There Are No Free Wheels

Esquire, April, 2000 by Ted C. Fishman

THERE'S SOMETHING PROFOUNDLY unfair about picking a posh suburb as the test market for free automobiles. As if one of the nation's most affluent towns, already strewn with Lexuses and Land Rovers, didn't have enough going for it, residents are now driving free cars. For that, they can thank Skip Lehman, a Chicago native who applied his Stanford M.B.A.

to creating the new economy's boldest giveaway. For the past three months, the village of Barrington du Lac, Illinois, has served as the beta market for FreeWheelz, a new e-business Lehman hopes will soon ply America's roads with thousands of new, Internet-pumped, self-financing, free cars. Talk to any of the "FreeWheelerz" who paid zilch for one of Lehmans's cars and they tell you their hero will transform the auto industry more than Henry Ford did. The revolution will get rolling in full on April 1, when FreeWheelz launches on the Web ...