From a Facebook photo to our own Cars & Coffee Düsseldorf community app—watch how a Sunday morning ritual sparked a connected car culture you can join.
When you ask people what Cars & Coffee Düsseldorf actually is, they usually describe a simple event format. Sunday morning, parking lot, cars. What they rarely see is the work that held that simplicity constant for five years. That work was almost never the format itself. It was the curation underneath.
Facebook, vehicle photos, sons and fathers
The marketing ran on Facebook in those early years — through Facebook Events and through one-to-one outreach. We searched posts and comments for sportscar enthusiasts, wrote to them, invited them in. Strikingly often, the first responses came from young men in their early twenties who then talked their fathers into joining. A small, lovely generational shift that wasn't in any marketing plan and that nevertheless shaped the format decisively.
The basic precondition was always: send us a photo of the car you want to attend with. From that grew the backbone of our curation. At our last Cars & Coffee at the Rheinturm we had nearly 600 applications — we admitted 250. There were no hard criteria for what was a yes and what was a polite "we're booked." It was instinct. Which car fits this atmosphere, which one fits the people already coming, which one would be missed if it weren't there. Anyone who has done this even semi-professionally knows: these decisions cannot be automated. You have to make them. And when you make them consistently, what outsiders read as atmosphere starts to exist.
Drivers' lounge, espresso machines, Areal Böhler
With growing frequency and growing logistical load we had to raise participation fees. The contributions from individual local partners no longer carried the weight. That took some of the charm of the original Cars & Coffee away — anyone who knew the format in its American ideal version registered that. We registered it ourselves. But somehow we had to carry the thing.
We introduced a drivers' lounge, a fenced area between participants and spectators. It was a compromise that gave the drivers some protection from too much spectatorship and simplified our logistics for a growing audience. In 2018 we reached the high point with the edition at Düsseldorf's Areal Böhler: more than 300 cars, more than 4,000 visitors, a nearly completely filled industrial venue.
Those days usually ran like this: we officially started at 10 a.m. for four to six hours. The first participants were there earlier, exactly when the espresso machines on the café bikes, Apes and coffee trucks were heating up and three different baristas were trying simultaneously to bring their pressure gauges back under control. Participants came from all over the DACH region, on average from around 100 kilometers, in individual cases from 500. A drive that no entry fee on earth could enforce — and which says exactly that much about the pull of the format.
Not all the drivers of the early days could follow this development. Some felt the format had grown too large. Some felt the character had shifted. They weren't wrong.
What we learned from our critics
Out of these frictions came the most important internal insight of those years: we treat drivers not as customers, but as an asset. A customer pays and consumes. An asset brings something into the format that wouldn't have existed without them — an atmosphere, a story, a small displacement in the class-reunion character that no one else could have produced. Whoever reads the format that way as an organizer makes decisions differently. They think less about ticket prices and more about which constellation should come together on Sunday.
From that followed something second, which has consequences right into DRIVTO's platform architecture: we wanted to build a format in which different groupings could coexist without excluding each other. A club structure — formally defined memberships, exclusive lists, sharply drawn lines — would have made that coexistence impossible. We wanted the frame. Not the door.
The app that never finished
In 2017 we found two community members willing to think the next stage with us. Together with two car spotters who brought their Instagram reach along, we developed the vision of an app — a kind of social media for supercar enthusiasts that would connect drivers between events. Deliberately not a club. Deliberately not a marketplace. We defined an umbrella brand identity for the iteration from event format to platform logic.
We built, tested, polished. First test phases lay behind us. We were close enough that the product was going to carry its own narrative — and then Covid came. We liquidated the project at the end of the 2020 event year because no perspective was emerging that would have carried another year of buildup economically. To the community we offered a landing page, but engagement eroded with every month that nothing happened.
Only in 2024 did we pick the idea up again. This time under the name DRIVTO. With all the groundwork of 2017–2020 in mind, with the list of those early drivers in hand, and with much clearer notions of what the platform should not be. Not a marketplace. Not a club. Not an aggregator. What it should be was exactly the answer to the question we couldn't move past in 2018.
What five years of Sunday mornings actually taught us
Three sentences that remain.
Atmosphere is a property of self-restraint, not of growth.
A meeting tolerates a different price than an event — and as soon as you raise the price, you have to mentally accept that your format is shifting.
The hardest decisions were always curatorial. Which car is okay, which one doesn't fit. These decisions cannot be delegated. You have to make them.
If DRIVTO has a visible DNA today, it sits in exactly those three sentences.
Philipp Lauterbach is the founder of DRIVTO, the curated identity and discovery platform for the European sportscar scene. Based in Düsseldorf, he has been building sportscar communities since August 2018 — first through the Cars+Coffee format in Düsseldorf, Cologne, Berlin, Mönchengladbach, and on Sylt, and since mid-2024 through DRIVTO as a platform with its own editorial magazine and proprietary DriverDNA methodology.
His path into the sportscar world began with an event-management apprenticeship inside a Mercedes-Benz dealer group. From there he moved into marketing roles at Ferrari and Maserati in Düsseldorf, where he became one of the defining marketing voices for these brands in Germany at the time. That phase also gave him his first direct contact with the Cars+Coffee movement — and the affinity for Italian cars that still shapes him today. Ferrari and Pagani have been at the center of what he himself seeks as a driver ever since.
Before DRIVTO, he established the Cars+Coffee stations across several German cities — an independent event series that at its most active phase connected more than 1,500 sportscar drivers across the DACH region. The DRIVTO driver community grew out of that base. His editorial focus sits on the pillars Cars Connect People (personal founder voice, driver stories) and State of the Scene (data-grounded market analyses, industry essays).
