Peter Rivera watched Thursday as a man pulled up to his home and took to Rivera's car with an Exacto knife, a squeegee, and several square yards of blue-and-white vinyl.

About half an hour later Rivera's 1998 Ford Ranger was a rolling advertisement for an online insurance company: "Keep your insurance rates in check. LowestPremium.com."

The text is mingled with a blue banner on either side of the car and 10 big, white checkmarks – all plastered around Rivera's side-panels, tailgate, hood, and doors. The job, covering only part of his car, is known as a "half-wrap."

Rivera, a 34-year-old Berkeley waiter who commutes to San Francisco each day, wasn't an unwilling victim to this ad-jacking, of course. About two weeks earlier, he and his roommate had caught sight of a quarter-page print ad in SF Weekly placed by San Diego-based Autowraps.com.

The ad said they could earn $400 a month by surrendering their vehicle to the same kind of ads seen on San Francisco's MUNI buses and employee automobiles sporting their companies' dot-com logos – not to mention the Yahoo-outfitted taxicabs seen in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Both roommates soon signed up, and waited to be identified as 1,000 miles-per-month drivers with desirable travel habits. If selected, some advertiser would pin hopes for plenty of roadside exposure on disposable-income types.

Rivera and roommate salivated at the prospect of just about breaking even on their car payment.

"I was totally into it," Rivera said. "I'm still totally into it."

His partial wrap, dictated by the advertiser, nets Rivera $250 per month for a three-month run. A spate of premium cars, notably the 1999 Volkswagen Beetle and high-riding sport-utility vehicles, trucks, and vans win a $400 full-wrap rate. Lesser vehicles get $300 a month.

"That's free money," Rivera said. "My car payment's not that much. I have 0.9 percent financing, so basically I'm getting a free car."

Welcome to the business model built by Daniel Shifrin, founder and president of Autowraps.com.

"We're really getting jazzed about this," Shifrin said. "This is a national phenomenon."

Indeed, it seems to bring to life the hoax that was an Esquire magazine article about a supposed chance to get a free minivan draped in an ad for "Stay Fresh" sanitary napkins.

"People are calling like crazy," Shifrin said.

So far, the database is filled with about 5,000 willing drivers hoping to get draped. Nationwide, 150 cars have been wrapped in the company's three-month soft-launch period, with many dot coms among the clients eager to stake out new territory in the new economy's space-scarce ad world.

The name carries a hint as to Autowraps.com's business, but if you stopped in at their website, you might think you'd hit upon an environmentalist's mission statement.

"Today the personal vehicle dominates the outdoor landscape more than any other time in history.... The car is king of the outdoors. The sheer physical dominance of the car coupled with the worst traffic congestion levels in history make" – and here comes the clincher – "the personal vehicle a natural medium for outdoor advertising."

Shifrin said he simply saw an opportunity to capitalize, as Autowraps.com says, on "one of society's most counterproductive inventions."

"There are calamitous conditions out there, in traffic," he said. "I mean it's terrible, we're polluting the earth.

"But in the meantime people are stuck in their cars. What can we do? We can bring them messages, we can entertain them, we can inform them, we can educate them – which I think is going to be better off for all of us."

The underlying concept has been done before. "Beetle Billboards" positioned ads atop Volkswagen beetles in the '70s. And other companies have placed ads on drivers' back windshields.

But thanks to thin and remarkably subtle vinyl adhesive able to wrap pre-printed images around cars' curvy lines and corners, Autowraps has taken advertising to a new, and some might say, excessive level.

"Yahoo was excited about the product because the taxi ads it ran on its own were so successful," Shifrin said. "They said this is a great medium for us to continue with." And soon he had cars in Orange County, California, wrapped in Yahoo's purple and yellow "Do You Yahoo?" theme.

Andrew Everett, a 31-year-old physical therapist in Los Angeles, wears a full-wrap Yahoo ad with pride on his Jeep Cherokee, one of the premium $400 per month winners. He now washes and drives his SUV all the more carefully, feeling almost like he's working for Yahoo.

"I love it. It doesn't bother me at all, really. I definitely wash my car more than I used to in the past, and not just because they want you to keep (your) car clean."

That behavior is in fact stipulated, among other behaviors, in the driver's contract with Autowraps.com: driving within the speed limit, obeying all traffic laws, and no "road rage" behavior.

Such unsightliness on the pavement would be a no-no when it comes to respectable brand management.

"(The contract) says you're not going to flip people off and drive erratically and drive intoxicated, and this, that, and the other thing," Rivera said.

Neither he nor Everett mind the idea of having a business agreement dictating their daily behavior.

It's a good thing too, because Autowraps.com plans to monitor such behavior. A percentage of the cars will be equipped with global positioning units that ensure not only that drivers are driving the 1,000-mile-per-month minimum along the specified routes, but keeping within the speed limit too.

"We are extremely concerned with driver safety," Shifrin said. "We want responsible drivers who are willing to obey and follow all traffic regulations. It seems like people understand our need for monitoring."

When the driver turns his car over for regular inspection each month, the data on a GPS unit's hard disk will let the company determine wehther the driver has been speeding excessively and sticking to his promised daily and weekend travel routine.

The GPS device will know where drivers have been, how long it took to get there, and equally important, where they parked. "Impact parkers," as they're called in Autowraps terminology, park in high-visibility areas with lots of auto and foot traffic. All the tracking is simply part of doing good business for Autowraps.com, which projects, in a good commuter, up to 750,000 "impressions" per month.

The reaction on and alongside the road seems to vary according to where people live and how snazzy their vinyl adhesive is. Rivera, who drives in the Bay Area, said pedestrians and drivers that have seen wrapped buses and many a promotional dot-com gimmick using cars, blimps, and more, are almost immune to a car smothered in advertising.

"Quite frankly I think people are already starting to get sort of tuned-out to it," Rivera said. "I park in the street and people in the crosswalk wouldn't even look twice at my car."

It tends to be his friends who want to know what the heck he's done to his car.

In contrast, Los Angeles seems to take more notice of Everett's flashy Yahoo get-up as it cruises down Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, where he and his wife live. The Yahoo scheme is apparently more eye-grabbing than what a somewhat disappointed Rivera says is a tame blue insurance ad.

Older people, in their 60s to 80s, will just glance over and keep driving, Everett said.

"But the younger folks, they just literally gawk. They think it's a company car. You'll run by one of the sidewalks, and they'll yell out, 'Yahoo!'"

So isn't there something a bit creepy about ads taking over private property? Is nothing safe from the spread of the almighty forces of America's marketing industry?

"Some friends, when I pulled up, they were like, 'What the hell is that on your car? Did you start working for an insurance company?' I'm like 'No, I'm getting paid to have advertisements on my truck.' And they're like, 'Oh, are you gonna sell your soul next?' I said I already sold it. It already belongs to someone."

If they came to him with ads for certain companies he didn't believe in, Rivera said he would decline – maybe. The company limits grounds for refusal to drivers who have moral issues with sex, alcohol, or tobacco ads.

"I might be against doing some kind of big cigarette ad," Rivera said. "But then again if they waved $400 bucks in my face, maybe my morals would be easily bought."