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Car and Driver's Csaba Csere · That Car Show

• 0:00
  They were really ugly. Yeah.
• 0:01
  And they were very crude inside. I think I once wrote that the
• 0:05
  interior finish is like the underside of a hot tub.
• 0:10
  Which is so good. That's such a great line.
• 0:12
  But it was, it really was that way.
• 0:14
  It was unbelievably bad. And that that was the consular I
• 0:18
  think today on that car. Show it's car and drivers.
• 0:22
  Chubba Chudda If you grew up like I did, voraciously
• 0:25
  devouring each new issue of Car and Driver and living
• 0:28
  vicariously through the writing of Chubba and his legendary
• 0:31
  editorial staff, this ones for you.
• 0:34
  We go way back to the very first Rd. tests of icons like the
• 0:37
  Ferrari F40 and Porsche 959, to oddball stuff like the Vector W8
• 0:43
  and a Popemobile into the state of the industry today.
• 0:46
  Along the way, we talk about some of the unforgettable
• 0:48
  personalities who shaped the magazine in the car world,
• 0:51
  people like David E Davis and Brock Yates.
• 0:53
  And Chubba was there for all of it remains one of the most
• 0:56
  influential automotive journalists of our generation.
• 0:59
  This is an old school audio only episode recorded in my garage,
• 1:03
  but it's a good one. In fact, it's the conversation
• 1:06
  I've wanted to have since I was, well, 12.
• 1:09
  It's Chubba Cheta, and it's that car show.
• 1:15
  Chapa Cheta joined Car and Driver in the early 1980s as
• 1:19
  technical editor and would become editor in chief in 1993,
• 1:23
  a position he would hold until 2008.
• 1:26
  And these, of course, were critical years for Car and
• 1:28
  Driver, years when the automotive industry was
• 1:30
  undergoing enormous change, when Car and Driver established its
• 1:33
  online presence, and when the print magazine itself underwent
• 1:36
  a very controversial redesign. She's responses to readers who
• 1:40
  wrote in to complain about it are legendary.
• 1:43
  But under his leadership, Car and Driver managed to walk that
• 1:46
  difficult line between technical excellence and editorial
• 1:49
  brilliance, really living up to its motto of reporting on the
• 1:52
  automotive industry with intelligence, independence into
• 1:55
  reverence. Chubb, of course, is still
• 1:57
  writing for Car and Driver and putting out some of his best
• 2:00
  stuff. We talk a lot on this show about
• 2:02
  what our 12 year old selves would think of us now.
• 2:05
  We also talk a lot about meeting our heroes.
• 2:07
  So someone who is a kid poured over each of those old car and
• 2:10
  Driver issues like it was my job.
• 2:12
  It's pretty damn cool to have Chubba Cheta in my garage today.
• 2:15
  Chubba, welcome to that car show.
• 2:17
  Glad to be here, Ryan. Where to start?
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  You know, when I was a kid, the absolute best day of each month
• 2:25
  was the day that car and driver showed up in the mailbox.
• 2:28
  In the early 80s and 90s, you know, there was know Internet
• 2:31
  car content for kids like me, especially living in the Midwest
• 2:34
  was really limited to the the magazines.
• 2:36
  And it was a huge deal that to see a car like a BMW 535I much
• 2:40
  less than M5 in person. And you know, stuff like
• 2:43
  Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Vectors, you know, they may have
• 2:45
  well have been vaporware and I guess the vectors kind of were.
• 2:49
  But you and your colleagues at Car and Driver brought that
• 2:52
  stuff to to life for us through your writing.
• 2:56
  What was the secret recipe? Well, the recipe was #1 we were
• 3:01
  all car nuts. There was nobody working on the
• 3:03
  staff who didn't really live and breathe and love cars.
• 3:07
  And, you know, that's the job of management to pull those people
• 3:10
  together. And when I joined the magazine
• 3:12
  in 1980, October 1980, the editor in chief was David E
• 3:17
  Davis Junior, you know, legendary guy in the business
• 3:20
  and, you know, he loved cars. He also loved writing and he was
• 3:27
  very interested in doing good stories that were literate,
• 3:30
  interesting, clever. And he always used to say, I
• 3:34
  don't want to just put out a good car magazine, I want to put
• 3:36
  out a good magazine. He wanted our editorial
• 3:40
  standards, our copy editing, our prose to be at the level of The
• 3:44
  New Yorker and Esquire, and that's what we were shooting
• 3:46
  for, while at the same time talking about our favorite
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  subject. Yeah, yeah.
• 3:51
  And writing in those days for Car and Driver, it seemed like
• 3:54
  it was the best job in the world, but I'm sure that wasn't
• 3:56
  always the case. Well, it's it was hard and it
• 3:59
  depended on where you came from. Several people on the staff, of
• 4:03
  course, came from various liberal arts background.
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  My degree is mechanical engineering.
• 4:09
  I hadn't had a writing course since high school.
• 4:11
  And basically I got to know some of the people at Car and Driver.
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  I was working in Michigan for Ford Motor Company in advanced
• 4:22
  engine engineering. So that's really my background.
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  And I lived in an apartment complex and one of the car and
• 4:28
  driver riders, Don Sherman, lived there really.
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  And Don and I found each other and we became friendly.
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  He would let me drive some cool test cars.
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  I'd give him some inside information on Ford, you know,
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  the usual sort of journalist source relationship.
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  And at one point Don was promoted.
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  He was technical editor at the time when I met him, but he was
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  promoted to the number 2 position in the magazine, which
• 4:52
  in his case was called technical director instead of executive
• 4:56
  editor because he was a tech guy.
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  Sure, but then he came to me one day and said you'd be the
• 5:00
  perfect guy to replace me as tech editor, and I wasn't sure I
• 5:04
  wanted to do it. I had no confidence in my
• 5:07
  writing. I had no experience doing that.
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  Also, engineers were paid pretty well by the car companies back
• 5:14
  then. In 1980, I think I was making
• 5:17
  $30,000 a year. I was single.
• 5:19
  That was good money, and going to Car and Driver was a 25% pay
• 5:24
  cut. At the same time, Car and Driver
• 5:27
  people lived a pretty good life. We drove test cars all the time.
• 5:34
  The rule then was you come in Monday morning, sign out a
• 5:38
  different test car every night of the week, first come, first
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  serve, except for David E maybe. And so when I joined the
• 5:46
  magazine I had, I was, I owned three cars and within eight
• 5:50
  months I got rid of all of really, because I'm driving test
• 5:53
  cars all the time. So that was obviously makes up a
• 5:56
  good chunk of the salary difference.
• 5:58
  Yeah. The other thing was when
• 6:01
  Mercedes, Porsche or whatever invited you to Europe for a, an
• 6:06
  introduction, you flew first class.
• 6:10
  They put you up in good hotels, they fed you good food.
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  It was a lifestyle well beyond what I grew up with or well
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  beyond that my income level could afford.
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  And for, you know, a guy who was 30 years old, that was nice.
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  I really enjoyed it and part of it was I was single.
• 6:29
  I had no kids. You know, if you've got kids and
• 6:31
  your daughter needs braces while having a A5 star meal in Munich
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  doesn't put braces on your kid, right?
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  But for a single guy, that was a nice life.
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  So it all worked out pretty well.
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  A funny story, my job interview, I mean I met people and talked
• 6:47
  to them on the magazine, but basically in the summer of 1980,
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  in June was the very first Nelson Ledges longest day.
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  It was a 24 hour showroom stock race.
• 6:59
  So there's basically showroom stock cars, things like Mazda RX
• 7:04
  Sevens and things of that ilk. And I was the crew chief for the
• 7:09
  car and driver team, and that was sort of the proof that I
• 7:12
  could get along with the staff and wasn't a complete idiot and
• 7:15
  so on and so forth. And later on after that, it was
• 7:18
  when I joined the magazine. OK, Yeah, yeah.
• 7:21
  And so were you a car guy all along or did the engineering
• 7:24
  come first or? Well, I probably when I was like
• 7:29
  1213, I was more like an airplane guy.
• 7:31
  Interesting. But I sort of became a car guy
• 7:34
  and I went to College in Massachusetts and worked there
• 7:38
  for my first job for a computer company designing basically
• 7:43
  boxes, which was in some ways it was an interesting job because I
• 7:49
  had a huge amount of responsibility and had a lot of
• 7:51
  control over the boxes I designed.
• 7:53
  And they weren't just boxes. I mean, they were a little more
• 7:55
  complex than that, but it wasn't really a a passion of mine.
• 7:59
  And by the time I joined Car and Driver, I owned a 74 Porsche
• 8:04
  9/11, a 73914 two liter and a 1976 Mercury Capri.
• 8:11
  I had to have a Ford. Product.
• 8:12
  Yeah, of course. So by then you know the car nut
• 8:16
  part had really come through when I was also a motorcyclist.
• 8:20
  Didn't know that. Yeah.
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  What were you riding at the time?
• 8:22
  When I joined the magazine, it was a Suzuki GS1000.
• 8:26
  OK. Big bike, big bike.
• 8:27
  Yeah, yeah. Cool.
• 8:29
  Well, you have witnessed so much change in the auto industry, You
• 8:32
  know, not just in the cars themselves, but in the way
• 8:34
  they're built and marketed, but in the way they're written
• 8:36
  about, too. What are your own golden eras,
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  for lack of a better term, not just for cars but for automotive
• 8:42
  journalism? Well, for cars, I would say that
• 8:47
  I really joined Car and driver at a fortuitous time because,
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  you know, in the 70s emission controls really started coming
• 8:56
  in nationwide. California, it started emission
• 8:59
  controls in the 60s. But by 1968, the first federal
• 9:03
  emission standards came in and they kind of got stricter by the
• 9:06
  year, all through the 70s. And the industry simply didn't
• 9:10
  have the technology to meet these regulations and still make
• 9:14
  power and good fuel economy and so on and so forth.
• 9:17
  And meanwhile, you needed to make emissions, and then
• 9:21
  suddenly you needed to make fuel economy too, because we had the
• 9:24
  first Arab oil crisis in 7374, when basically overnight
• 9:29
  gasoline prices quadrupled. And So what what really fell out
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  of the equation was power. And the low point was right
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  around 76 or 77. I think the most powerful
• 9:43
  Corvette in one of those years had 165 horsepower.
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  I mean, it was pitiful. Yeah.
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  And after that things started improving every year the
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  industry made incremental improvements because the
• 9:55
  technology was slowly working in remember in the beginning we
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  were sealing carburetors, right? We didn't have very many
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  overhead Cam shafts except for European cars.
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  I mean, we didn't have not not only we didn't have fuel
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  injection, we didn't have direct fuel injection.
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  We didn't have any of the stuff we have now.
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  We had three speed automatics, you know, and that kind of
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  thing. And manuals were 4 speeds.
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  And so everything got a little better every year.
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  And so by 1990, I think a Mustang GT had a big 200
• 10:23
  horsepower. I mean, not much by modern
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  standards, but pretty good then. And the beauty was every year
• 10:30
  things kind of got better. And so there's a certain
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  tendency in a car magazine to always praise the newest thing
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  is the best thing and so on. But in fact, I was at a time
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  when things were genuinely, demonstrably, objectively
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  getting better year by year. Yeah, yeah.
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  And as someone born in 1975, I mean, that's when I was coming
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  up, getting into cars. I guess I'd never really thought
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  about it, you know, framed like that, right?
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  That that was a time of constant improvement.
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  Yeah, yeah. No, it was genuine and, and at
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  the same time, you know, I'm talking about powertrains, but
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  there was also this sense that sort of the big floaty American
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  type of style was, uh, was passe.
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  And even the American car makers were trying to build, at least
• 11:14
  in some models, more like the European chassis dynamics.
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  They were a little tartar, a little more controlled, a little
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  more responsive, and that was improving every year as well.
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  Yeah, yeah, I think of. Cars like the Cadillac Cimarron
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  and the stuff, I mean, it's one of those perfectly coined eras,
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  the Malaise era, right? I mean that there's never been a
• 11:32
  better name for an era. Well, absolutely right.
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  And the other part of that too, and this takes us up much closer
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  to modern times, but the, the bad part of when I was there was
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  that the American car industry was still sort of going downhill
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  and things like the Cimarron or perfect example of that.
