THE
TERMS.

I am putting €30,000 of my own money toward a Mercedes-Benz CLE, which I intend to buy around December 2026. This site lets other people top up that budget. The more the budget grows, the better the car I can actually go and buy.

Two things on that car are up for grabs: the license plate and the plate holder text. Companies that want something bigger can email me directly.

The premise is a joke. The car, the money, and the promises on this page are not.

This is the most important paragraph on the page, so it gets its own section.

• Everything you pay here is a donation toward the car budget. You are not buying a product, a service, a share, or an advertising placement.
• Donations are non-refundable. Not if someone outbids you. Not if you change your mind. Not if you decide the whole thing was silly. Once it clears Stripe, it is in the car fund.
• Being the top plate or the top holder text is a display honour plus a real-world promise from me, not a purchased good.
• Money goes to me personally, through my personal Stripe account. This is not a registered charity and your payment is not a tax-deductible charitable gift.
• Card processing happens entirely at Stripe. I never see your card number.

If you cannot comfortably lose the amount you are about to send, please do not send it.

There is no separate “bid” you can lose. Your bid is the cumulative total of every payment you have ever made on this site. Pay €30 today and €25 next month and your standing is €55. Nothing expires, nothing gets refunded when you are passed, and there is no credit to redeem — your earlier money is still working for you.

• To take the lead on the plate your cumulative total must be at least €50 and at least €10 above the current leader’s total. For the holder it is €20 and €5 above.
• Smaller donations are still welcome and still count toward your cumulative total and toward the car budget. They just will not move you into the lead until they clear the numbers above. The minimum single payment is €2, because of card fees.
• Ties go to whoever got there first. If two totals are level, the earlier one keeps the lead.
• The €5 verification refills described below also count toward your cumulative total. You are never punished for checking a plate.
• Leaderboards show a display name and a total. If you do not give a name you appear as Anonymous. Your email address is never shown publicly.
• Whoever leads each auction at the moment I buy the car wins it. There is no separate closing ceremony, no sniping window, no extensions.

The big number on the homepage is €30,000 plus everything raised, gross. Gross means before Stripe’s processing fees, which are roughly 1.5% plus €0.25 on European cards and higher on international ones. So the cash that actually lands in my account is a few percent below the displayed figure, and the real car I can buy is a few percent cheaper than the headline suggests.

I show gross because it is the number you contributed to, and I am telling you about the gap here rather than hiding it.

Plates are Romanian standard format: county B (two or three digits) or IF (two digits), then three letters. The site enforces the DRPCIV formatting rules — no Q, no I or O as the first letter, no zero-only number groups, and a blocklist of combinations the authorities will not issue. If the site rejects your combination, that is the rule, not my taste.

To find out whether a plate is already on the road I query regcheck.org.uk, a third-party vehicle data service. Here is exactly what that is worth:

• A hit means the plate is probably in use. A miss means it is likely available. Both directions can be wrong, and both can be out of date — one of my own test cars still shows up on a Romanian plate while it is physically in Spain.
• The check is advisory in both directions and is never a guarantee. DRPCIV at the registration desk is the only real answer.
• Your first payment of any amount unlocks 5 free checks, for life. After those, checks are €5 each, and as noted above that €5 also counts toward your bid.
• A check that comes back “taken” still uses up a check. I pay for the API call either way. A bad answer is still an answer.
• If you re-check a plate you already checked in the last 7 days, I serve you the cached result and do not charge you a check.
• There is a daily ceiling on total lookups across the whole site as an anti-abuse measure. If you hit it, checks come back the next day and no credit is consumed.
• When a plate is taken I show you the car currently wearing it — make, model, year, as reported by the API. That is the fun part. It is also third-party data I did not verify.

Order of operations: pay first, verify after. Your position on the leaderboard and your chosen plate string are independent. An unverified or unavailable plate never costs you your rank — you just pick a different combination.

This is a hard promise: a personalised plate of the plate winner’s choosing will be registered on the physical car. Not a mock-up, not a render — the actual metal on the actual bumper, at the actual registration.

The honest caveat is that DRPCIV, not me, decides which exact combinations get issued, and availability moves between now and registration day. So:

• Near registration day I contact the winner on the email address from their payment or sign-in and confirm the exact combination. Keep that inbox alive.
• If DRPCIV rejects or cannot issue that exact combination, the winner picks again from what is available, as many times as it takes. The guarantee is a personalised plate of your choosing, not one specific string of characters.
• If a winner is unreachable for 14 days after I first write to them, I will register a plate of my own choosing so the car can go on the road, and their name stays on the leaderboard.
• The money stays in the pot either way. A plate DRPCIV will not issue is not grounds for a refund — see section 02.
• Same idea for the holder: the winning text gets physically printed on the plate holder I order and fit to the car, and shown on the site.

