Three cities, three adaptations: Cologne, Mönchengladbach, Berlin reveal surprising driving lessons—and what they mean for your next commute.
There is an observation about the Cars & Coffee format that wasn't in any of our plans but that every edition confirmed. The drivers differed surprisingly little from city to city. In the terms of our current DriverDNA methodology: in nearly every edition, the majority of participants carried a recognizable Showstopper share and a clear Connoisseur share. Anyone who comes to a Cars & Coffee — whether in Düsseldorf, Cologne, Mönchengladbach or Berlin — typically comes in this blend. That belongs to the logic of the format.
What differed strongly, though, was the city. More precisely: the space in which the format took place. The hours before and after the event itself. And what the city does to the atmosphere, without an organizer being able to influence it much. Three adaptations showed us this each in their own way.
Cologne — the great show
The location we found in Cologne was a round square on the water in the Medienpark. Visually strong, acoustically open, easy to overlook. The result: Cologne was visually our most imposing edition. The cars stood in an almost natural half-circle choreography, the gaze pulled from one corner of the square to the other, and the city itself sent along a friendly, indirect audience. Cologne became a show.
That had strengths and limits. A show pulls attention. A show also shifts the center of gravity — away from the conversation between drivers, toward the staging. We accepted the logic and didn't argue with it. Cologne was allowed to be Cologne. That drew an audience of its own that wouldn't have shown up in Düsseldorf in the same way.
Düsseldorf — the class reunion that dissolves outward
Düsseldorf had a different logic. Here Cars & Coffee was less show than class reunion. The conversations began as the first cars rolled in, because most of the people already knew each other. After the official end of the format, the drivers fanned out across the city — to the Kö, to the Medienhafen, to one of the three or four restaurants that are made for exactly these Sunday afternoons. Düsseldorf was never only what happened on the parking lot. It was always also what came after the parking lot.
That city logic was one of the reasons the Düsseldorf edition carried the curatorial main weight for years. It didn't only offer drivers a format, it offered them a half-day choreography. Anyone driving in from Cologne, Aachen or Bonn at 8 a.m. on a Sunday knew that things wouldn't end at 2 p.m.
Mönchengladbach Night Edition — Need for Speed at the airport
Mönchengladbach was the most radical translation. Instead of a Sunday morning on an inner-city square, we had the Mönchengladbach airport. Instead of 7 a.m. daylight, we had 9 p.m. under LED bars and runway lighting. Instead of a static format, we had a dynamic driving element — taxi rides in a Lexus from the VLN program and in an LMP prototype, which expanded the experience by a dimension no classical Cars & Coffee carries in its toolkit.
It was a Need-for-Speed feeling, honestly — not a term I would use in every editorial, but the exact one here. The black-asphalt staging of the airport, the rumble under the cars, the option to ride along in an actual race car. Cars-&-Coffee logic, translated into a time of day and a sensory architecture the original format didn't offer. Mönchengladbach worked because the longing for the format was honest — and because we made the translation with the courage to distance ourselves from the original.
Berlin — the Carfactory and the drive afterward
Berlin ran at the Carfactory, one of the few Berlin locations that lends dignity to a sportscar format rather than merely permitting it. We designed the Berlin edition somewhat more exclusively. That fit the place, the Berlin driver profile and the fact that a city like Berlin doesn't carry an edition that would only be a weaker copy of a Düsseldorf model.
What was actually beautiful about Berlin was the drive we attached to the event together with a local cooperation partner. The static format character became a moving thing. Drivers who had met on the parking lot drove off together afterwards — and in exactly that transition, Berlin was paradoxically closer to the core of the format than some edition with higher driver density. Because Cars Connect People happened there as motion, not as standing conversation.
What ties all four together
If I had to take a single image from all the editions that describes what Cars & Coffee does, it would be this: someone in his early twenties who has just bought his first sportscar stands next to a collector in his mid-seventies. Both have a good coffee in their hand. Both speak at eye level, on first-name terms, about the shared passion. There is no VIP wristband, no status barometer, no invisible precedence. The one thing that binds them — the love for a particular car, a particular driver culture — works so precisely that the generational gap becomes irrelevant for the moment.
That is exactly what makes this format what it is. And that is also the reason we insist at DRIVTO that the platform is not a VIP lounge. It is a parking lot with coffee. Just digital. The eye level is non-negotiable.
What we took from the friction
A last point that matured across the four adaptations: not every driver wanted the same format. Some increasingly asked for smaller editions with a focus on driving experience — less standing, more driving. From that we developed our own sub-formats that kept the Cars-&-Coffee principle but prioritized the movement share. That line is one of the roots of what DRIVTO today counts as drive formats — and also the reason that formats like Tute Bene Hillclimb or Testf1rst sit so prominently in our recommendation logic. They are not a copy of a Düsseldorf reality. They are the next adaptation of the same code.
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).