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  But the reality is, you know, I, I kind of kept up with the
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  business side of the industry because I was number one, I was
• 11:57
  an economics miner. I was kind of interested in
• 12:00
  business, and later on when I became editor in chief, our
• 12:06
  company wanted me to be a spokesman for Car and Driver.
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  So I started doing TV interviews and radio interviews.
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  And you know, I've done the Today show a dozen times.
• 12:16
  I've done all the morning shows, I've been on the Evening News.
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  I've done all of that stuff. And I was fairly good at it.
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  But part of it was I tried to be prepared.
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  So I still to this day have a spreadsheet that has industry
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  sales going back to 1950. And getting back to the first
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  part of this, GM is as recently as 1978 had about 45% of the US
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  car market. And by the time they went
• 12:43
  bankrupt in 2008, it was down to 18%.
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  Wow. And you know, that's why they
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  went bankrupt. And, you know, they called it
• 12:52
  legacy costs because they had a huge amount of cost for
• 12:55
  retirement benefits, pensions, retiree medical plans back from
• 13:01
  when they had this huge chunk of the market.
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  And so they couldn't really sustain that.
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  And I tended to call those lost market share costs.
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  Yeah, because if they'd retained a larger market share, those
• 13:13
  costs would have been much more manageable.
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  But when you lose 2/3 of your market share and you still have
• 13:18
  this enormous cost from people who retired at age 60 and keep
• 13:23
  sucking up the money for 20 years, and sucking up is maybe
• 13:27
  the wrong term. They were entitled to it.
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  They negotiated for it. But you know, that was the
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  downside of my era where GM in particular just was kind of
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  going downhill for 30 years straight.
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  Yeah, yeah, you remember the movie Gung Ho?
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  Oh yeah. In retrospect, it seems kind of
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  like a documentary because, you know, that really was kind of
• 13:47
  the zeitgeist, right? That was really what was going
• 13:49
  on back then. Well, and there was another
• 13:51
  movie called Blue Collar. I don't know if I.
• 13:53
  Remember the name? Don't remember the movie but.
• 13:55
  That was a much darker movie about how there was certain
• 14:00
  corruption in the union, and not even just corruption, but
• 14:04
  basically antagonism between the unions and the car companies.
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  In my brief period at Ford, I was only there for about 2 1/2
• 14:12
  years. At one point we were in the
• 14:15
  Dearborn Assembly plant where they were manufacturing
• 14:18
  Mustangs. And back then the assembly line
• 14:22
  drove over a pit where certain things were installed from
• 14:26
  underneath. But the guy's working overhead
• 14:29
  and there was something on the car I wanted to see.
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  And so I was with a, a more senior engineer and I said, you
• 14:35
  know, I think I want to go down to the pit there and take a look
• 14:38
  at how this is installed. And he says, you don't want to
• 14:40
  go down there, something could fall on you.
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  I said no, no, I'll be careful. He says, no, you don't
• 14:43
  understand. Something will fall on you
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  because you're wearing a white a tie.
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  Oh, I see. And, and that was the leg of
• 14:50
  level of antagonism that actually existed.
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  And it was something that hadn't even occurred to me.
• 14:55
  And this guy's being very careful about that.
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  Yeah. And now we're going through
• 14:59
  another change, right. I mean the, the Chinese stuff is
• 15:01
  inevitable. Yeah, right.
• 15:03
  They're bringing it into China or to Canada rather, I think as
• 15:06
  of this year or next, right. The the cars are already in, in,
• 15:09
  in Mexico occasion you'll see one here.
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  What you know, how do you think that's going to change things
• 15:13
  again? Where's that going to put the
• 15:15
  American automotive industry? Well, it's it seems pretty
• 15:18
  scary. I, I, you know, at this point I
• 15:21
  just do half a dozen stories a year for car and driver.
• 15:25
  I have not driven any of the modern Chinese cars, but from
• 15:29
  everything I hear, they're pretty good.
• 15:31
  This isn't to say they're better than American cars or German
• 15:34
  cars, but their value is very high.
• 15:37
  The prices are, are quite low. And whether how much of that is
• 15:41
  because of just lower wages or government subsidies, I mean,
• 15:44
  that's hard to determine. But if they come into the US
• 15:48
  market, the US car companies are in deep trouble because I've
• 15:51
  seen this before. American customers are willing
• 15:55
  to take a chance at a new car if it's cheap and it's it's a new
• 16:00
  one has a warranty. I mean, I was around when the
• 16:03
  Yugo was in. Right. 3995, yeah.
• 16:06
  Car was car was crap. I mean, it was really terrible.
• 16:09
  Yeah, and not only did it end up having low quality, but when it
• 16:15
  was brand new, perfectly assembled, I mean, the interior
• 16:18
  upholstery was like it was made out of used athletic towels.
• 16:23
  And I mean it, it drove slowly, It didn't handle well, didn't do
• 16:27
  anything. But it was a new car with a
• 16:29
  warranty at a low price. Same thing for Hyundai when they
• 16:32
  got started in 87, I think it was with the original Hyundai
• 16:35
  XL, the assumption was well it's Korean not Japanese, but it'll
• 16:41
  be just as good and it's cheap and it's fine.
• 16:44
  And it turned out well. They were Asian but they weren't
• 16:46
  as good as Japanese cars. And they started falling apart
• 16:49
  two or three years later with great problems and all kinds of
• 16:52
  other things. And they ultimately recovered
• 16:54
  and build a very good car today. But they had to do like the 10
• 16:58
  year powertrain warranty and all that to come back.
• 17:01
  But my only point is Americans have a willingness to take a
• 17:04
  chance on a new product if it's cheap enough, right?
• 17:08
  And so if the Chinese came in and undercut the Americans, I
• 17:11
  think there'd be plenty of, uh, willing buyers.
• 17:14
  And I for now, they've got to be kept out, I think, because the
• 17:17
  Americans can't compete and. Well, you know, we have
• 17:21
  environmental regs, right? We have labor regs.
• 17:24
  I mean, with all these things that yeah, we just, we literally
• 17:26
  can't compete with with when all that is, you know, out the
• 17:28
  window. Well, but.
• 17:29
  But it's out the window. But of course, if the Chinese
• 17:32
  come in here, they have to meet the American.
• 17:34
  Oh, sure. But back home.
• 17:35
  But back home, they don't. That's right.
• 17:37
  Yeah. They need to meet the
• 17:38
  regulations for the cars, but not necessarily for the
• 17:41
  factories. Yeah.
• 17:42
  And that's your point and that's correct.
• 17:44
  And. Interesting how Hyundai at your
• 17:46
  point, you know, now with Genesis, I think makes one of
• 17:49
  the best cars on the road and it's class if you want a big
• 17:52
  comfortable sedan, maybe not the best powertrain in the world,
• 17:54
  but it's sure got everything else.
• 17:56
  You know how far they've come. They're very nice.
• 17:59
  And I should say after I, I left Car and Driver full time at the
• 18:04
  end of 2008. And so I continued to do a
• 18:07
  little bit of freelance riding and I also did some consulting
• 18:10
  for car companies and I consulted for Hyundai for
• 18:13
  several years and I would do a couple trips a year to their
• 18:17
  main proving grounds in Korea and spend a week working with
• 18:21
  their engineers. I mean, the guys are really
• 18:23
  smart and they really work hard. There used to be family night
• 18:29
  was Wednesday night when they would serve dinner at the
• 18:33
  engineering center and you had to be out of the office by 6:00.
• 18:37
  Huh. And but in my point is at
• 18:39
  Hyundai, they had to have a family night where you were
• 18:42
  ordered out of the office at six because the engineers otherwise
• 18:45
  stayed around and worked till 78 or 9:00.
• 18:48
  How? Different from Ford back in
• 18:49
  1980. Oh yeah, where these guys are
• 18:52
  looking to leave 1/2 hour early every day if they can.
• 18:55
  And but they're, and, you know, they work very hard, they're
• 19:00
  smart, they're dedicated, and it's no wonder that they're in
• 19:03
  pretty good shape these days. Yeah, I, I was just flashing
• 19:06
  back to Daewoo. Do you remember Daewoo?
• 19:08
  Yeah. And they, if I recall, and I
• 19:10
  remember reading about this in Car and Driver, they their
• 19:12
  business model was they had a network of college students who
• 19:15
  would show these things at at college events, university
• 19:19
  events. And of course, they didn't last
• 19:20
  very long. Very occasional.
• 19:22
  I'll still see one of those. And I wonder how that thing is
• 19:24
  still, you know, moving under its own power.
• 19:26
  But that was an interesting time, you know, with the Koreans
• 19:29
  coming in and the. Well, you know, one of the
• 19:31
  things in the whole car business is there's a huge amount of
• 19:36
  overhead from the established stuff.
• 19:39
  I don't know what the current numbers are, but I think like 15
• 19:42
  years ago, maybe 20 years ago, I went through the numbers and for
• 19:46
  a car that had an MSRP of $20,000, the manufacturing cost,
• 19:52
  the variable cost was like 8500 bucks.
• 19:55
  Wow. So you think about this and you
• 19:56
  say, oh, what a great business. So you know, the, there's more
• 20:00
  than 100% profit in the thing, except of course, that's the
• 20:04
  variable cost. Once you've already tooled up
• 20:06
  the factory, right? Once you've already done all the
• 20:08
  engineering and testing, right? You've got to pay for the
• 20:11
  overhead for all the management. I think at one point you just
• 20:15
  divide the number of cars sold by the total advertising budget
• 20:19
  in the country and it was something like 12 or $1400 per
• 20:23
  car of advertising. So, you know, there's a lot of
• 20:26
  stuff in there. And that's why over the years,
• 20:28
  companies like Daewoo and other people have tried to maybe find
• 20:34
  some shortcuts for this because the numbers are big and and a
• 20:37
  lot of these expected expenses that the industry has grown up
• 20:41
  with. And if you can avoid some of
• 20:43
  those, it makes a big difference.
• 20:44
  Yeah. And we've seen it again with the
• 20:46
  EVs, right? And all these, you know, these
• 20:47
  startups, you know, whether it's a fairly future, whether it's
• 20:50
  Vin fast, whether it's Lucid, well, the biggest.
• 20:54
  Example of that is Tesla, which has done very little in the way
• 20:57
  of advertising. And part of it was until Trump's
• 21:01
  second term, you know, Musk was very well regarded and he was
• 21:06
  the spokesman and you know, he put out some tweet or, you know,
• 21:09
  do some social media business and that was their advertising.
• 21:12
  And again, think about it, if, if, if the average car has an ad
• 21:16
  budget of like 1000 bucks and he has an ad budget of 50 bucks,
• 21:20
  well, that's $1000 that either goes into his pocket or comes
• 21:24
  off the cost or a little bit of both.
• 21:26
  And so, you know, if you can do that, that's a huge advantage.
• 21:29
  Well, the first time I ever got it was the model 3 in particular
• 21:32
  that really impressed me and I got in that and I, I, boy, it
• 21:35
  felt like the future. It really did.
• 21:36
  It was so good, so competent, such a just a good car.
• 21:40
  And I think that just that's what it took, you know, that's
• 21:42
  the, the, the pivotal moment for a lot of people in EVs that was
• 21:46
  didn't have to advertise the car sold itself, I guess is what I'm
• 21:49
  getting. At I, I, I did the first Rd.
• 21:51
  test of the Model S, did car and drive OK yeah.
• 21:54
  And that was after I, you know, like 2014, whenever it came out.
• 21:57
  Yeah. And I was very impressed with
• 21:59
  it. I mean, and, you know, I wrote
• 22:03
  in the end that, OK, this car doesn't quite have the vehicle
• 22:07
  dynamics of a BMW and perhaps not even of a modern GM car.
• 22:11
  Sure. But it's pretty close, right?
• 22:13
  It's good enough. And the powertrain was
• 22:15
  fantastic. It had good range.
• 22:17
  It felt good. All the controls worked and my
• 22:22
  conclusion was not only is this a great EV, it's a pretty great
• 22:25
  car. And to your point, that's what
• 22:28
  it takes because to someone who wanted to buy an EV here, their
• 22:32
  ship had come in. I mean this was a an EV with no
• 22:35
  real compromises for them. Especially if you want to market
• 22:38
  like LA where you had the charging network and oftentimes
• 22:41
  that was included in debt for the life of the car, right?
• 22:44
  Well, that's right. And, and also keep in mind that
• 22:47
  a lot of the people who buy EVs, they don't even need the
• 22:50
  charging network because they're driving them around town.
