Meet the final (?) four winners of Project Drive-In

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Today, Honda announced four more winners of its Project Drive-In contest to award digital projection systems. The latest lucky drive-ins include:

Ocala Drive-In, Ocala FL, the only Florida entrant in the contest.

Starlite Drive-In, Cadet MO, which somehow escaped our seemingly exhaustive four-part list of news stories about the candidates.

Monetta Drive-In, Monetta SC, The Big MO.

StateLine Drive-In, Elizabethton TN, sorry that I misspelled StateLine as two words during the project round-up.

So far Honda hasn’t taken my forwarded suggestion to finance the 140+ other drive-ins that still need digital equipment, but it is extending its fundraiser through the end of 2013. I think that local fundraisers stand a lot better chance of success than this national effort, but what do I know?

Here’s one more way to help. Honda has donated a 2014 Odyssey Touring Elite as an incentive on the Project Drive-In fundraising page. (You’ll need to scroll way down to the bottom of the page to see it.) If you make a $50,000 donation, you get the brand new Odyssey minivan, and you get the warm feeling of knowing that you help fund an additional digital projector to save another drive-in from closing. Plus you get your name in Honda’s next drive-in video. If you were planning on buying one of these anyway, why not do it here?

Project Drive-In roundup 4: The list that wouldn’t die

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In the third installment of our roundup of candidates for Honda’s Project Drive-In, I predicted that Honda would choose more than five lucky recipients of digital projectors. What I really didn’t anticipate was that Honda would reopen voting for the second set of winners.

With another round of voting comes another round of candidates that we haven’t mentioned so far, along with some (marked with an asterisk) who saw new stories about them after voting was extended. If you’re reading this, you’re already online, so go vote for your favorite!

* This drive-in was in a previous roundup, but a new story has been published about it after Honda extended voting for Project Drive-In.

A brilliant suggestion to Honda: Finance the losers

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Project Drive-In logoAs we continue our long, extended Drive-In Project journey, we will pause to thank Honda for its generous support in supplying nine digital projectors to struggling drive-in theaters. And then we will pass along a great suggestion posted yesterday evening.

The Johnson City TN Press ran an article about the State Line Drive-In of nearby Elizabethton and its reaction to Honda’s voting extension giving the State Line another chance. One Gabe Curde, possibly a Johnson City real estate agent, left a superb suggestion as a comment to that story: “Why doesn’t Honda offer 0% financing on these projectors to any half way qualified drive-in owners who don’t win a contest?”

That’s simply brilliant. Consider the stories about the Apache (Globe AZ), making it more famous on its deathbed than it ever was in life. Owner Bobby Hollis told a Cronkite News Service reporter, “Nobody is gonna loan me the money to convert to digital. Trust me, I’ve looked.” Honda has the resources to offer Hollis and any other drive-in owner some really good financing on projectors. And it would even help publicize Honda’s financing arm for wavering new-car buyers. C’mon, Honda, how about it?