To All The Cars I've Loved Before: Your First Car Tells The Story

45 Years of MotorWeek: John Davis on Creating Automotive Television & Changing How America Sees Cars

• Doug & Christian - Your Guides to Classic Cars & First Car Stories • Season 6 • Episode 9

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Join hosts Christian and Doug as they welcome automotive television royalty—John Davis, creator, host, and executive producer of MotorWeek, the longest-running automotive magazine show in television history. For 45 years and over 1,900 episodes, John Davis has shaped how generations experience automotive journalism. 

Discover how a young producer at Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser had a vision in 1978 to bring automotive print magazines to television—something no one in North America had successfully done. After a 3-year wait and a 6-week sprint to launch, MotorWeek premiered in October 1981 on Maryland Public Television and forever changed automotive media on PBS and then the Internet.

John reveals the philosophy that made MotorWeek succeed across five decades: "The cars are the stars." Learn why consistency matters, how instrumented testing keeps the show scientifically credible (one of only 3 publications still doing it), and why team opinions matter more than individual perspectives. From PBS stations nationwide to YouTube's digital age, MotorWeek adapted while maintaining its core mission.

Personal stories include John's Ford family and influence on his first car, restoring a 1975 De Tomaso Pantera, other dream cars, and more.

Don't miss MotorWeek's 45th Anniversary Special on PBS and YouTube - https://youtu.be/Vq1H8gVQKP4?si=yoph4G81bpNkudHn

Perfect for MotorWeek fans, automotive journalists, PBS television enthusiasts, muscle car collectors, and anyone who appreciates how one show influenced 45 years of automotive culture. Whether you discovered MotorWeek in the 1980s or found it on YouTube, this episode celebrates television's most enduring automotive voice.

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Listen on your favorite platform and visit https://carsloved.com for full episodes, our automotive blog, Guest Road Trip Playlist and our new CAR-ousel of Memories photo archive.

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SPEAKER_01:

Welcome back to All The Cars I've Loved Before, your authoritative podcast on automotive nostalgia where our guests are unique. Each auto has an era, and every car tells a story. So you know what time it is. It's time to plug in, get a little grease under the nails, and slip on that favorite car-themed t-shirt, hat, or jacket. And and Doug, as usual, doesn't disappoint you. We'll get to him in one minute. But we're so excited today. We typically just banter away, and you know me, I can babble for quite a while, but typically talk a bit about what's happening in our lives in the world in automotive industry. But uh, we're gonna be quick today because waiting in the green room today is automotive royalty. Maybe we should call it the purple room today. Just uh just just really excited uh by today's guest. But real quick, let's welcome back listeners from around the world. Dallas, Texas, New York, New York, Sunnyvale, California. What's in Sunnyvale? That's not Apple. Is Apple Cupertino? Apple's Cupertino? Well, I know Juniper Networks is in Sunnyvale. Yeah, I knew somebody was in Sunnyvale. Atlanta, Georgia, welcome back. Sydney, New South Wales, land down under Montreal, Quebec, Bienvenue. Welcome back. Wake Forest, Philly. There's only one Philly. Where's Philly? Philly. Pennsylvania, Tokyo. Welcome back. Brisbane, Australia, London, England. We could go on, we could go around the world and back again. But uh here we are. And uh oh, so uh back to the the themed t-shirt for today. It's not really a car t-shirt, but let's let's talk to the audience a bit about what you got there as usual, stylish. Well, why don't you describe it? Ah, it is definitely a vintage, a 70s vintage. It's got the profile of what looks like a Picasso painting and triplicate, but it's not Picasso. It is the PBS logo from way back then. And you'll you'll hear why that's important in a minute, but where did you dig out that shirt? Was that was that in in the back of your closet or or was it$80 from some upscale uh uh internet vintage retail? Uh uh question.

SPEAKER_02:

No to both questions. Uh I did buy it online. I had to search for it. Yeah. Uh yeah, I'm pretty happy with it.

SPEAKER_01:

And so I have to ask you, how does today's guest tie into your shirt? And will you please introduce today's guest?

SPEAKER_02:

So my PBS logo shirt. One of my earliest memories around cars was watching this wonderful show on Maryland Public Television. I'm from Maryland. Same about about cars. And fast forward 45 years, 1900 plus episodes, we have the creator, the host, and executive producer of television's original automotive magazine, known as Motor Week. Motor Week. That's right. And John Davis is our special guest today. Hello, John.

SPEAKER_00:

Hello, hello, hello, Doug, and hello, Christian from Maryland. We're delighted to be with you. Glad to have you with us. And welcome to be with you.

SPEAKER_01:

Hey, so Doug said that he he grew up watching the show, and I said, yes, yes. He said, Maryland. I wasn't saying uh that I grew up in Maryland. So Doug grew up in Maryland and watched the show. I grew up in Louisiana, watched the show. And and I just feel like this, I can't ever remember this show not being in my life. And it was just so wonderful. I'm quite starstruck talking to you here today. So can you talk a bit about the inception of the show, how it started, and and um how it all got underway in your world?

