Hasta La Gadget!

Four two-person teams have left four cities: Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Tampa Bay, and are all on their way to Dallas, Texas in custom-designed Mercedes-Benz cars today, using Twitter for fuel. Their cars aren’t physically running on tweets of course, but virtually they are: the reason Mercedes-Benz says the race is “Tweet-Fueled” is because each of the four cities have to get the support of their home cities to drum up enough support on Twitter to get them to the finish line in Dallas. 

The route is 1500 miles from each city, and they have three days to get there. Along the way, the teams will rely on Twitter activity to “fuel” their vehicles, meaning any retweeting, @-replies, or use of the cities’ team hashtags apply to keep their cars headed down the road. At the end of the day, any “unused fuel” will translate into points that the racing teams can use towards social media challenges they’ll get along the way, like tweeting photos of other Mercedes-Benz vehicles they see along the way or stopping by a local high-school or college to tweet a photo of themselves with supporters. 

The winning team (the one with the most points at the end of the race) will get a 2012 C-Class Mercedes-Benz coupe, and Twitter followers who support the winning team are entered into a drawing for a trip for two to a Mercedes-Benz sponsored event, or one of 20 “Most Valuable Tweeter” awards and prizes. You can follow the race live at Facebook (a little ironic) or by following the Mercedes-Benz Tweet Race account.