Welcome to my Museum of Failed Ideas (part one)
aka that time I turned car talk into a business… and back into car talk.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been jotting down weird business ideas on sticky notes. They’d pop up in notebooks, coat pockets, car dashboards. Like breadcrumbs of creativity and occasional delusion.
Some of those ideas actually turned into something real. Most didn’t.
But my all-time favorite failure? DreamDrives.
It started with a question I loved asking at parties:
“If you had a million euros and could buy ten cars with it, what would be in your garage?”
As a car guy, I could talk about this for hours.
A cool daily driver. That obscenely loud one you’re not sure is legal. A mint-condition version of your very first car. Maybe something nostalgic. Maybe something undervalued but on the rise — like a Peugeot 205 GTI, an air-cooled Porsche 911, a Donkervoort S8AT. Or even a DeLorean, because who doesn’t want to time-travel stylishly?
At one point I thought: what if I could turn this into a business?
Fractional ownership of iconic cars. You’d invest in a garage of collectibles, and actually get to enjoy them — not just look at an app.
Scratching my own itch.
That’s exactly where it went wrong.
Because here’s what I learned:
- If you really want to invest in a car, you shouldn’t drive it. You should store it in a sealed, dehumidified crypt :-)
- The business model was shaky at best (insurance, wear and tear, scheduling, logistics… all nightmares).
- Scaling? Brutal. Try finding a mechanic you trust with a Ferrari. Now try finding one you trust with ten cars you don’t own alone.
Could it have worked if I’d stuck with it longer? Maybe.
But we had great fun invalidating the idea. Plus, I did get to keep a Donkervoort out of it. So I’m calling that a win.
And hey — now I get to talk about it at parties again.
To be continued.
