Sitting in a tiny, Italian restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, my wife asked me what was my biggest takeaway from my day representing MINI USA’s Final Test Test Drive program at the New York International Auto Show (NYIAS). I couldn’t answer her without a broken voice and tears escaping under my glasses and down my cheeks.
No exaggeration: it was one of the most important, fulfilling days of my life.
I’m not your typical car guy. I don’t work on my car. I’ve never changed the oil on anything but a lawn mower. Outside of my wrap and its matching wheels, I don’t typically spend money on anything but repairs and consumables.
I just like to look at cars.
All my life, I’ve been enamored by the art form that is vehicle design and intrigued by how brands define themselves. I read car magazines and Sharpie’d custom ink on my Hot Wheels. I drew concept vehicles at my home school desk. The first logos I ever designed were crafted for groups of the vehicles I drew—logos brought to life by Prismacolor pencils before I ever learned how to bend lines with a computer. I made lists of my favorite cars and then updated the lists. I saved brochures that car dealerships use to show you model options.
Fast forward a good 20 years. The kid in me was about to have my doors blown off.
The NYIAS isn’t even the biggest auto show in North America, let alone the world. (Geneva’s auto show dwarfs even our biggest in Detroit.) Yet it stopped just short of sensory overload. Massive, curved LED screens—and flat ones literally as long as my house—swooshed through precision driving videos or frenetically flipped through images of design inspirations. Concept cars and new releases twirled lazily on elevated platforms. Cars literally hung from the ceiling; million-dollar rides gleamed behind glass knee walls; electric cars whirred around an indoor track; the blue light of LED headlamps and taillights glowed through the massive sheets that covered unintroduced models.
I told Crystal, “It was like being a seven year old going to FAO Schwarz and seeing all the toys I ever dreamed about and realizing that I would never get to play with them—and that I was okay with that.”
See, my biggest takeaway from the day was contentment.
On the train ride up to New York, Crystal asked me what my expectations were for this MINI USA experience. I told her that I didn’t know, that I just wanted to absorb it for what it would be. I didn’t know in advance that it would satiate some unfulfilled cravings.
- I had once dreamed of being an automotive journalist, and I got to rub shoulders with some to see what their job is actually like—at least at trade shows.
- In college and then again at my first career stop, I looked wistfully at ad agencies and public relations firms. At both my video shoot in Los Angeles and at the NYIAS, I got to witness some true professionals in that field do their work.
- I’ve been a MINI ambassador for years, and I got to talk to the media about that passion.
- I’ve loved rally cars since before I knew what rally racing was, and I got to open and explore the MINI-branded vehicle that won first, second, and third during the most recent Dakar rally.
- I’ve always wondered what it was like at the moment a manufacturer pulled the cover off their world debut, and I didn’t have to wonder any more.
I have a compulsive personality. I typically push the limits of the law of diminishing returns. On this day, though, as the crowd and noise subsided, I looked around and exhaled like I have during my last hour at various workplaces and living spaces.
I breathed it all in and then let the air escape my lungs.
It was enough.
I had tasted something good but didn’t overeat. I had felt the context—that this was just a gift of a moment, an anecdote in the storybook of my life. I felt totally comfortable, turning the page of that book to see where the story would take me next.