• 22:53
  And I mean, I remember with, with the Tesla, I mean, we lived
• 22:57
  in Ann Arbor, which is like 40 miles West of Detroit.
• 23:01
  And I had a buddy who lived in Clarkston, which is more like 40
• 23:04
  miles northeast of Detroit. And I mean, I drove it all day
• 23:08
  in Ann Arbor. Then I drove it up to Clarkston,
• 23:10
  drove it back, still had plenty of range.
• 23:13
  And suddenly here was a car or even in a a sprawling city or
• 23:17
  metropolitan network, you could drive it around from one end to
• 23:21
  the other twice and still make it home.
• 23:23
  And then you just plug it in and it's ready to go the next night.
• 23:26
  And you know, we talk about charging network a lot and it's
• 23:30
  important. But for a lot of people who have
• 23:32
  EVs, my wife has an EV. I mean, she never charges in a
• 23:36
  charging network. I mean she charges at home.
• 23:38
  Twice that pole star we've had for 2 1/2 years.
• 23:40
  Twice we've not charged it at home.
• 23:42
  I mean, that tells you everything you need to know
• 23:44
  well. Exactly.
• 23:45
  I mean, charging at home is so easy and so painless, so.
• 23:49
  And I think that's what most EV buyers do.
• 23:51
  Yeah, yeah. Well, you're obviously a
• 23:53
  technical guy, an engineer. Can we talk about the testing
• 23:56
  process at Car and Driver and how it's changed over the years?
• 23:59
  Because I used to have that road test digest memorized as a kid
• 24:03
  and anything that would do zero to 16 under 5 seconds I thought
• 24:06
  must have just felt like a rocket because you know, we had
• 24:08
  a Chrysler minivan with that 3 speed automatic at home.
• 24:10
  We had a Jeep Cherokee. Eventually my dad got an E30,
• 24:12
  which was the coolest thing ever.
• 24:14
  But you know those, you know, that was, you know, like some
• 24:17
  kids would memorize baseball stats.
• 24:19
  I memorized that table. So how how has that changed?
• 24:24
  Because you know, when you start using the wheel, right?
• 24:26
  I mean, now everything is is I guess, telematics.
• 24:29
  Well, it's, it's GPS based, but the interesting thing is the
• 24:35
  actual testing process has not changed very much.
• 24:39
  It's the instrumentation with which we measure the performance
• 24:42
  that that's changed. Because when I started we had
• 24:46
  already started using the fifth wheel and the car manufacturers
• 24:51
  had been using fifth wheels for years, but they used a fairly
• 24:55
  large and clunky wheel that was attached to the rear bumper with
• 24:59
  sort of a semi permanent kind of thing.
• 25:02
  We needed an attachment that was much easier and more portable
• 25:07
  than that because you know, we we show up, here's a car, we got
• 25:12
  to put the equipment on it in 10 minutes, test it right, But off
• 25:15
  in 10 minutes. We don't have, you know, we
• 25:16
  don't have half a day to install this semi permanent fifth wheel,
• 25:20
  right. So we worked with a guy in
• 25:23
  Southern California named Paul Lamar, now deceased, very smart
• 25:27
  guy. He was aerodynamicist for Jim
• 25:30
  Hall on the. Show OH.
• 25:33
  Wow. I mean, he's a brilliant guy.
• 25:35
  And then he he got into computers and microprocessors
• 25:39
  and so he built a fifth wheel and the wheel was a 20 inch
• 25:42
  bicycle wheel. And it had a kind of a a
• 25:46
  trailing arm structure that went to a suction cup that went on
• 25:50
  the side of the car. And this was a commercial
• 25:53
  suction cup of the type used to move plate glass windows.
• 25:56
  It had a built in pump, you know, you just it was thumb
• 25:58
  actuated and the, the the pump had a red ring around it.
• 26:03
  So as it lost pressure, the thing would come up, the the
• 26:07
  plunger would come up. And when you saw the red ring,
• 26:09
  that meant you better do something about it because it's
• 26:11
  losing pressure. So we always put it on the left
• 26:14
  side, adjusted the rearview mirror on that side to keep an
• 26:17
  eye on the plunger, right. Because, you know, some car
• 26:21
  surfaces were nice and smooth and slightly curved and fine.
• 26:25
  Others were a little bit more problematic and so you had to
• 26:28
  mind it. But anyways, the fifth wheel
• 26:31
  basically had a a ring around the inside that sort that had
• 26:36
  teeth on it and I don't remember how many teeth 8000 something
• 26:39
  like that. It was especially machine deal
• 26:42
  and there was a photocell that basically counted the teeth.
• 26:46
  This went into a little a custom black box with a microprocessor
• 26:51
  that had been custom programmed and there was a little printer
• 26:54
  in there, some sort of thermal printer and it just would spit
• 27:00
  out the zero to 1020 thirty all the way up in the quarter mile
• 27:04
  and all that business. Must have changed.
• 27:06
  Everything and it it did, I mean, and suddenly we're able to
• 27:10
  get, you know, pretty good results.
• 27:12
  You know, the other thing is there's a process in doing the
• 27:15
  testing too, like at Car and Driver, we always tested the car
• 27:21
  with said it manufacturers tire pressures.
• 27:25
  We didn't adjust that. You know, if what the
• 27:28
  manufacturer said, that's what we did.
• 27:31
  We always tested it with full tank of fuel.
• 27:34
  And that's also how we weighed the cars.
• 27:35
  All the car and driver weights were always with full tank of
• 27:38
  fuel and nothing else in the car.
• 27:40
  And we're pretty strict about that.
• 27:41
  I mean, you know, I, I get on to Renlis the Porsche 4I mean these
• 27:45
  cars. Well, I weighed my car and had
• 27:46
  about 1/3 of tank of gas and I sometimes will come back and
• 27:50
  say, well then you really don't know what that car weighs
• 27:52
  because you don't know what that third tank of gas was.
• 27:54
  I mean, we, we tried to be precise to my point.
• 27:57
  Yeah, we would have a process. We didn't power a shift.
• 28:01
  We always use the clutch, let off the gas during the shift.
• 28:05
  Now we did this pretty, pretty quickly.
• 28:07
  But I mean, we, you know, we didn't hold the gas down and we
• 28:11
  also weather corrected because, you know, as the atmosphere
• 28:15
  changes, even though we tested in Michigan all the time,
• 28:20
  Michigan is at about our test track.
• 28:23
  We use the Chrysler Proving Grounds about 20 miles West of
• 28:25
  our office. It's at 900 feet or so, which
• 28:28
  isn't much elevation, right, But still, atmospheric pressure is
• 28:32
  like 29.1 inches of mercury, not 29.9.
• 28:35
  There's a sea level. Yeah.
• 28:37
  Similarly, we tested year round. Well, sometimes it's 100° in the
• 28:42
  summer and the air is thin, right?
• 28:43
  Sometimes it's 0° in the winter, and the air is really dense.
• 28:48
  And we found a set of tables that I think Chrysler
• 28:51
  Corporation had created in the 60s that you could plug in the
• 28:56
  barometric pressure, the temperature.
• 28:59
  And also we measured the relative humidity because the
• 29:03
  moisture in the air, it could be 29.1 inches of barometric
• 29:08
  pressure. But if 2/10 of .2 inches was air
• 29:12
  was was water vapor, then there's only 28.9 inches of air
• 29:17
  to burn in the engine. So we went through all of that,
• 29:19
  tried to be serious about it. And you know, it's not a perfect
• 29:22
  process. It's not like that chart is
• 29:24
  going to be flawless, But you know, we tried to do repeatable
• 29:28
  conditions because, you know, we tested all around the world and
• 29:32
  this fifth wheel would fit into a large suitcase.
• 29:35
  I mean, it was not not it was big and heavy, but it was
• 29:38
  something you could check on an airplane and take with you
• 29:41
  somewhere to test the car. So that was the original
• 29:45
  process. And then we got this device from
• 29:48
  a company called Daytron that used sort of a light beam that
• 29:53
  was that was shooting down onto the pavement and it reflected
• 29:57
  and from that, and I can't even tell you how it worked, but it
• 30:01
  could measure the speed. It did a pretty good job of
• 30:03
  that, and it was much smaller than the fifth wheel, so it was
• 30:07
  useful. And now they're using a device
• 30:09
  that uses GPS, and it's an English company whose name
• 30:13
  escapes me now, but that that's the current system.
• 30:16
  What I liked is you, whenever you changed your testing
• 30:19
  process, you always did a piece on it.
• 30:21
  Yeah. And you're very transparent.
• 30:22
  You explained it and I always appreciated that.
• 30:25
  And Car and Driver really was, and I think still is sort of the
• 30:28
  Bible for that, right. Peerless as far as is is
• 30:30
  testing. Well, Car and Driver still does
• 30:33
  the best job. Yeah.
• 30:34
  You know, and in truth, people have stopped testing because
• 30:39
  it's expensive. Yeah.
• 30:41
  I mean, you know, running Chrysler proving Ground I think
• 30:44
  is $800.00 an hour. Really.
• 30:46
  And the equipment all costs money.
• 30:48
  You're using people's time right now.
• 30:50
  I think the only people who test in the United States are Car and
• 30:53
  Driver and Motor Trend. And Motor Trend is now part of
• 30:56
  the same parent company. Yeah, they're both part of hers.
• 30:59
  Yeah. And Motor Trend doesn't test as
• 31:02
  uh, extensively as Car and Driver.
• 31:04
  We always did 70 to 0 stops. They did 60 to 0.
• 31:08
  And car and driver has recently introduced 100 mile per hour to
• 31:11
  0 on anything with any performance because 70 is just a
• 31:17
  really low speed. There's nothing special these
• 31:19
  days. And you know car and driver
• 31:23
  because we have access to Chrysler proving ground where
• 31:26
  there's a long straightaway we'll accelerate cars.
• 31:30
  I mean, we anything fast, we publish zero to 150 miles an
• 31:34
  hour and occasionally publish 0 to 200, you know, on a really
• 31:37
  fast car because we have the space to do it.
• 31:40
  Motor Trend doesn't. So no, Car and driver is by far
• 31:43
  the the best place to get test data for cars to this day.
• 31:47
  Yeah, absolutely. And Speaking of a place to do
• 31:49
  it, Car and Driver very famously had a secret testing location
• 31:53
  called Mrs. Orkut's driveway. Can you tell me about that?
• 31:57
  Yeah, well, it's just a little bit east of Barstow, CA and I'm,
• 32:06
  I always forget whether it's on I-15 or off of I-15 or I-40.
• 32:10
  Both of those come together into Barstow.
• 32:12
  I think it's I-40. And when I-40 was built, there
• 32:16
  was before there's a A2 lane Rd. that parallels I-40 and I think
• 32:22
  it's Sierra Highway. And when I-40 was built, there
• 32:26
  were some houses north of I-40 that were cut off from Sierra
• 32:31
  Highway. So they ended up putting an exit
• 32:34
  in this one location and only served two or three homes.
• 32:37
  And basically you got off this exit, went north, and then
• 32:42
  turned right onto this long road that paralleled I-40 and it went
• 32:47
  like 4 or 5 miles to one person's house, which was
• 32:51
  someone named Mrs. Orchid. Oh, so it's a real person?
• 32:54
  I never knew that. OK.
• 32:55
  I'm sure. I don't know if that house still
• 32:56
  stands, been a long time since I've been there, but it was dead
• 33:01
  level. It was dead straight, but it was
• 33:04
  also in the middle of nowhere. You didn't want to crash there
• 33:07
  because you weren't going to be getting medical help anytime
• 33:10
  soon. And it also didn't get a lot of
• 33:13
  traffic. And it was a fairly coarse
• 33:16
  aggregate, so a lot of dust would settle there.
• 33:19
  And at one point I did a project car, a Trans Am, Pontiac Trans
• 33:23
  Am that had a Gale Banks twin turbo small block Chevy.
• 33:27
  And we were trying to go 200 miles an hour, which we
• 33:29
  ultimately got. But when this thing went down
• 33:33
  the road at any speed, it threw up this rooster tail of dust.
