New Driving Game: That’s My Car!

I’ve written here before about how my wife, kids and I like to play dumb driving games to pass the time, such as the alphabet game, yellow car I win, hey cow, punch bug, and more. But we recently came up with a new one that I absolutely love. It’s called “That’s my car!” It’s super simple and a great way to get kids interested in spotting cool/interesting/unique cars on the road. Or just fun for some friendly competition on who can spot the best car. The goal is to spot a cool car, and “claim it” by saying “that’s my car” before anyone else does. However, you only do this once, and once you have your car, you can’t pick a different one. This makes things tricky, because if you pick one early on, you’re risking that there will be a better one later. And if you wait too late, you might end up having to pick whatever’s in your neighbor’s driveway when you get home. Here’s the step by step version of the rules:

1. At the beginning of the drive, someone must declare that the game has begun. This prevents someone from seeing a GT-R in the middle of the drive and claiming that they’re playing. And yes, this has already happened and sparked a huge argument, which led to this rule.
2. Each person has to claim a car by saying “that’s my car” and then saying which car they’ve picked. Whoever says it first gets the car.
3. The idea is that in our perfect little world, this car would be yours, and could become your daily driver, track car, or whatever. It’s just for fun, unless you and your friends are insanely rich and can play a crazy high stakes game of this.
4. You can only claim one car during the game. If you see a better car later, too bad.
5. The car must be in sight when you claim it. You can’t drive 20 miles away and then say “ah yeah you know what, I’m gonna take the 911 I saw back there. Nope. Make up your mind.
6. The game ends at the end of your drive. If you haven’t claimed a car yet, you have to pick one that you can see. You can’t pick the car that you’re in.
7. It’s up to the group to decide if there’s a “winner” or not. Sometimes it will be very clear that one person got the better car, other times you can argue about it for hours, which adds to the fun.

Since we started playing this, we’ve had a lot of fun, and it’s made long car rides a lot more interesting. Here are a few results of our games so far: Game 1 Wife’s car: Some sort of classic mobster car. We couldn’t get a clear look, but it was something like this: My car: 2015 Mustang, blue. Winner: Wife. While the Mustang is pretty awesome, the mobster car was pretty dang sweet. Just wish I could have seen it for more than a split second to find out what it was. Game 2 Son: Same blue Mustang Me: Crappy pickup carrying a camper. Winner: Son. I waited too long, and had to take the only thing I saw. Game 3 Wife: Mercedes G Wagon Me: BMW i8 Son: Corvette z06 Winner: Me. My wife absolutely loves the G Wagon, but we all agreed that the i8 was just ridiculously cool. This was also the first time any of us had seen one in person, and we got to follow it for about 5 miles. I looked up the stats, and they’re pretty impressive. 357 hp, 78 mpg, $140,700. If anyone plays this game, leave me a comment and let me know how it goes! It’s much better to play in areas that actually have decent cars of course. I don’t recommend playing on the Ohio Turnpike. Yikes.