The Ultimate Drive

Ever driven a BMW? I hadn't until this weekend. It was The BMW Ultimate Drive in our own Wilmington, North Carolina. The Ultimate Drive is a program to raise money to give to the Susan G. Komen Foundation. I'd never been to anything like it before, nor has my family been affected by breast cancer.

One of the first things I noticed was that I felt a little out of place with my t-shirt and my jeans in the sea of khaki and polo shirts. Especially when I saw the set up inside Shaffer – white linen table cloths, etc. I was nervous – they’re going to let me drive one of their cars? These start at $40,000.

The majority of the people there didn't seem to be nervous though, many of them looked completely nonchalant about the whole thing. One man seemed less like he was there to raise money for Breast Cancer and more like he was looking for a way to test drive a BMW without the pressure of a salesman -- not that I blame him.

People were there to make lists to facilitate the process of getting people in cars in some kind of order and showing them a route to take. At first seemed like it would be like waiting for a table at a busy restaurant, but it turned out to be very different. People mixed and mingled and showed no impatience, which was helped by the fact that there was plenty of food, drink and beautiful weather.

The fund raiser works by driving the cars, therefore people come to drive the cars. BMW has a special set of cars for this program. They are all silver with a few solid pink squares on them and "The Ultimate Drive" written on the side of them. Because of this, they are easy to pick out going down I-40. It seemed that the police knew what was going on and had decidely made them selves scarce, as pulling over one of these cars would probably look bad. And people took full advantage of this. These cars were flying, several managing to hit triple digits.

When you come back from driving a car, you get to sign a car they had set up on the inside of the building. The car will eventually end up in a museum somewhere, probably with ten or eleven others -- one for each year that BMW has done this. You can see the happiness on people's faces. They feel good. And why shouldn't they? It's a fun experience and they feel they are helping to support a good cause.

There is really only one quote that stuck out to me and unfortunately it is not what I consider a positive. BMW had one of their wagons avaible to drive amongst the Z4's and the 328i convertibles. I heard one girl remark to a group standing around that, "They [the facilitators] asked if I wanted to drive the wagon and I laughed at them." I was surprised that someone would scorn driving the car while she wanted on another simply because it was a wagon especially since BMW donates money by the mile. I don't think however that this was the general feeling of those who came because I'm sure I heard some one else say, "I wouldn't laugh at them. It's for breast cancer."