• 33:37
  That was amazing. I mean, completely visible from
• 33:40
  I Yeah. And one when we were out there
• 33:43
  testing, a California State Highway Patrol cop showed up to
• 33:49
  investigate and we told him what we were doing and he turned out
• 33:53
  to be a car nut. He wrote me a fake ticket for
• 33:56
  196 mph. And he actually hung around and
• 34:00
  said, you know, let me stick around here for a little bit
• 34:03
  till you finish up because there's another CHP guy who is
• 34:07
  not the kind of car nut I am. And if he catches you here,
• 34:10
  you'll be in trouble. So I I'll, I'll look out for
• 34:13
  them for you. I seem to remember this being in
• 34:14
  the magazine, the ticket and all this, which is what year would
• 34:18
  that have been about? You think?
• 34:19
  8484? OK, yeah, very cool.
• 34:22
  I, I, you know, of course, the one lap of America that you guys
• 34:25
  did every year was, you know, left such an impression on me.
• 34:28
  You used to sell a DVD. You put out AI bought that DVD
• 34:32
  somewhere. I've got that DVD because again,
• 34:34
  it's just, you know, weren't so many avenues of consuming this
• 34:37
  stuff. And I think the only thing on TV
• 34:38
  at the time was, was Motor Week, which I still watch.
• 34:40
  Yeah. John Davis, you know, looks the
• 34:43
  same as he did 40 years ago, but.
• 34:45
  And John's a great guy. Yeah.
• 34:47
  I mean, his show is not the most interesting thing in the world.
• 34:50
  And you know, we we did some TV in the late 90s and we kind of
• 34:55
  did comparison tests. We called it head to head,
• 34:58
  right? And what we tried to do was
• 35:02
  basically capture us talking. Live Motor Week is typically
• 35:07
  done with voice over. Yeah, they have a formula.
• 35:10
  Well, they well, it's not just a formula, but when you try and do
• 35:13
  it head to head, yeah. When you try and do it live, you
• 35:15
  realize that you have a problem in that if you get something
• 35:19
  wrong, how do you fix the tape? Right.
• 35:21
  And like we would have when we did comparison tests, we go on a
• 35:25
  test drive often two or three days and every half hour or so
• 35:29
  we'd switch cars. And depending on where we were,
• 35:31
  we might have a little bit of discussion, you know, what do
• 35:32
  you think about this and that? Sure.
• 35:34
  And when we did the TV show, I would say to the guys, OK, the
• 35:39
  comment you made about the steering is really good.
• 35:41
  Yeah, what you said about the engine was very good.
• 35:44
  What you said about the transmission was very good.
• 35:45
  So let's sort of recreate this. And you say the things you did,
• 35:49
  but make sure you check certain things, right?
• 35:51
  So don't tell me the engine's 300 horsepower if it's 310,
• 35:55
  right? Because then I've got a piece of
• 35:56
  video I can't use, Right? And when you do that, you
• 36:00
  realize why so many people do the voice over, right?
• 36:03
  Because suddenly it's so much easier to avoid these errors and
• 36:06
  fix them well. Andy were sort of the first ones
• 36:08
  doing it. Yeah, right.
• 36:10
  Early, yeah, but we couldn't make any money out.
• 36:12
  Yeah, well, you. Know all this time?
• 36:14
  Well, you couldn't get a car company sponsor because if they
• 36:18
  were manufacturing one of the cars in the test and it didn't
• 36:23
  win, they didn't want to be sponsoring it.
• 36:26
  We needed to find like an oil company or a tire company.
• 36:30
  But I don't know that our audience was big enough for our
• 36:33
  ad sales guys didn't have the contacts, but we just never
• 36:36
  found the right deal on it. So you know, we, we, I mean we
• 36:40
  did 1/2 hour TV show for like 2530 thousand.
• 36:43
  Bucks it was really cheap, yeah. But we from a business
• 36:46
  standpoint, it just didn't. Work well and to bring this back
• 36:49
  to the magazine, you know, you were always very candid, very
• 36:52
  honest with with testing and, and, you know, sharing your
• 36:55
  opinion on cars. Yeah.
• 36:56
  And some cars didn't do very well, yet you continue to
• 36:59
  maintain those relationships and get cars to test down the road.
• 37:02
  I mean, how did you, how'd you handle that balance with the
• 37:06
  with the OEMs? There's a couple of things going
• 37:08
  on there. I mean, one was, there was
• 37:11
  definitely. I mean, David E Davis once said
• 37:18
  we don't want to hate any cars. We don't want to be angry if we
• 37:22
  don't like a car. We should adopt A point of view
• 37:26
  that is disappointed. And so, you know, and the way
• 37:31
  that worked out in practice was if we loved a car and we knew
• 37:35
  who the chief engineer was, we could say this guy ought to be
• 37:39
  canonized, you know, and the Pope needs to do this.
• 37:43
  On the other hand, if we hated a car, you didn't want to say this
• 37:46
  guy needs to be put to death along with his entire family to
• 37:49
  terminate the gene rule. So, you know, there, there was a
• 37:53
  little a bit of a bias in there. But at the end of the day, you
• 37:58
  know, we always felt that our responsibility was to the
• 38:01
  readers and not to the advertisers.
• 38:03
  And the last thing I wanted to do was tell you to spend your
• 38:06
  money on a car that was a good car.
• 38:08
  You bought it. And then you came in and said
• 38:10
  you're you're an asshole for telling me to buy this because
• 38:13
  of this, this and this. And the way that worked was we
• 38:17
  were successful enough. We were the largest car magazine
• 38:20
  in the world in my day, and for much of my tenure there, our
• 38:25
  circulation was 1,350,000. And so we had power and car
• 38:31
  companies couldn't really afford to boycott us or not give us
• 38:35
  cars or something like that. So that success bred a certain
• 38:39
  amount of a, a confidence and ability to say things the way
• 38:45
  they were. And that's, that's actually one
• 38:47
  of the things that's changed now, because now you've got a
• 38:50
  million car sources you've got anyhow, anyone can start a
• 38:55
  podcast or a blog or well, that's for sure.
• 38:58
  No, but I mean, but if you're. Doing car reviews and you're a
• 39:02
  small time guy and you you get a new Honda Accord and you say
• 39:06
  it's bad. Honda may just look at you and
• 39:09
  say, well, we don't need to ever give this guy a car again.
• 39:12
  He's not very important. He's small, getting going.
• 39:14
  Yeah. And they they can't quite do
• 39:16
  that to car driver. And that's kind of the
• 39:18
  difference in the way that journalism has changed.
• 39:20
  Yeah, Yeah. Well, you've, you've tested, you
• 39:23
  know, driven just about everything.
• 39:24
  Let's talk about bellwether cars.
• 39:26
  You know cars that when you got behind the wheel as an engineer,
• 39:29
  as an automotive journalist, that you knew were going to
• 39:31
  change everything. Well, I mean cars that really
• 39:34
  impressed me. I did Car and Drivers Rd. tests
• 39:36
  of the Porsche 959, Right. I remember that.
• 39:40
  Yeah, I went to Germany. Yeah.
• 39:42
  I picked the car up at Porsche's Weisock Technical Center.
• 39:46
  The chief engineer gave me the guy Manfred Buntly.
• 39:51
  He he, he gave me the walkthrough on the car and went
• 39:55
  out and drove it, tested it. Basically we we rented
• 39:58
  Hockenheim racetrack and used the back straightaway and the
• 40:02
  car was fantastic and. At the time, it was the fastest
• 40:06
  car we'd ever tested. It went 3.60 to 60.
• 40:11
  But it was also solid. It was all-wheel drive.
• 40:14
  And I remember talking to the chief engineer and saying, look,
• 40:17
  you know, I'm going to put instruments on it, measure the
• 40:20
  acceleration. I want to get the best number,
• 40:23
  but I also don't want to break your car.
• 40:24
  Tell me how to do it. And the 959 had a stalk on the
• 40:29
  right side of the steering column and that program, the
• 40:33
  drive mode. And I think the lowest mode was
• 40:36
  dry pavement, then there was wet pavement, snow.
• 40:40
  And then off road, that's right, there was an off road mode.
• 40:43
  There was an off road mode because at one point that car
• 40:46
  was going to be used for rallying.
• 40:48
  That was the era of the killer bees, the Super high performance
• 40:52
  rally cars. But anyways, when you went into
• 40:56
  the off road mode, it was all-wheel drive and it locked
• 40:59
  up. I think the middle and the front
• 41:01
  differential or the middle and the rear differential, I don't
• 41:03
  remember which one. But it locked everything up.
• 41:06
  And he said basically wind it out to 7000 and sidestep the
• 41:10
  clutch. And I would probably have not
• 41:13
  done that if he hadn't told me to because that's incredibly
• 41:16
  brutal. And you do that and it lights up
• 41:20
  all four tires. And but, you know, remember,
• 41:24
  this was a turbocharged engine. I think it was 2.85 liters, 450
• 41:28
  horsepower. But turbo motors until the boost
• 41:32
  comes on, can be pretty dead. Yeah.
• 41:34
  And the reason you do this wheel spinning launch is if you do it
• 41:39
  right when the tires hook up, the engine has come up on to
• 41:43
  boost by then off you go. And that's exactly what this
• 41:46
  did. And of course, for a magazine,
• 41:49
  we need pictures. So I had a photographer on hand.
• 41:51
  Well, I do the wheel spinning start and the photographer
• 41:54
  misses the picture, so I need to do another one.
• 41:57
  And then he wanted another one. I ended up doing six of these
• 42:00
  and the car survived. It just fluffed it off like
• 42:03
  nothing. The car was also comfortable to
• 42:06
  drive. It had great steering feel.
• 42:08
  What I remember about it is at one point I'm driving on the
• 42:12
  Audubon and it's pouring rain and I'm going like 130 and this
• 42:15
  thing is like on rail. So it was a very impressive car.
• 42:19
  Yeah, yeah, no one's sidestepping a clutch in a 959
• 42:22
  and 2026, aren't they? I mean, they're, they're stashed
• 42:25
  away. They're, you know, I mean, the
• 42:27
  fact that you got to do that's really cool in in time, you
• 42:30
  know. That was the beauty of it.
• 42:31
  And and interestingly to that point, sidestepping the clutch
• 42:37
  or having to do a, you know, a hard clutch drop that lit up the
• 42:40
  wheels was typical on like 911 turbos to get the best time.
• 42:44
  So in the this is like early 90s, I invented a new test
• 42:50
  called St. Start.
• 42:51
  Yeah, right. And the idea there was, OK, a
• 42:56
  9/11 turbo will do whatever it was 4 flat zero to 60, but only
• 43:00
  if you do this wheel spinning launch.
• 43:03
  How many owners are willing to do that to their top of the line
• 43:06
  cars? Or even if they're willing, how
• 43:09
  many people are willing to do that on a Denver St. in a green
• 43:13
  light? And in fact, on a 9/11 turbo, if
• 43:17
  you did a more normal launch, it couldn't, It was actually slower
• 43:22
  than an automatic Corvette of the era.
• 43:25
  It was like a 2 second difference between a normal.
• 43:27
  It was like 6 flat normally, but 4 seconds flat or so with the
• 43:32
  wheel spinning launch. And so the idea was let's do a
• 43:35
  test with a more conventional launch.
• 43:40
  Well, suddenly you say, OK, well, a gradual clutch
• 43:44
  engagement. What is that?
• 43:45
  And how do we make it repeatable?
• 43:47
  And you can't. So we came up with the idea of
• 43:50
  let's do the test with the car in first gear from 5 to 60 miles
• 43:55
  an hour. So at 5 miles an hour, it's
• 43:57
  already in first gear. Just floor the throttle.
• 44:00
  If it has turbo lag, it has turbo lag.
• 44:02
  If it doesn't, it doesn't. And that became what we call the
• 44:05
  street start, or I think they're now calling it 5 to 60 mile
• 44:09
  acceleration, but it's typically quite different.
• 44:11
  Yes, and, and but that's, that's what it's signifying because the
• 44:15
  reality is, you know how many people will do a full out clutch
• 44:19
  drop on the street or even come close?
• 44:20
  To it right no, that really changed everything I remember
• 44:23
  that and it's you know held a lot easier on cars of.
• 44:27
  Course. It used to be zero to 60, zero
• 44:29
  to 60, zero to 60. And as I got older and learned
• 44:31
  more about cars, really learned it was about the quarter mile,
• 44:34
  right. But but again, to bring this
• 44:35
  back to that road test digest, and again, anything less than 5
• 44:40
  seconds just seemed so fast. Yeah, yeah.
