No one was visiting Mitsubishi dealerships. They had fallen off the consideration lists of all but 4% of Americans. So when we launched the all-new Outlander Sport, we knew we couldn’t rely on people visiting a dealership to drive the car, so we let them drive it from their living rooms.

We rigged a real Outlander Sport so that it could be driven by remote control, and then put those controls in the hands of everyone on the web. Consumers were able to log-on from across the country and drive the car in real-time on a course in Southern California. And for the first time in a long time, Mitsubishi had people lining up to take their car for a spin.

A national television commercial, online banner ads and homepage takeovers, along with out of home in key markets drove people to the Live Drive site. From there, people could pre-register for their drives to ensure they would have a place in the queue when the test-drive launched. Once it was up, consumers were able to use Facebook and Twitter to invite friends to ride along with them during their test drives. They could even compare how well they drove on Mitsubishi’s Facebook leader board. This helped the site be passed along as people were drawn to the novelty of this technological first.

For the 10 day event, over 50,000 people signed up to take a test drive.25% of those who took the online test-drive chose to look for a dealer so they could take a test-drive in person.E-Leads shot up by over 2,000%.We set a Guinness World Record.For the first time in a long time, Mitsubishi was in the news and they couldn’t have been happier.Dodge even produced a national television commercial about it.