The offices of Auto Driveaway, the company John Sohl founded in 1952, fill most of the 14th floor at 310 S. Michigan. Sohl’s company, the largest driveaway outfit in the world, is responsible for about 60,000 car deliveries a year. Some of those are made by truck, but the bulk of Auto Driveaway’s deliveries are made by nonprofessional drivers in need of transportation, known in the business as “casuals.” Though it is perfectly legal, a cloud seems to hang over this practice; some ads for auto movers in the Yellow Pages assure car owners “no casuals.”
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The auto driveaway business is a hybrid–part moving service, part travel agency–whose history centers on two years, 1932 and 1965. The first, according to Sohl, is the year the first casual driveaway business was started, by a woman named Catherine Raye in Detroit. “No one knows much about her, though I met her a few times. She told two Cadillac owners in California that they could have their new cars driven to them at $25 apiece or shipped by truck from the factory at $350 apiece. She went through about five husbands, all of whom opened driveaway companies. When some agents from the Interstate Commerce Commission came to check on her one day, she opened her desk drawer, laid a gun on the desk, and said, “Get out of here.” She was quite a character. I liked the gal.
The driveaway business, having a countercultural quality from the time of its founding by Catherine Raye, has benefited from the loosening of social ties over the past few decades. “The most common users of driveaway cars are couples,” Sohl says. “We used to put only husbands and wives together because we were afraid of the Mann Act,” he says, referring to the 1910 statute that prohibits the crossing of state lines for immoral purposes. “When we first went into business in 1952 we had a copy of the Mann Act on every office wall. It’s still mainly couples who travel, but over the past 15 years many of them have been two women.”
It is true that traveling by driveaway car is more unavoidably human than taking a bus or a plane. “The main reason people use driveaway cars is excitement. It’s a great way to see the country. We have a fax list that goes out twice a week to all our offices telling which cars are ready for delivery; we’re the only company with this service. You can pick up a car in Chicago, deliver it to Des Moines, get another car there, deliver it to Albuquerque, and keep going as long as you want. Two summers ago two nuns from Boston covered the country in one of our cars in five weeks.” Despite the catcalls of truckers and other detractors, the driveaway industry has found a niche.