• 44:42
  Something like the 9:59 or the yellow bird just seemed like it
• 44:45
  came from another planet, you know, because this was still a
• 44:48
  time when, you know, even cars we thought were sporty, like a
• 44:51
  Pontiac Bonneville SSEI or something.
• 44:53
  We're still 8 seconds or something probably, or high
• 44:56
  sixes maybe I. Well, I mean, I, I remember when
• 44:59
  the first, uh, Volkswagen, I think it was originally the
• 45:02
  Rabbit GTI came out, yeah. It had 90 horsepower, which, you
• 45:06
  know, the, the regular Rabbit at the time had 75 or something.
• 45:10
  So we had one yeah. And, and, and the GTI had nice
• 45:14
  suspension and we loved it, right.
• 45:16
  But I think it was like a nine flat zero to 60 car.
• 45:19
  And we were excited yeah. But in that context, that was a
• 45:22
  quick car, and especially in a small car, which always seems a
• 45:25
  little quicker, you know it. Was great, yeah.
• 45:28
  Anything less than 10 seconds, I don't think that's pretty quick.
• 45:30
  That's pretty quick. You know, in a world of 18
• 45:32
  second minivans and and things like that, that really was
• 45:35
  sometimes to bring this back, I guess, to the stuff that people
• 45:38
  are actually driving. One of the things I liked about
• 45:40
  car and driver was you did the, you know, the dream cars, right,
• 45:42
  But you also, you know, did the Hondas, the Accords and things.
• 45:45
  When did you know that the popular shift was happening to
• 45:48
  trucks and SUVs away from cars like the Accord and the Camry
• 45:52
  and the and the Taurus? You know, that kind of thing?
• 45:54
  I mean, it, it, it was fairly gradual, yeah, in the 80s and
• 45:59
  90s, but it sort of actually took off after I left.
• 46:04
  I mean, I, as I recall as recently as like 2012, the car
• 46:10
  and truck balance. And by truck I say, you know,
• 46:13
  pickups as these minivans was still 5050 or so by 2012.
• 46:19
  And we've gotten to the point now where it's like 8515 or
• 46:23
  something. And for the domestic makers, I
• 46:25
  mean, they hardly make any cars at all.
• 46:27
  I mean I think Ford the only car they make is the Mustang.
• 46:31
  Wow. That is, you haven't really
• 46:33
  thought about it, but. Yeah, I think that's the only
• 46:35
  car they built today. Yeah.
• 46:36
  And Chrysler doesn't build many cars.
• 46:39
  I mean, they've got the Charger and I guess there's a new
• 46:43
  Challenger, but I mean, there's not much there.
• 46:46
  No. And GM actually builds more cars
• 46:49
  than the others because they've still got a Chevy or two and
• 46:51
  they've got a few Cadillacs. But again, I think even at GM,
• 46:54
  the sales are 90% truck. Wow.
• 46:57
  I mean, by far the biggest car makers are the Japanese and but
• 47:00
  even they have shifted. I mean, you know, truck sales
• 47:05
  are more than 50% at Honda, they're more than 50% at
• 47:08
  Hyundai. I don't remember the Toyota
• 47:10
  number, but that has grown over the years as well.
• 47:12
  Do you think that that will ever come back?
• 47:14
  Because you know, when I was young and I would see, oh, you
• 47:17
  start to see a Cherokee or a Blazer, right?
• 47:20
  You know, as and people are using them as as cars, right,
• 47:22
  for the first time. And I think a lot of that was
• 47:24
  just I want something that other people don't have.
• 47:26
  So do you think will ever come full circle and people will
• 47:29
  think sedan's looking pretty good to me again?
• 47:32
  Well, maybe you. Know, I don't know if it's
• 47:34
  totally emotional or not. I mean, if you look at, I mean,
• 47:38
  the most popular truck segment other than the full size pickups
• 47:41
  are the compact SUVs, you know, the Rav 4, the Honda CRV, Nissan
• 47:46
  Rogue, those things. And when you think about that,
• 47:49
  you say ACRV is roughly the cost of an Accord and the Accord's
• 47:56
  actually a better car. It's a different platform and a
• 47:59
  little more sophisticated platform.
• 48:01
  And ACRV is, roughly speaking, a Civic platform type of car.
• 48:06
  But the ride and handling is pretty good.
• 48:10
  Interior space for passengers is good or better than the Accord,
• 48:14
  and it has the versatility of that luggage room.
• 48:17
  And so someone looks around and says, why should I buy the sedan
• 48:21
  for kind of the same money? I get this CRV, which is more
• 48:27
  versatile. And yeah, it doesn't ride and
• 48:29
  handle quite as well. But I don't ride, and, you know,
• 48:33
  I'm no expert. I don't drive hard, so that
• 48:35
  doesn't matter to me. The fuel economy is not that
• 48:39
  different on the highway, the Accords better in the city it's
• 48:42
  about the same. And maybe this makes sense to
• 48:45
  me. Now this doesn't explain all the
• 48:47
  Suburbans and all that other stuff.
• 48:48
  And but you know, the change is there.
• 48:52
  I mean, I'm not a truck guy, although I have to say, I mean,
• 48:55
  I, I own 2 Porsche Cayenne's. So I, I, I have that, I have
• 48:59
  those guys. But you know, to me, the the
• 49:03
  pickups, yeah. And the off road things, I mean,
• 49:06
  a Wrangler to me is like, I hate them.
• 49:08
  Yeah, I mean, Oh yeah. I mean, they're they're maybe
• 49:11
  cool looking, but I don't do off road bowling.
• 49:14
  Right, Right. But on the pavement, A Wrangler,
• 49:18
  well, it's got this boxy body work that is going to produce
• 49:22
  wind noise. Sure.
• 49:24
  It's got these lug tires that hum like crazy.
• 49:27
  The thing's heavy. It's slow.
• 49:29
  It gets lousy fuel economy. It doesn't handle well.
• 49:32
  Yeah. I mean, why is a penalty?
• 49:33
  Box, as far as I'm concerned, yeah.
• 49:35
  And I mean, I think there's a image with it that people love,
• 49:38
  but I'm immune to that image. So for me, I look at it
• 49:41
  functionally. I think it's a liability.
• 49:43
  I don't want such a large vehicle.
• 49:45
  I want something that can park and people aren't going to bang
• 49:47
  the bumper. I, you know, I just yeah, I
• 49:49
  don't, I don't get it. But I, I, I guess I don't buy
• 49:51
  cars for other people, I buy them for myself.
• 49:53
  And I think that's a big difference with a lot of folks.
• 49:55
  Well, you know, same for me, but I mean, there are people, you
• 49:58
  know, I, I have a a 2017 Porsche 9/11, right?
• 50:03
  I think it's too big. Yeah, I mean.
• 50:05
  That's a whole other conversation.
• 50:06
  I mean, I'm a fairly normal sized guy.
• 50:08
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 50:09
  And in general, you know, if I've got 2 inches of headroom,
• 50:13
  well, I'd rather have half an inch.
• 50:14
  I mean, you know, why? Why do I need this thing that
• 50:17
  big? But some people seem to like the
• 50:20
  bigger as better mentality and so be it.
• 50:22
  I mean, that's the beauty of having freedom of choice.
• 50:25
  I, I, I think if things come back, it might come back at some
• 50:28
  point if fuel stays expensive, right?
• 50:32
  Because you know, it, it costs some money to fill up one of
• 50:36
  these big things. And at $4.00 a gallon, a lot of
• 50:39
  these trucks have 30 gallon tranks.
• 50:41
  The big ones. I mean, when you're dropping
• 50:43
  $125.00 every fill up, you may get your attention at some
• 50:47
  point. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 50:50
  What was your greatest moment as editor?
• 50:52
  Of car and driver boy, I don't know, I mean, that's a hard one
• 51:01
  because, you know, I, I mean, I was lucky I took over a going
• 51:06
  concern. We were the biggest car magazine
• 51:09
  out there. And in some ways I kind of look,
• 51:13
  I I never had the idea that I need to put my imprint on the
• 51:17
  magazine. I mean, I'm, I've got this great
• 51:20
  magazine. Mm Hmm.
• 51:21
  It's making money. The bosses in New York are
• 51:24
  happy. Yeah, Yeah, the readers seem to
• 51:27
  be happy. I mean, as as an advertiser once
• 51:30
  told me, you know, the dogs are eating the dog food, so don't
• 51:32
  mess with the recipe, like. And so my job, the way I saw my
• 51:37
  job, was to keep that going, make improvements where I could
• 51:41
  maintain the quality to the highest level and keep on
• 51:46
  putting out a balanced magazine. You know, you mentioned earlier
• 51:50
  about the dream cars and stuff. You know, there's a lot of
• 51:53
  people who read car magazines for the vicarious interest in
• 51:56
  these cars they can never afford or drive.
• 51:59
  But our notion was we wanted to have a big tent for automotive
• 52:02
  enthusiasm. So we're going to test
• 52:05
  everything from economy cars all the way up to the exotic because
• 52:08
  as I said to people, you know, I have no trouble envisioning A
• 52:12
  mailman who's interested in cars and he can't afford a Ferrari.
• 52:18
  Maybe he's looking for something like a Ford Focus, something in
• 52:22
  that category, Civic category. Well, we do comparisons on
• 52:25
  those. And some of those cars are more
• 52:27
  interesting to drive than others.
• 52:29
  Yeah. And we want to be able to tell a
• 52:30
  guy who's a car enthusiast in that demographic what he should
• 52:34
  be looking at and buying. And you know, maintaining that
• 52:37
  balance wasn't all that easy. We also tried to maintain a
• 52:41
  balance in stories. And it's not like there was a
• 52:43
  formula, but a certain number of American cars, certain number of
• 52:47
  Japanese cars, certain number of European cars, some exotics,
• 52:52
  some affordable cars, some pickups, some cars, also some
• 52:56
  feature stories have something that maybe is technology, maybe
• 53:00
  have something that's a personality, maybe have
• 53:02
  something that's competition related.
• 53:04
  So I mean, I could give you almost a formula for the perfect
• 53:08
  balance for any issue, not that you could achieve that every
• 53:11
  issue, but you know, there was this sense.
• 53:14
  I mean, I was always opposed to the special issue type of deal.
• 53:19
  Let's focus on all one thing. And part of that was my own
• 53:23
  experience with magazines as a motorcyclist.
• 53:27
  I got Cycle World magazine and they would do an annual dirt
• 53:30
  bike issue. Well, I don't ride in the dirt,
• 53:32
  right? So that issue, there was nothing
• 53:34
  in it for me to read, right? And I never wanted to put out a
• 53:37
  special issue of Car and Driver that some reader would come up
• 53:41
  with and come to that same conclusion.
• 53:43
  So we tend to do avoid that kind of thing that a lot of people in
• 53:46
  the magazine world thought was crazy.
• 53:48
  You know, there's a special issues of the thing, right?
• 53:50
  I didn't think they were the thing at all, right?
• 53:52
  Maybe I was wrong, but it worked for us.
• 53:55
  And that's what they say now, you know, with the our content
• 53:56
  now, you know, people want consistency.
• 53:58
  And I think you offered that in spades.
• 54:00
  So, you know, each issue was a complete issue, right?
• 54:02
  You had the colonists, you had the the fancy stuff, you had the
• 54:05
  workaday stuff. You had those character
• 54:08
  articles, for lack of a better term, those features.
• 54:10
  And I'd like to talk about that a little bit because I think
• 54:12
  some of the best articles in Car and Driver over the years have
• 54:15
  been about the more colorful side of the industries, the
• 54:18
  visionaries, the charlatans, you know, the dreamers, any of those
• 54:21
  people that really left to mark. You know, I recall this article
• 54:23
  about Liz Carmichael and the Dale car.
• 54:25
  That's something that stuck with me.
• 54:26
  But you did. Warren Mosler was another one,
• 54:29
  right? These these, these unique
• 54:30
  individuals So well, that's what made Hard Driver different to
• 54:34
  me, no? Absolutely.
• 54:35
  And, and The funny thing is, you know, sometimes you met these
• 54:38
  guys and while you could admire aspects of their personality,
• 54:45
  they were. Yeah, they were deeply flawed
• 54:49
  people. I mean, I I did the road test on
• 54:51
  the Vector W8. Yeah.
• 54:53
  And spent a bunch of time with Jerry Weiger.
