The golf club car park has long been a battleground for premium car makers, yet in an era where brand loyalty is diminishing and newcomers are circling around the established players, the sport is being used in an altogether different way.

Golf offers something unique in sport in allowing amateur players to play in the same sporting arenas as legends of the game. While you can’t go and take a penalty from the same place as Harry Kane at Wembley, hit a six like Ben Stokes at Lord’s or serve an ace like Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon, you can go and play St Andrews or Pebble Beach and attempt the same winning putt as Rory McIlroy.

Car makers recognise that and are now hosting their own tournaments on a vast international scale at some of the world’s best courses, designed solely for customers, rather than corporate entertainment. 

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More than 200,000 car buyers will take part in amateur golf tournaments organised by car companies this year. So big have these events become that they're now the largest in the world for amateur golf, thus opening up another front on which car makers can do battle. 

Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche are among those offering competitions organised with customer retention firmly in mind. They offer not only epic prizes but also, more memorably, “truly money-can’t-buy experiences”, as Mercedes puts it.

Many of these tournaments have evolved from traditional sponsorship deals that these German brands have had with golf tournaments - and now newcomer Genesis is getting in on the act, with its headline sponsorship of the Scottish Open each July.

The Korean firm is following a path well travelled. Yet no car maker has gone so far as to copy JCB in building its own golf course, as the construction machinery giant has done next to its Staffordshire base. Give it time… 

BMW’s roots in golf perhaps run deepest in the UK, through its 20-year-old headline sponsorship of the biggest professional tournament in the UK, the PGA Championship at Wentworth (previously sponsored by Toyota and Volvo), and with more than 90% of its retailers having proactively engaged in partnerships with local golf clubs.

These are used both as venues for qualifying rounds for BMW’s own International Golf Cup (claimed to be the world’s largest amateur golf tournament, the next edition of which will culminate in Bangkok) and for EV test-drive events and product placement.