious with social media in those years; there were early, careful steps and not much more. I knew Cars & Coffee from Instagram and Facebook — internationally, the format was long established.

One morning a call came from reception. Two gentlemen wanted to see me. It was Daniel and his business partner at the time. What they then pitched I would today, soberly, describe as not a particularly compelling starting position — vague, very early, lots of open questions, an honestly rather thin foundation. But I could hear that they believed in it. And I knew the format well enough from my own observation to understand what it was achieving internationally. We agreed on a joint event. That became several. We attached an after-event format to it, giving us direct access as a brand to the drivers — meaning the buyers in the sportscar segment.

Crossing the table

In late 2016 and over the course of 2017, something matured that had previously only been intuition. On the Ferrari retail side, my own development perspective was limited — and I had always known I would eventually found something. With Daniel and his partner, I saw two things very clearly. They could do sales, they could do branding. What was missing were processes, an architecture, a larger vision. Above all, what was missing was a viable business-model idea that could have given this format an economic shape.

This was the point where I saw the chance not just to join, but to join meaningfully. That took several conversations and a lot of trust. There was no salary. For the three of us, it was a real venture — driven less by economic hope than by the shared belief that Cars Connect People isn't a marketing line but a social observation we had each made for ourselves.

In 2017 I crossed to the organizer side.

How the format expanded

In the years that followed, we opened stations in multiple cities. Each had its own character, because that's what the grammar of the format requires: Cars & Coffee belongs not to us, but to the local scene. Düsseldorf became a class reunion, from which drivers fanned out across the Medienhafen, the Kö, and the city's restaurants. Cologne developed a show character, carried by a round square on the water in the Medienpark. Mönchengladbach ran as the Night Edition at the airport, with a Need-for-Speed accent and taxi rides in a Lexus from the VLN program and an LMP prototype. Berlin ran at the Carfactory, more exclusively designed, with a closing drive by a local cooperation partner — and precisely because of this, closer to the core of the format than many smaller editions.

In 2018 we ventured to the first Owners Weekend on Sylt — four days, an island, a trial run for something that exceeded the classical Cars & Coffee in content.

Pause and revival

Covid ultimately forced us to stand down the 2020 event year and most of 2021. A broader brand iteration and the platform venture connected to it — something we had been building since 2017 with two community members and two reach-strong car spotters, a kind of social media for supercar enthusiasts, deliberately not a club — we liquidated at the end of 2020. There was no perspective to carry another year of buildup economically. What remained was the community, a landing page, a pause that felt longer than it was.

In 2024 we picked the idea up again — this time as DRIVTO. Not as an event brand but as a platform. With its own editorial voice, its own DriverDNA, its own logic for the question of who is actually standing on those parking lots. The Düsseldorf Sunday mornings still are what they were. But we don't build the platform on the event format anymore. We build it on the people who found their way to that format.

What remains

Cars & Coffee as a format will continue to exist. In Düsseldorf, in Cologne, in Berlin, in Milan, in London, in Tokyo, in Los Angeles. There is no central body, and that's how it should be. What we take from nearly ten years as the most important lesson is the observation, hard to put in sentences, that Daniel had from the start: that a car is a strangely precise occasion for placing people on common ground who otherwise would never have met. That is the insight DRIVTO is subordinate to