• 54:56
  OK And car and Driver put the Vector on the map because it was
• 55:00
  the cover story, I think in December of 1980, Larry Griffin
• 55:03
  wrote the story. And Larry Griffin was a
• 55:09
  hyperbolic writer. Yeah.
• 55:10
  Say, and but he did a great job on that.
• 55:14
  And there was a great photo shoot with Weigert and some
• 55:17
  bimbos and they're dressed in. Flight suits, Yeah, yeah.
• 55:21
  But you know, then for about 10 years, the Vector W 8 was
• 55:26
  vaporware. It just didn't appear.
• 55:27
  And finally, we've got a car for you to test, and I show up.
• 55:32
  They were headquartered in God. Where were they?
• 55:36
  Southern California, near San Pedro area, down on the
• 55:41
  peninsula there. It might have been Torrance, but
• 55:45
  they were right there. There's a car.
• 55:47
  We take a car up to our testings or we're going to our testing
• 55:52
  site. And at the time in California,
• 55:54
  we tested in the high desert near Lancaster.
• 55:57
  And so we drive a car up there and on the way we're going
• 56:00
  through some winding roads. We're taking some pictures and
• 56:03
  one of the cars starts just it starts overheating and we've got
• 56:09
  to bring it to a stop. And he had a second car that had
• 56:12
  come along. That one, the transmission
• 56:14
  packed up. The three speed automatic.
• 56:16
  Oh yeah, And this was even before we'd done any
• 56:19
  performance. Wow.
• 56:21
  And so we go back to the shop, they're working on it.
• 56:23
  The next day, they get one car together.
• 56:27
  We take it out to Terminal Island, which is basically a
• 56:30
  place full of warehouses, But there's some straight roads
• 56:33
  there that, I mean, they're not roads you should be testing on,
• 56:36
  but they're feasible for that. Sure.
• 56:38
  Let's put it that way. And that car packed up with some
• 56:42
  malady. So it's like Tuesday and, you
• 56:47
  know. Yeah, it was like Tuesday
• 56:48
  morning and I'm talking to Jerry and I said, Jerry, you know, I
• 56:53
  haven't got any test numbers. And, you know, Jerry just is
• 56:55
  like in denial. He says, well, you know, we'll
• 56:58
  get the car together for you, Don't worry about it.
• 56:59
  We'll see how solid it is. You know, you can see how solid
• 57:02
  it is. I drive this across country and
• 57:04
  I'm thinking, what do you mean? I can see how solid it is.
• 57:07
  I've just gone through three cars in a day and a half.
• 57:09
  It's not solid at all. And I had to go home on
• 57:12
  Wednesday and I said to Jerry, I said, look, you know, if you
• 57:17
  guys can get a car together, I'll try and test it.
• 57:20
  But I mean, I'm on a flight out of here Wednesday morning and I
• 57:23
  was staying on Century Blvd. outside of LAX.
• 57:28
  And Jerry calls it like 3:00 AM and said we got a car together,
• 57:32
  we'll meet you out there. So I go down and there's a
• 57:35
  street that runs north-south between the beach and the West
• 57:40
  End of LAX, and it's called Pershing Ave.
• 57:43
  Sure. Yeah.
• 57:43
  And at 3:00 AM, there's nobody on it.
• 57:45
  So we actually put the on it. Wow.
• 57:48
  I got some acceleration numbers, but again, the car started.
• 57:53
  Yeah, I think we did two runs. And the transmission starts
• 57:56
  packing up and we give it, you know, we ended the testing while
• 58:01
  the thing was still ambulatory, so to speak.
• 58:04
  And we did, we did the story. And I did that whole story as
• 58:09
  almost like a timeline for sort of what happened when because I
• 58:12
  was trying to figure out, I mean, I don't want to totally
• 58:16
  just dump on this guy. So just the facts, ma'am, is the
• 58:19
  right of right. Facts speak for themselves.
• 58:21
  And the last paragraph was a conversation that Jerry and I
• 58:26
  had had. And you know, I'm, I'm telling
• 58:29
  them, I said, Jerry, you know, this car is not ready.
• 58:31
  I mean, it needs a lot of development.
• 58:33
  And basically at one point he says, hey, our, our buyers are
• 58:37
  big guys. They've got lawyers.
• 58:39
  They know what to do if there's a problem.
• 58:41
  And, and I quoted that verbatim, which was an amazing thing to
• 58:44
  say about your customers. And and you know, again, this is
• 58:48
  a guy who I don't think he was a charlatan.
• 58:50
  I don't think he was a crook, but Jerry was fundamentally A
• 58:54
  stylist. I think he'd gone to Art Center
• 58:56
  College of Design. And, you know, that look of the
• 58:59
  vector that he created was fantastic.
• 59:02
  It just people loved it and it and it was timeless.
• 59:06
  I mean, he created in 78 and in the early 90s.
• 59:09
  It's still a startling looking car, right?
• 59:11
  But he knew nothing about vehicle engineering.
• 59:14
  He had a chief engineer who was a fairly junior guy.
• 59:18
  And Jerry was also enamored by having the right components.
• 59:22
  You know, I've got Recaro seats and I've got the, the Brembo
• 59:26
  brakes and I've got this and I've got that and I've got that.
• 59:29
  And he didn't understand the notion that at some point
• 59:31
  there's a development process where you get all this stuff to
• 59:34
  work together. And, you know, you may have a
• 59:36
  great engine and may have been built by the greatest engine
• 59:38
  builder. You've got the best
• 59:40
  turbochargers, but your your cooling system needs to be
• 59:43
  adequate for this 500 horsepower engine.
• 59:46
  And you don't figure that out until you actually go out and
• 59:49
  test the car. Yeah.
• 59:50
  And that whole part of that car was just missing.
• 59:54
  Yeah. And and, you know, he was like a
• 59:56
  a fun guy to meet. Yeah.
• 59:57
  The funny thing is we did that story that I think was a pretty
• 1:00:00
  negative story. Yeah.
• 1:00:01
  And I see him at the LA Auto Show two years later, and he
• 1:00:05
  greets me like a long. Yeah, he was definitely one of
• 1:00:08
  those guys who believed that any publicity is good as long as you
• 1:00:10
  spell my name right. Yes, yes, in that car.
• 1:00:13
  I mean, if you didn't grow up in that area or around in that era,
• 1:00:15
  that was the most exotic of the exotics, right?
• 1:00:18
  That was up there with the Lamborghini LMO 2 or, you know,
• 1:00:22
  you never saw one, you maybe never would, but you knew they
• 1:00:24
  existed and they were just, you know, the stuff of Levian.
• 1:00:27
  But vaporware, if there was ever a car that was vaporware, that
• 1:00:29
  was the one. Well, and.
• 1:00:31
  When we would talk about top speed later on and we'd mention
• 1:00:34
  a car that you know, was the fastest car in the world, right,
• 1:00:38
  A Ferrari F40 or so, which I think we tested at 199 miles an
• 1:00:42
  hour. I tested.
• 1:00:43
  I remember the other. We published that we'd get
• 1:00:46
  letters saying, well, the vector will go 240 and, and, and you
• 1:00:49
  know, you'd come back with some response.
• 1:00:51
  Well, you know, maybe in Jerry's mind or maybe if you dropped it
• 1:00:54
  out of a 747, 20,000 feet, but but you know it, it had never
• 1:00:59
  been tested to do that. No boy did it look good, but it
• 1:01:02
  looked great. It looked so good.
• 1:01:03
  It looked fantastic. Yeah, yeah, the Mosler.
• 1:01:06
  Mosler. Is that how it's pronounced?
• 1:01:07
  That's another car that I always captured my imagination, only
• 1:01:10
  ever saw it in the pages of Car and Driver.
• 1:01:12
  It was this homely looking thing.
• 1:01:14
  But it it actually did have pretty great performance, I
• 1:01:16
  think. Right.
• 1:01:17
  Warren Mosler, entrepreneur. Well, I think he was a he might
• 1:01:22
  have been a bond trader. Oh, is that what it is?
• 1:01:24
  OK. I mean, usually a very wealthy
• 1:01:27
  guy and a very smart guy. Yeah.
• 1:01:29
  And a guy who got interested in cars and he really got
• 1:01:33
  fascinated by the concept, by the Colin Chapman concept of ad
• 1:01:38
  lightness, you know, and he believed in making a really
• 1:01:41
  light car. And he built those original cars
• 1:01:45
  that raced at Nelson Ledges in a number of places.
• 1:01:47
  They were really ugly. Yeah.
• 1:01:49
  And they were very crude inside. Yeah, I think I once wrote that
• 1:01:53
  the interior finish is like the underside of a hot tub.
• 1:01:58
  Which is so good. That's such a great line.
• 1:02:00
  But it was, it really was that, yeah, he was unbelievably bad.
• 1:02:05
  And that was the consular, I think.
• 1:02:06
  That's right, yeah. And then he built a later car.
• 1:02:10
  There was a much prettier car, yes, but basically, you know, he
• 1:02:14
  was a a dabbler in this area, right?
• 1:02:16
  But he, you know, he was interested, he had the money to
• 1:02:19
  indulge his interest and he built some interesting cars and
• 1:02:22
  his cars were fast on the chest. I mean, and they had these
• 1:02:24
  Chrysler. That's what I was going to get
• 1:02:26
  at, yeah, which was the shocking part.
• 1:02:28
  Yeah, but but you know, they weighed 2000 lbs or less and
• 1:02:31
  they performed well. You also did these amazing
• 1:02:34
  articles on things like the Popemobile.
• 1:02:36
  You once took a Crown Victoria and built it out like an
• 1:02:38
  undercover police car. You drove it, I think it was a
• 1:02:41
  Detroit or Toronto or one of these places, and you went to,
• 1:02:43
  there's some CD strip and parked it in front of a cool, you know,
• 1:02:46
  dive bar and this kind of thing. And that's what really, in my
• 1:02:50
  young reader's eyes, I guess, really elevated you guys and set
• 1:02:53
  you apart. And that kind of content
• 1:02:55
  inspired a generation of, of writers.
• 1:02:57
  I'm sure you see it. You read pieces now and you say,
• 1:02:59
  oh, yeah, that's taken from the Car and Driver playbook.
• 1:03:01
  I mean, I know I'm guilty. Yeah, such an indelible mark.
• 1:03:04
  You know, generation. We, we, we, we did the
• 1:03:07
  occasional wild thing. Yeah.
• 1:03:09
  And you know, it's not like every issue had one of those.
• 1:03:12
  But why not do some wild stuff and have fun with cars, you
• 1:03:15
  know? And, you know, the beauty of our
• 1:03:18
  deal was, and this goes back to the David E Davis and Brock
• 1:03:22
  Gates days were those guys were interested in good riding but
• 1:03:27
  were real car enthusiasts. And they put together the right
• 1:03:30
  staff. And, you know, we never did any
• 1:03:32
  market research. I mean, basically when a story
• 1:03:35
  idea came up, it was like, well, if we think this is a good idea,
• 1:03:39
  the readers probably will. And basically, we were generally
• 1:03:44
  right. So, you know, it was a nice way
• 1:03:46
  to run the business. You would just have these
• 1:03:48
  editorial meetings, I assume, and people would pitch these
• 1:03:50
  crazy things and sometimes they'd stick anything that was
• 1:03:53
  too crazy for you that like, damn, I'd like to do this, but
• 1:03:57
  this just isn't going to fly past legal or whatever.
• 1:04:01
  Not too much really, the only time we ran into trouble
• 1:04:06
  sometimes with legal and insurance department was and
• 1:04:10
  trying to test some exotics like we never tested a Jaguar.
• 1:04:15
  God, what was it? The 220.
• 1:04:17
  Yeah, the FJ220 and we found private owners who had, but they
• 1:04:22
  wanted us to insure the car for and suddenly the insurance might
• 1:04:27
  be 6 seven, $10,000 for a day. And also we were responsible if
• 1:04:33
  we blew the clutch for fixing that and whatever.
• 1:04:36
  And you know when your editor, I mean I I can do that stuff
• 1:04:40
  Subrosa, but if the thing sort of blows up on me, then I'm in
• 1:04:44
  trouble with headquarters. So, you know, there are certain
• 1:04:47
  things, there's a lot of things we did where we didn't check
• 1:04:50
  with those guys, but there were times when for something like
• 1:04:56
  that, you just checked with them just to make sure.
• 1:04:59
  And sometimes we got shot down. But, you know, we did our our,
• 1:05:03
  our bosses were generally fairly supportive.
