Reinventing the Wheel

Concept

Every Indian car conversation ends in the same place. Nice car, but what’s the resale value? We’d like to make a show that answers the question every week, on camera, with money at stake.

Reinventing the Wheel follows two hosts, two well-known creators who are funny together and know a little too much about cars, as they drive around India buying the saddest cars they can find at auction. Bank repossessions, government disposals, insurance write-offs, that one Skoda nobody wants. They buy it cheap, drive it to the nearest 3M Car Care studio, and put it back together. Paint correction, PPF, interiors, headlights, whatever it takes to make the thing look like it was never owned by anyone. Then they sell it, and we show the receipt.

Every episode has the same three beats. The buy, the fix, the sale. The drama is in the gap between what they paid and what they got, and in whether the two of them can agree on anything at all along the way.

The season runs on a kitty. They start with a fixed amount and have to finish with more. Every episode adds or subtracts from it, so there’s a scoreboard the audience can follow, arguments about who cost the team money, and a genuine question of whether the whole thing ends in profit or in tears.

For 3M, the studio is the middle act of every episode, and the before-and-after is the whole point of the show. The audience watches a car go from unsellable to sold, and the thing that happened in between is 3M. No product demo has ever had that many people rooting for it.

The hosts bring the audience, so the media budget is mostly the cars. Eight episodes, twelve to fifteen minutes, on YouTube and the hosts’ own channels, with shorts cut for reels. We’d cast the hosts with 3M and shoot a pilot in Bengaluru.