DriveNow currently offers to sign up for 19€ and get 90 minutes for free to celebrate their start in Düsseldorf,
so a collegue and me decided to give it a try. When we went to Sixt at Ostbahnhof the first time, the queue was too long, as
we wanted to eat pizza nearby, so we went for the pizza first, but when we came back the registration system was down.
So I tried again yesterday morning at a different Sixt station and it worked flawlessly.

In the evening I read through the FAQs and found an interesting fact. If you pick up a car which has less than 25% fuel and
refuel it, you get 20 minutes free. I quickly found a Mini Cooper Cabriolet at 23% just a few metro stops away, so I decided to do
him a favor 😉

I quickly found the Mini, but as it was quite dark. Opening the car took about 20 seconds (DriveNow reserves a certain amount
of money on the credit card an opens the car once it was successful). They have a modified smartphone (7′ screen) in each car, which
asked me how clean the interior was and asked whether I noticed any damages. The time starts counting after answering these
questions, so you can make yourself comfortable in the car and adjust it to your needs. I couldn’t find out how to fold out the side mirrors and since the
the rear mirror is not really useful in a Mini Cabriolet while the roof is closed I drove to the gas stop really carefully.
There I stopped the car and was asked whether I wanted to park, return or fill up the car, so I chose fill up and it displayed the
PIN of its Shell card. I had no problems paying with that card and the whole stop at the gas station took just about 5 minutes.
There I also managed to fold out the door mirrors and chose “Home” for navigation. Drive-Now has a quite innovative feature – you
can define several places online and they are accessible from every car, I find this pretty useful.

So I drove back via the Autobahn (Isarring) and chose the first parking spot I found. Giving the car back was easy and once you lock
it with your DriveNow ID the time stops counting. It took me exactly 21 minutes, but since I got a 20 minutes bonus for refueling
I just used 1 minute 🙂