• 1:05:07
  If you remember the Ford Explorer, Firestone.
• 1:05:10
  Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, we when when that story
• 1:05:15
  happened and all these cars are going out of control and
• 1:05:18
  crashing, We're kind of trying to figure out what's going on
• 1:05:22
  because we've had blowouts. I mean, I've been in a car that
• 1:05:26
  had a left front tire blowout at 195 miles an hour and I'm here
• 1:05:29
  to talk about it. And cars just don't go out of
• 1:05:32
  control. You don't lose control of a car
• 1:05:35
  just because you've got a blowout or a flat.
• 1:05:37
  I've been on a racetrack where whole wheel fell off.
• 1:05:40
  You know, again, I'm here to talk about it.
• 1:05:42
  So there was a puzzle of what was going on there and we
• 1:05:45
  decided we wanted to look into this and we bought a used
• 1:05:49
  Explorer of the correct vintage and we found a wheel from a car
• 1:05:55
  maker who will go unnamed on in this case, in which we could
• 1:06:00
  control the wheel was fitted with some valves and
• 1:06:05
  electronically you could release all the air from the wheel
• 1:06:09
  suddenly. And we put one of these on the
• 1:06:11
  Explorer. We put it on the left rear,
• 1:06:14
  which is where 60% of the blowouts happen and they happen
• 1:06:18
  there because of the four wheels on an Explorer, that was the
• 1:06:22
  most heavily loaded wheel. It was most heavily loaded wheel
• 1:06:25
  even with only a driver and that.
• 1:06:26
  Tells you something, yeah? Well, and, you know, all cars
• 1:06:29
  have certain weight distribution.
• 1:06:32
  You know, that's kind of because of the nature of the hardware
• 1:06:35
  and whatever. But that was the one.
• 1:06:37
  And then we tried it out and the car just went straight ahead.
• 1:06:42
  And we even contacted NBC News and we did a nightly news
• 1:06:45
  segment on this where I put together using aircraft remote
• 1:06:51
  control stuff where from the side of the drag strip I could
• 1:06:55
  press a button unbeknownst to the driver.
• 1:06:58
  And I didn't realize that, so they didn't know when it was.
• 1:07:02
  Wow. And, and, and did this and we
• 1:07:04
  even did it where the driver's hands weren't on the wheel.
• 1:07:07
  Right and the. Explorer just goes straight
• 1:07:09
  ahead and, and this isn't to say that they didn't have a problem
• 1:07:14
  because they did, but the crashes were happening because
• 1:07:18
  people were basically, they would hear the blowout and they
• 1:07:22
  would panic and stand on the brakes or do something with the
• 1:07:25
  wheel. If they actually had done just
• 1:07:27
  nothing. Yeah, they would have just
• 1:07:29
  plowed on straight ahead with no problem.
• 1:07:31
  And, you know, we did this, We did the story in the magazine,
• 1:07:34
  and we get letters and say, well, you know, if it happened
• 1:07:36
  on a winding Rd. that wouldn't have been so easy.
• 1:07:38
  I said, well, yeah, but yeah, they didn't happen on winding
• 1:07:41
  roads, right, Because the tire blew out because it overheated,
• 1:07:44
  and it overheated because it was running high speed.
• 1:07:48
  And a lot of them happen in Texas as though at 80 miles an
• 1:07:52
  hour, you overheat at 60 on a winding road, right?
• 1:07:55
  Well, you know, the tire doesn't get as hot.
• 1:07:57
  Well, if it happened in the rain, you couldn't have
• 1:07:59
  maintained control. Well, the tire stays cooler in
• 1:08:01
  the rain, and they didn't happen in the rain.
• 1:08:03
  So you had some of the best responses to letters to the
• 1:08:05
  editor over the years. Well, and.
• 1:08:07
  And. Informed responses, yeah.
• 1:08:09
  Well, they were informed responses.
• 1:08:11
  And by the way, if someone caught us in an error, yeah, we
• 1:08:15
  acknowledged it, right? Because, you know, we wanted to
• 1:08:17
  be fair, right? And you know it, it's the right
• 1:08:21
  thing to do. But the fact is in like in this
• 1:08:23
  story, we had done our research on all this and I knew quite a
• 1:08:27
  bit about these crashes. And I mean, ultimately it was an
• 1:08:31
  interesting problem because I'm not even sure Firestone was at
• 1:08:34
  fault. I think Ford was at fault
• 1:08:36
  because most GM SUVs and most SUVs had tire pressure
• 1:08:41
  recommendations around 30 to 35 PSI.
• 1:08:45
  I think the Explorer, if I recall correctly, was at 26 and
• 1:08:49
  because the car didn't ride very well at 32 or 35, so they
• 1:08:54
  lowered it and at 26 the car was fine.
• 1:08:57
  But a lot of people don't test their tire pressure regularly.
• 1:09:00
  So if the spec is 35 and it drops to 30, you're still in
• 1:09:04
  pretty good shape. If it's 26 and it drops to 21 or
• 1:09:07
  22 and you're running on a 90° day at 80 miles an hour and
• 1:09:12
  maybe your car has a little bit of luggage in the back, then
• 1:09:15
  that left rear tire gets pretty hot.
• 1:09:18
  And that's when it blows out. And so it was a combination of
• 1:09:21
  ingredients that happened here. Yeah, yeah, when you are the
• 1:09:25
  editor of a car magazine and you're making national news or
• 1:09:28
  you're bringing a story like that to the national attention,
• 1:09:31
  you're doing something right for sure.
• 1:09:34
  And I think Car Driver did that a lot.
• 1:09:35
  That was that was a big. Story Well, we tried to do it
• 1:09:38
  when we thought we had something to contribute because you know
• 1:09:42
  most of us on the staff were you know raced if we could and we
• 1:09:48
  were at the magazine in an era where there were some free
• 1:09:50
  racing opportunities and you know some of those were racing
• 1:09:55
  some of those were just driving fast cars.
• 1:09:57
  But you know, for us, even in the 90s, doing a race report in
• 1:10:02
  a monthly magazine is ridiculous.
• 1:10:04
  You know, the race had happened 668 weeks ago, but because of
• 1:10:08
  our our reach, we could maybe contact the racing team.
• 1:10:12
  I mean, I drove an IndyCar, that's right.
• 1:10:14
  And was able to do a story on what it's like to actually
• 1:10:16
  driving an IndyCar. That's what we could do.
• 1:10:19
  That you weren't going to get on TV or someplace else.
• 1:10:22
  And most of us knew some, you know, we're reasonably good
• 1:10:24
  drivers, knew something about vehicle dynamics.
• 1:10:27
  And so when something like this explorer story happens, you sit
• 1:10:30
  there and say, well, why are these cars crashing?
• 1:10:33
  And we follow up on it. And, you know, occasionally it
• 1:10:36
  was regulatory. I did a column once when the
• 1:10:39
  original 55 mile per gallon Cafe law was passed, I think under
• 1:10:45
  first year of Obama's term. And I basically wrote a column
• 1:10:49
  about how the law has a lot of loopholes and it also has
• 1:10:53
  certain assumptions that don't seem to be very sensible.
• 1:10:57
  And the the key assumption was to get the 55 mile per gallon by
• 1:11:02
  2025. The assumption was that the
• 1:11:04
  fleet was going to be 80% cars and 20% trucks.
• 1:11:09
  And they got it exactly backwards.
• 1:11:11
  And whether they got it backwards on purpose or that's
• 1:11:15
  the race show you needed in order to get to the 55 mile
• 1:11:18
  gallon, you know, hard to say. But you know, we, we would
• 1:11:23
  occasionally get involved, but you know, we didn't want to be
• 1:11:25
  too political. On this stuff, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:11:29
  So I think I might know your answer to this, Chebba, but Car
• 1:11:32
  and Driver's 10 best issues were always some of my favorite.
• 1:11:36
  But I imagine as an editor, you probably dreaded putting those
• 1:11:38
  things together. Well, basically you had to plan
• 1:11:42
  them in advance. Yeah.
• 1:11:44
  Because, you know, when I mean, the 10 best cars wasn't bad.
• 1:11:48
  I mean, you know, you'd get a bunch of cars together, staffed
• 1:11:52
  together, would collectively nominate them, and then we'd
• 1:11:54
  spend time driving them and decide, you know, we'd vote.
• 1:11:58
  And, you know, those things were voted.
• 1:12:00
  I didn't, I didn't select them. I mean, and I didn't have a
• 1:12:03
  double vote or a triple vote or something, but we all voted on
• 1:12:06
  those. But the other story is like 10
• 1:12:08
  best engines of all time, 10 best technical developments or
• 1:12:11
  whatever. That often took a little bit to
• 1:12:14
  work. And also the, what do we call
• 1:12:17
  it? Winners and losers?
• 1:12:18
  Yes. Yeah, those are great.
• 1:12:19
  Yeah. You had to go through the whole
• 1:12:21
  year automotive event. So the key there was to assign
• 1:12:24
  someone to winners and losers like, you know, three months in
• 1:12:27
  advance to the deadline. So they had plenty of time to
• 1:12:29
  sift through things. Yeah, those were great.
• 1:12:31
  Esquire magazine used to do the. Oh gosh, was that.
• 1:12:33
  I think that's where we got, yeah, the DBS awards or
• 1:12:36
  whatever, you know? Yeah, those were always
• 1:12:38
  excellent. So you've listed a few names.
• 1:12:40
  David E Davis, obviously, legend, you know, big, big shoes
• 1:12:43
  to fill. Brock Yates.
• 1:12:46
  John Phillips was always a favorite of mine.
• 1:12:48
  And his writing style, I remember his picture, his little
• 1:12:52
  headshot. He had a couple of wolves with
• 1:12:54
  him, if I'm not not mistaken, Patrick Bedard, who actually was
• 1:13:01
  an indie, indie driver. Stephen Cole Smith.
• 1:13:04
  I think it was Stephen Cole Smith that did the piece about
• 1:13:06
  the Popemobile Cadillac had built.
• 1:13:08
  This, I don't know that was ever pressed into service.
• 1:13:11
  That car's at the Peterson Museum now in the vault.
• 1:13:14
  But this, this, I don't know if it was a Fleetwood or something
• 1:13:16
  this big white, you know, And there was this picture of him up
• 1:13:19
  on the. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:20
  I was just like, stuff was brilliant.
• 1:13:22
  Who am I leaving out? Who?
• 1:13:23
  Who sticks out for you? Is is really, you know, some of
• 1:13:26
  your most exceptional folks? Well, I mean, those are some of
• 1:13:29
  the key guys. Yeah.
• 1:13:31
  I mean, a guy like Rich Seppos who's been around forever.
• 1:13:34
  I mean, he was there when I joined the magazine and actually
• 1:13:37
  he still works there. Incredible.
• 1:13:39
  He was gone for, I don't know, 1015 years in the 90s, but, you
• 1:13:43
  know, very solid guy, very good driver, very honest and, you
• 1:13:48
  know, very strong guy. But, you know, you've you've hit
• 1:13:51
  a lot of the key guys. You know, Yates was interesting
• 1:13:54
  because you know, he was a very big name.
• 1:13:57
  I mean, he and David Eve started at Current Driver in the 60s and
• 1:14:01
  you know, in the 70s, you know, Yates did screenplay for the
• 1:14:09
  Cannonball Run kind of stuff. I mean, you know, he made big
• 1:14:11
  money, but he and David had kind of a Big Brother, little brother
• 1:14:17
  relationship and every now and then they were in the on the
• 1:14:20
  outs. When I joined the magazine in
• 1:14:22
  1980, Brock was in On the Outs and then he was at some point, I
• 1:14:27
  don't know, a year or two later, was rehabilitated.
• 1:14:30
  I don't know what happened. But yeah, I wondered that story.
• 1:14:34
  But he was a charming guy. Yeah.
• 1:14:35
  And I remember him coming into the office and he was going
• 1:14:39
  around to each individual office introducing himself and, you
• 1:14:44
  know, in a very humble, modest way.
• 1:14:46
  And he wasn't really a humble modest, but he was actually a
• 1:14:49
  very nice guy. He was a lot of fun to be with
• 1:14:51
  and, but you know, he, he, he, he could be over the top.
• 1:14:55
  We did this Mexico comparison test down to Baja in 83.
