Jump In My Car

Who lives in Berlin doesn’t need a car. The cramped streets, packed transit, and impossible parking make sure of that. Some drives you could walk faster. But nearly three years in the city and there’s nothing like hitting the Autobahn with the music loud and the throttle all the way down. Mercedes invited me to Stuttgart to drive their new cars and see how they work. I wasn’t about to say no.

We showed up in Baden-Württemberg around the time the airport nearly exploded, grabbed some beers in the park, and headed for the Mercedes museum. They fed us well and walked us through automotive history with someone who lived it. I maybe caught feelings for an intern somewhere in the tour—history’s not my strong suit anyway.

The hotel bar that night was the kind of chaos that somehow made sense. We drank with designers and photographers, people who worked at the museum, random people I hadn’t expected to see. Pizza and beer at sunrise. By some miracle, we all managed to show up the next morning more or less standing upright.

Then it was into the design studio, the actual thinking behind the cars and what comes next. Real people who genuinely cared about building something good, not just hitting quarterly targets. You felt it the whole time. After that we got to drive them ourselves around Stuttgart, though I nearly caused a highway pileup because either the navigation system bullshitted me or I took the wrong exit—probably both.

I was genuinely surprised how much fun the trip was. Not in the cynical promotional-tour way. The whole thing had this vibe of people who actually wanted to make great cars. That alone was worth the drive.