Nothing you submit appears on the homepage, on the 3D car, or on the real vehicle until I have personally approved it. That applies to plate combinations, sponsor names, sponsor links, and holder text.

• While something is waiting on me, the previously approved entry stays on the hero and the new leader is shown as “pending approval”. Their leaderboard position is not affected.
• Editing your plate, sponsor line, or holder text resets approval and sends it back through the queue.
• I will reject anything hateful, harassing, obscene, deceptive, illegal, impersonating a real person or brand without authority, or anything that would get the car keyed. This is a judgement call and it is mine.
• A rejection is not a refund. You submit something else. If I reject in bad faith, tell me and I will fix it — but the decision is mine to make.
• Sponsor lines are a display name plus an optional link. No logos in this version. Links must go somewhere I would be comfortable sending a stranger.
• Physical branding on the car lasts one year from the day it goes on, plate holder text and body placements alike. After that it comes off unless we agree on a renewal.
• By submitting text or a link you confirm you have the right to use it, and you give me permission to display it on the site, on the car, and in photos and videos of the car — including after the campaign ends.

The milestone ladder on the homepage maps the car budget to a real CLE specification, using current market prices plus a buffer for import, transport, RAR, registration and the inevitable surprise.

• Milestones are targets, not promises. They are built on today’s prices. If the market moves before December 2026, the closest achievable specification wins and I will say so publicly rather than quietly downgrading.
• At close I buy the highest fully funded tier. Not the next one up, however close it got.
• Surplus above a tier becomes real options on that car — seats, paint, packages — not a different car, and not my pocket money.
• Below the first tier the site shows a warming-up state with the distance to the first qualifying CLE. If the campaign never reaches it, I buy the best car the budget supports, publish exactly what I bought and exactly what it cost, and still honour the plate and holder promises.

Once a tier is locked in, the actual configurator choices — exterior colour, interior, key options — go to an amount-weighted vote among donors. Every euro you have donated is one vote. Someone who gave €500 has five hundred times the say of someone who gave €1, which is the only version of this that seemed fair.

• The vote runs near the close, in December 2026, over the real options available on the car at the tier reached. The voting screen is not part of this first version of the site.
• A running colour poll may open earlier and feed the colour of the 3D car on the homepage. That poll is for fun and is not the binding vote.
• If a voted option is unavailable, discontinued, or would delay delivery past the point of sanity, I take the nearest equivalent and explain why.

You pay first and get an account after. Stripe collects your email at checkout, and a magic link to that same address later lets you manage your plate, run checks, and top up. There is no password to forget and no database of your details beyond what Stripe already holds.

• I store the minimum against your Stripe customer record: your chosen plate, sponsor line, holder text, approval status, and how many checks you have left.
• Your email is never shown publicly and I do not sell, rent, or share it. I will email you about this campaign, the car, and your entry. That is it.
• Payment data lives with Stripe; plate lookups go to regcheck.org.uk; the site runs on Vercel. Those are the only third parties involved. There is no analytics or tracking on this site.
• Want your public entry removed or your name changed? Email me and I will do it. Removal does not undo the donation.

I am one person building this in public, so here is the honest risk section.

• If I am somehow unable to buy the car — illness, accident, something legal — I will publish the full amount raised and refund donors pro rata, minus fees already paid to Stripe. That is the one and only refund scenario on this page, and it is about catastrophe, not about changing your mind.
• If the campaign runs past December 2026 for boring reasons (stock, shipping, paperwork), I post the new date. Delay is not cancellation.
• I may change these terms. Material changes get announced on the site and dated here. Changes are not retroactive: the version in force when you paid is the one that governs your donation, and I will keep the old versions available on request.
• I can refuse or reverse any payment that looks fraudulent, charged back, or designed to abuse the leaderboard, and remove the associated entry.
• This site is provided as-is. Romanian law applies, and if we genuinely cannot sort something out between us, the courts of Bucharest have jurisdiction. I would much rather you just emailed me.

The 3D car on the homepage is “Mercedes-Benz CLE Coupe and Cabriolet” by Nieve5677, published on Sketchfab and used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). The model has been optimised and re-textured for the web. Neither the model author nor Sketchfab endorses this campaign.

The license plate on this site is drawn with a free DIN 1451-derived typeface and is a fan-made illustration, not an official document. Mercedes-Benz is a trademark of Mercedes-Benz Group AG. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Mercedes-Benz in any way. I am just a person who likes their cars a lot.

Vehicle data comes from regcheck.org.uk and is used advisorily, as described in section 05.