Benjamin M. Monroe Blog: Event: 2018 Cars & Coffee By ATT-Performance

Monday, April 9, 2018

Event: 2018 Cars & Coffee By ATT-Performance

With Spring showing its shy face and the sun coming out, the temperatures are getting to short sleeve levels and the car shows are slowly popping up once again. While we cover US events extensively, this weekend we decided to cover an event on the other side of the pond. The place of the 2018 Cars & Coffee by ATT-Performance is the city of Rastatt in Germany. A small city by German terms (some 50,000 inhabitants), Rastatt is also a part of the bigger Baden-Württemberg state.

Together with the neighboring towns, the area is home to the factories of some of the most prestigious car brands. Stuttgart – where Porsche builds their cars – is just an hour away, and Bavaria – home of several BMW factories – is just 2-3 hours away on those unrestricted autobahns. The southern edges of the much-famed Black Forest and its impressive driving roads are just 20min away, while the famed Alpine roads are less than an hour to the South: perfect breeding ground for petrolheads.

This being a car production mecca, the area is filled with a population that loves cars, loves hanging out on weekends and enjoys showing off their aftermarket creations. While in the United States, you can pretty much install anything on your car and not worry about the police cracking down on you, in Germany, in 99 percent of the situations, any aftermarket part you install on your vehicle needs to have a Technischer Überwachungsverein approval.

The TÜV approval means that your parts, quality and production facilities are tested and certified thoroughly in various situations and can be safely installed on your vehicle. While in the early 2000s, not a lot of attention was brought on aftermarket tuning, with the rise of the car culture in Germany, police began to crack down on various tuner projects and their owners hard. While some objected to it, it really brought a lot of improvements to the market, weeded out the bad brands and products, and made everything safer. That being said, various tuning companies from the United States rely on local distributors to handle their Technischer Überwachungsverein approval and make their parts fully legal for use in Germany.

This event was held by ATT-Performance, one of the best aftermarket tuning shops in the country. An authorized dealership for brands like Akrapovic, KW Suspension, ADV.1 Wheels, Vorsteiner and others, they’ve ensured to help the brands they sell through their store, achieve the approval status they needed for most of the catalog offered, helping owners tune their vehicles in the safest way possible. This event marked both the start of the motoring season and a customer appreciation day that brought around 800+ cars and thousands of participants who spent their sunny Sunday morning and afternoon, checking out the rides, sipping coffee and beer (after all, this is Germany) and talking about cars.

With this being Germany, the local brands like BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen and VW comprised most of the grid. But, there were a few Italian and British supercars sweetening the lineup. In the media gallery below you’ll see several fully tuned BMW 1M, M2, M3, M4 and M5s, joined by several Audi R8 builds, followed by the likes of a McLaren P1, McLaren 675LT and Ferrari FF, Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio, Corvette Z06 and others. There were some impressive restored vehicles like the two Fiat 500e’s and several VW Golf and VW Beetle project cars.