• 1:15:00
  And on the first day we crossed the border and we're in Ensenada
• 1:15:06
  and we had dinner at Husang's Cantina, which was a famous
• 1:15:09
  place back then. And he, he's had a couple of
• 1:15:12
  beers and needs to go to the bathroom and, you know, pisses
• 1:15:16
  on a wall in the parking lot. And one of the cops comes over
• 1:15:19
  and Yates kind of has the attitude.
• 1:15:21
  Well, this is Mexico. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:23
  The policeman didn't quite see that.
• 1:15:25
  Yeah. But we were able to deal with
• 1:15:27
  that. But, you know, very, very nice
• 1:15:29
  guy. Yeah.
• 1:15:30
  You know, Phillips is a wild guy.
• 1:15:32
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:15:33
  The picture of the wolves. He lived in a suburb of Ann
• 1:15:36
  Arbor and at one point he decided having a full blown
• 1:15:41
  alpha male wolf as a pet would be a good idea and he bought one
• 1:15:46
  from this wolf sanctuary in Indiana somewhere.
• 1:15:50
  And he brought it home and he put a chain link fence on his
• 1:15:54
  backyard. And I don't know what was 6 feet
• 1:15:57
  high or something, but his backyard fronted on a pond.
• 1:16:01
  And he didn't put the fence across the pond.
• 1:16:04
  And he sort of didn't consider that in the winter the pond
• 1:16:07
  might freeze, so suddenly there's a path out of there.
• 1:16:10
  And also apparently the wolf could Burrow under the chain
• 1:16:13
  link fence. He later on learned that if you
• 1:16:15
  want to keep him in with chain link fence, it has to go 3 feet.
• 1:16:17
  In Oh amazing. Too.
• 1:16:19
  And he'd get a call, like, midday from the local Police
• 1:16:22
  Department telling him, John, now your wolf is out, and some
• 1:16:28
  kids are really frightened, and their mothers are really mad.
• 1:16:31
  Sure you don't get here and pick them up in 20 minutes.
• 1:16:33
  I got to shoot him. Wow.
• 1:16:35
  So he eventually ended up giving back the wolf.
• 1:16:38
  But most of us would understand ahead of time that this was
• 1:16:41
  maybe not right. Yeah.
• 1:16:43
  But John could be extreme in some of these things.
• 1:16:45
  Yeah, yeah, well, we got such a sense of the personalities right
• 1:16:49
  on the page. And you used to RIP each other,
• 1:16:51
  right, you know, in some of the articles.
• 1:16:53
  And it's just, ah, it just seemed like the coolest group of
• 1:16:55
  guys. And again, that motto with of
• 1:16:58
  irreverence, right? Just just really, you know,
• 1:17:00
  shown through and well. But the irreverence, you know,
• 1:17:04
  David would say something like that and say, you know, we, we,
• 1:17:08
  we want to be irreverent. We are irreverent.
• 1:17:12
  But if we're going to be irreverent and we're going to
• 1:17:15
  criticize people and poke fun at people and maybe be borderline
• 1:17:19
  mean sometimes, we better be accurate, right?
• 1:17:22
  You, you can't be irreverent and slight, and that's a bad
• 1:17:25
  combination, right? So just to interject, next week
• 1:17:28
  I'm doing a, a short southwestern road trip, but I'm
• 1:17:33
  visiting Patrick Bedard. Oh, you are in Sedona.
• 1:17:36
  And then I'm visiting a high school buddy.
• 1:17:38
  And I was going to see John Phillips, who's in Taos now, but
• 1:17:42
  he's going to be out of town. So I'm going to I, I'll miss
• 1:17:45
  him, but I, I will see Patrick. And he and I were pretty close
• 1:17:49
  because he was a technical editor before Sherman, right?
• 1:17:52
  So he goes back a long ways and he's a great guy.
• 1:17:56
  Yeah, yeah. What a neat group.
• 1:17:57
  What a what a neat just moment in time.
• 1:18:00
  And and again, you know, I said it before, but you, you know, I
• 1:18:02
  think you may have had the most challenging period as editor.
• 1:18:05
  And the fact that, you know, I asked you what your your highest
• 1:18:07
  point was the fact that you didn't make just maintain, but
• 1:18:10
  you, you, you grew, you expanded, you, you improved
• 1:18:13
  under your tenure. And that's, you know, that's I
• 1:18:15
  think that the the biggest compliment and, and so many
• 1:18:17
  titles are aren't around anymore and car and driver are still
• 1:18:20
  going strong. So, I mean, it was, it was
• 1:18:22
  fortunate. And you know, I mean, to be the
• 1:18:26
  editor, you've got to have, you know, it's a funny thing.
• 1:18:28
  You've got to have an interesting combination of
• 1:18:30
  talents because, you know, I was never the best writer around the
• 1:18:33
  magazine or even the second or maybe the best writer.
• 1:18:37
  But my philosophy was always, I think the legendary New York
• 1:18:42
  Yankees manager Casey Stengel said management, when I get
• 1:18:46
  paid, when you hit a home run, and it's for keeping the team
• 1:18:49
  together, for making the whole thing work well enough for all
• 1:18:53
  the individual lights can shine. And it's exactly that way in a
• 1:18:57
  magazine. I don't have to have the
• 1:18:58
  greatest story or the most important story in the issue.
• 1:19:01
  If the issue is great and I'm the editor, I get credit.
• 1:19:05
  And so my job is to make a great issue.
• 1:19:07
  I don't have to be the one who's the key part of that.
• 1:19:10
  You did, and you know, it's a recurring theme on on this show
• 1:19:14
  that. But you seem to be yet another
• 1:19:15
  one of the fortunate folks who are doing exactly what they
• 1:19:18
  were, you know, made to do. And you know, that's said if you
• 1:19:22
  hadn't taken this journey, what would you be doing?
• 1:19:24
  I guess, well, I don't know, you know, I mean, there was AII kind
• 1:19:28
  of wish at at some points in my life that I had been some sort
• 1:19:32
  of entrepreneur in the automotive space that could have
• 1:19:35
  made that thing work. Sure.
• 1:19:36
  But the reality was, you know, I was 28 years a car and driver.
• 1:19:40
  I had a great career. I basically got paid to play
• 1:19:44
  with cars. And, you know, even when you
• 1:19:47
  become editor in chief, of course you've got more
• 1:19:49
  management responsibility and it's a different deal.
• 1:19:52
  But, you know, we had a pretty good company and it was a pretty
• 1:19:54
  good team and, and I was suited to it.
• 1:19:57
  I mean, I know one previous editor, I mean, will go
• 1:20:01
  nameless, but he would be summoned to New York for a
• 1:20:06
  management meeting and he would break out in hives.
• 1:20:09
  And you know it doesn't work. For whatever reason, maybe it's
• 1:20:13
  ego, but the first time I show up in the boardroom for a
• 1:20:16
  meeting, my mental attitude was finally, I'm where I belong.
• 1:20:21
  And well, I mean, you know, maybe I'm wrong about that, but
• 1:20:23
  the point is, if I'm comfortable, they're
• 1:20:25
  comfortable. I mean, that's the way it works.
• 1:20:28
  And we had some tough bosses. The guy who was president of our
• 1:20:32
  company when I became editor was David Pecker, friend of Donald
• 1:20:36
  Trump. Yeah, who you know.
• 1:20:38
  Supposedly did the capture and kill things at The Enquirer.
• 1:20:42
  That's right. I know him quite well.
• 1:20:43
  Yeah. He was my boss, huh?
• 1:20:45
  And, you know, he was a terror in New York.
• 1:20:49
  And either I was too stupid to know what a terror he was, but.
• 1:20:52
  And I was never, you know, never disrespectful to him.
• 1:20:55
  Sure. But, you know, if he said
• 1:20:56
  something that I thought was wrong, I would correct him, You
• 1:20:59
  know, and I, I once had a run in with one of my edit with an
• 1:21:03
  editorial director was nominally my boss.
• 1:21:06
  OK. And he would say, well, you
• 1:21:07
  know, you didn't tell him what they wanted to hear.
• 1:21:09
  Yeah. And I said to him, I said, well,
• 1:21:11
  look #1 I'm in Michigan. I don't know what they want to
• 1:21:15
  hear. So.
• 1:21:16
  And #2 as an executive in the company, I think it's my job to
• 1:21:20
  tell them what I see is the truth.
• 1:21:21
  Yeah. And try and get them to make
• 1:21:23
  what I think is the right decision.
• 1:21:24
  And ultimately, they get to make their decision and I get to
• 1:21:28
  either do it or resign. But, I mean, going in upfront, I
• 1:21:32
  should be telling them my view of, of the truth.
• 1:21:34
  Absolutely. And that generally worked pretty
• 1:21:37
  well. Yeah.
• 1:21:37
  So, you know, I was blessed with reasonable management.
• 1:21:40
  Yeah, You know, I, I've gleaned a lot talking with folks on the
• 1:21:43
  show over the years. And one of the things I've
• 1:21:45
  learned is you've got to ask. There's something you want, you
• 1:21:47
  know, a car to test whatever you have to ask for it, you know,
• 1:21:49
  another one is to put yourself in places where you're going to
• 1:21:52
  meet people, where you're going to, you know, but I think, you
• 1:21:54
  know, I've learned a third one today and that's walk in like
• 1:21:57
  you belong there. Yeah, right.
• 1:21:59
  And that's the tone moving forward.
• 1:22:00
  So that's, wow. It's, well, I mean, really a
• 1:22:03
  proud tenure, proud career one which continues.
• 1:22:06
  But again, those years when you were at the helm of Car and
• 1:22:09
  Driver meant a lot to a lot of us and and really guided our our
• 1:22:13
  enthusiasm to later in life. So.
• 1:22:16
  Thank you. No, no, I'm, I'm happy to hear
• 1:22:18
  that. And I, I, I, I, I, I hear that
• 1:22:21
  from a fair number of people. You know, I mean, I, I travel in
• 1:22:24
  some car circles and I'm going to be judging at the Vale of
• 1:22:28
  Concord in about two weeks time. And, you know, people come up to
• 1:22:33
  me, you know, they see the name and.
• 1:22:35
  Yeah. Are you this guy?
• 1:22:36
  Yeah. And generally it's very, very
• 1:22:38
  positive. I don't know that I've ever had
• 1:22:40
  a guy come up to me and say, you know, I, yeah, you really
• 1:22:43
  screwed up. Yeah.
• 1:22:43
  At that time. So.
• 1:22:45
  They better not. Oh.
• 1:22:46
  No, it's, it's, it's great to hear and it was a good time.
• 1:22:49
  Yeah, absolutely. Are you optimistic about the
• 1:22:51
  future for US automotive enthusiasts?
• 1:22:55
  Yes and no. I mean, I think automotive
• 1:22:58
  enthusiasm is going to be around, uh, autonomous driving,
• 1:23:02
  for example, is taken longer to arrive, yeah, than anybody
• 1:23:06
  thought. I was hired to give a speech to
• 1:23:09
  an industry group on autonomous cars in 2016 and I'd predicted
• 1:23:13
  that by 2020 it would be here and available as an option on
• 1:23:16
  cars and, and we're not there yet.
• 1:23:18
  And by the way, even the current status, like Waymo cars, they're
• 1:23:23
  not that autonomous. My daughter, as it happens,
• 1:23:26
  works at Waymo. And but you know, the way Waymo
• 1:23:30
  comes into a city where they've got to run around for a while
• 1:23:33
  and map all the intersections and fill a database with all the
• 1:23:36
  possibilities. And I sit there and think, well,
• 1:23:39
  how autonomous is that? Yeah, you and I can go into any
• 1:23:42
  city that we've never seen before and drive from one edge
• 1:23:45
  to the other with no particular difficulties, no pre programming
• 1:23:49
  required. These things are still not that
• 1:23:52
  autonomous. And it's going to be a ways out,
• 1:23:55
  but I mean, I can envision a time when driving a car is a
• 1:23:59
  skill, like flying an airplane or riding a horse and something
• 1:24:03
  that most people do not possess. That may hopefully won't be for
• 1:24:08
  30 or 40 years, but cars will still remain and be special
• 1:24:13
  interest items. And we'll see.
• 1:24:16
  Interesting. It's an interesting take,
• 1:24:18
  Chabachetta. It's been an honor.
• 1:24:19
  I mean that. Thanks so much for the
• 1:24:22
  conversation today. I'm Ryan Barkey, and until next
• 1:24:25
  time, it's that car show.