Monterey Car Week car service.
Chauffeured transport across Car Week — Pebble Beach, Laguna Seca, Carmel Valley and the auction rooms in Monterey — with the same car and the same chauffeur held for the whole week.
All-inclusive fare, quoted upfront. Free cancellation: 6 hours for airport pickups, 24 hours for hourly and point-to-point.
Airport transfers need 6+ hours’ notice; everything else needs 24+. For a last-minute ride, text +1 (408) 883-9848 with your full name, the pick-up address, your flight number if it is an airport pick-up, the drop-off address and anything else we should know. You can also call, or email support@pblimo.com.
For one week in August the Monterey Peninsula holds more cars than it has road. Everything worth seeing sits inside about fifteen miles — Pebble Beach, Laguna Seca, Carmel Valley, downtown Carmel and the auction rooms in Monterey — and for that week those fifteen miles behave like fifty.
The useful question is never how far apart two venues are. It is where a car can legally stop at each of them. Hotel forecourts, club entrances and the lawns themselves close to general parking during Car Week, and the set-down points move from day to day. Holding that information is most of the job.
Most people keep the same car and the same chauffeur for the week rather than booking ride by ride. It is simpler, but it is also better: a chauffeur who drove Thursday afternoon already knows what Friday will cost in time.
Five places, fifteen miles, one week
Car Week is not one event in one place. It is a dozen of them spread across the peninsula, and the ground in between is the part that goes unplanned.
The lawn sits inside a gated drive, and traffic on it builds long before anything opens. Arrivals are planned against the gate rather than the programme, and the pickup point is agreed before you are dropped, away from the main exit.
The circuit is twenty minutes from Monterey on a road that carries the whole county. During Car Week that twenty minutes is not twenty minutes, and the last two miles are the slow ones. We travel against the arrival flow rather than into it.
The gatherings in the valley are one road in and the same road out, with nowhere to wait at the top. Cars stand off and come in on call, which is the only version of this that works when several hundred people leave at once.
When Ocean Avenue closes for a street display, the nearest legal set-down is several blocks out and uphill. Worth knowing before you are dressed for the evening rather than when you arrive.
Previews and sales finish when they finish, not when the schedule says. A car held on the clock is worth more here than a booked pickup you then have to move twice.
The same chauffeur across the auctions, the circuit and the lawn.
Where a car can legally stop at each venue, checked for the day.
Previews and dinners run long. The car waits rather than being rebooked.
Travelling in for the week?
Most Car Week arrivals come through SFO or San José, and the drive down is around two hours before the peninsula fills. Booked together, the airport leg and the week are one chauffeur from the terminal onward.
Airport transfers
One car, one chauffeur, seven days
The auctions, the circuit and the lawn are the same week and the same driver. By Friday he knows what each road costs at each hour, which is the part no booking form can tell you.
Vehicles for this service
