Happy pre-Thanksgiving! We have so much to be thankful for here at Modern Dealership Magazine that we decided to get started with the car talk gratitude now …
We’ve got a super-exciting issue coming out next month, with the Terry Miller on the cover (and other industry VIPs inside: Glenn Lundy, Jessica Charris, Ali Reda, and more). We’re wrapping up our third year of magazine-making, allowing us to continue meeting and getting to know the brightest, most generous people in the biz. And our readers are pretty amazing, too – thank you to those of you who are participating in Off The Lot (next month’s question: Who is your favorite customer of all time? Respond here!), following us on Facebook, and just keeping in touch in general.
We’ve compiled a list of sweet, generous (or in some cases, plain indulgent) car gifts from recent years that we thought you might enjoy. Perhaps some conversation starters around the dining room table … has anyone in your family ever given or received a car as a gift?
To help quell their fears, children ages 2 to 7 at Doctors Medical Center in Modesto, Calif., are being given “mini cars” to drive themselves into surgery. They get to choose between a pink VW Beetle or a black Mercedes, with functioning headlights and taillights and even a radio so they can tune into music they like. The staff reports that worry and tears are being replaced by smiling faces!
Did you hear about the young man who walked 20 miles to make it to work on his first day? The night before Walter Carr was to start working for Bellhops Moving, a moving company, his car broke down. So he started walking at midnight to make sure he got to his first house to help pack up by 8 a.m. Walter’s never-give-up approach was rewarded two days later when the CEO of Bellhops drove from Tennessee to Georgia to give Walter his own vehicle. The owner of that first house was also inspired by Walter’s dedication – she started a GoFundMe page to help fix his car, which, last reported, had raised more than $30,000.
Notable in a different way, there was that time Malaysian businessman Jho Low gave Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries a $325,000 white Ferrari as a wedding gift back in 2011. Kim won the luxury car in their divorce battle, but U.S. courts might demand that it be returned. Low is wanted by the Malaysian government for misappropriating funds (estimated to be in the billions of dollars) from IMDB during his role as the project’s special advisor.
Speaking of Billions … remember when Bobby “Axe” Axelrod gave Axe Capital’s in-house performance coach, Wendy Rhoades, a brand-new Maserati GranTurismo Sport Coupe as a year-end bonus? Man, that was great. (You can see Axe standing in front of it in 0:29 of this clip.) And if you haven’t seen Billions yet, now you have something to binge-watch over the holiday!
In a related story: Last month, a Milwaukee police officer pulled over a mom who was driving her two kids around without car seats, because she couldn’t afford them. Instead of ticketing her, the officer bought car seats for the two young girls and even installed them. Pretty sweet.
Thanks, as always, for reading! Have a happy Thanksgiving!
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