SPEAKER_00:

Sure. Uh as I was producing Wall Street Week with Lewis Hurkeiser, which was the show that really began financial television as we know it today. And when I became executive producer in 1978, my boss asked me to come up with an idea of my own, and I had a couple. Uh I did a personal finance show pilot, but I really wanted to bring the automotive print magazine to television. No one had done that before, uh, at least not successfully. There have been some attempts around the world. There was a show called Torque in Australia, and uh there were various uh efforts going on in Europe to try and launch something, but nobody in North America had really done it, and let alone on some kind of a weekly basis. Uh so 1978, we did the pilot for Motor Week. We had the uh name researched, we knew it was clean, and uh we did the show, and then it sat on the shelf for three years as we went about trying to sell it, get stations interested, because we knew we wanted to be more than a local show from the beginning. It was kind of the mantra of our operation to produce for your local audience, but do it on subjects that everybody would love to know about. So we always had this idea, it would at least be re regional up and down the East Coast, but be national if possible. And lo and behold, three years later, after various attempts to get it launched and talking to stations to see if they would be interested, we found out that a competing station was gonna do an automotive series. And my boss on July the 5th, 1981, called me into his office. His name was Warren Park, a lovely man. And he said, you know, we're gonna have an auto show on offer to PBS uh in January. Can you be on the air by then? Uh and he I said, I'll be on the air instead of six months, I'll be on the air in six weeks. We didn't quite do that. Uh it was mid-October, uh, so you know, 12 weeks or so. And we came on with the first episode, and we've been on ever since. And there was a rationale to that because I'd learned from doing Wall Street Week that if you're on every week, stations leave you alone in the schedule and they allow you to build an audience. But to do that, you've got to offer essentially a new show every week.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

And even though we do 26 all-new shows and 26 shows where the majority is new, and that's how you keep a time spot and allow your audience to grow. Otherwise, the stations will say, it's a rerun, we'll take it off and bring it back later. And sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. And so here we are. We've been on weekly ever since.

SPEAKER_01:

So it was the idea was never let your backup see the field. It was always have something in queue, always have something. How quickly did you stumble upon, or maybe it was by design? You seem like a by design guy. How quickly did you get the winning formula for what we see as the show today? Was that pretty much out of the box? Did you have to tinker with it much?

SPEAKER_00:

Uh, the format you see today was very much what we started with. We didn't have a lot of feature segments, so they were added, but the concept was a magazine style for television. And at that time, there were really only two uh programs uh that were using that formula. One was a um a local series that was done by all the Westinghouse-owned TV stations around the country at the time. They later became CBS stations. And it was called Evening Magazine, and they would do five and six-minute segments, and they would borrow from other stations to fill out a week. They did it every night, five nights a week, uh during the you know, Monday through Friday. And then at about the same time we were doing our first episode, not our pilot, um, evening magazine was debuting with a magazine style format. And the advantage of a magazine style format is number one, you don't bore people to death with very long segments. Everything's about five or six minutes. Yeah. You're allowing the person who wants to see a new car to see that, but then someone who maybe wants some other information like our Goss's Garage to have that. But the big deal is I knew one day we probably would do a commercial version of the show, and it allowed you to easily edit and insert commercials.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, how interesting.

SPEAKER_00:

So the magazine format started, we still use it today. A lot of other things have changed, but that basic format has been unchanged for 45 years.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow. And and how big a staff did you have at the very beginning? And once you got to something that started to move past local, regional, and and uh national, did you have to staff up a lot or were you able to sort of just kind of punch above your weight with everybody that you had there?

SPEAKER_00:

No, we had to go down. Uh in the early years, uh, we basically had probably about 13 or 14 full-time people, not at the very onset, but very quickly after. But to be honest, what's happened is as technology came along, uh, we like most other television operations around the country, uh, reduced manpower. And I'll give you an example. We used to have our feature reporters go out with a producer. Well, it got to the point where the feature reporter became so talented, they could essentially produce themselves. So as producers retired or left us, they weren't replaced. On the technical side, when the camera situation, when we began a remote crew to go out and do a road test, was three people on the camera side. You had a camera person, you had an engineer, and you had an audio engineer as well. Uh, now it's one person with a with a very good camera or a selection of cameras, actually, and they do all of that. So uh I wouldn't call it automation, but I would say progress and electronics and just the style of how we do things allowed us to reduce that count to about 10 where we are today. And we've just lost uh one person uh who was taking a different job, and because of the PBS cutbacks, you've probably all read about, we likely won't be replacing that position anytime soon. So we've had as few as uh six or seven and as many as 13, but 10's a nice number and it seems to work well.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh wow, wonderful, wonderful. Oh, and Doug, I apologize for completely dominating the discussion. Let's bring my co-host in on the on the interview here. Yeah, yeah. So um why are you here, Doug? He's all the skill. I'm just the I'm the car nut, Christian's the cultured person.

SPEAKER_00:

I can tell that. Yeah, so thank you by the way for wearing the PBS shirt.

SPEAKER_02:

That's uh that is a terrific shirt. It's a it's an honor to wear it with.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

So um you mentioned your your team, right? Uh as many as 13, but there's an interesting story about how you picked them, right? Related to the Maryland Public Television parking lot.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, when I was given the go, I had to basically put together a group of people. And it had been three years since we did the pilot. So I literally walked down into the parking lot and started looking at the cars out there, and then copied down the license plates and went into security and said, okay, whose vehicle is this? Well, Craig Singhas had already been on the pilot. He owned a Shelby Mustang, so he was easy. Uh, Joyce Braga, our first female reporter, and who did the news on the earliest episodes, she was driving a Porsche 924. So I knew she was perfect for the job. And it it went on like that and still continues today. I will tell you, when someone applies for the job, one of the questions they get asked is, and by the way, what do you drive? It tells you a lot. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02:

Yep, for sure. For sure. And do you get a lot? I'm sure for our listeners and myself, do you get a lot of people applying for jobs, just sending resumes over?

SPEAKER_00:

Uh, yes, we do. Although these days with the internet, you really don't need an operation as big as ours to get on the, you know, to get in front of the public with your automotive insights. And actually, we've had several instances in the last couple of years where we've hired people for one uh position or another because of their internet presence. Uh, case in point, when Pat Goss uh left us very unexpectedly, we turned to the internet to look for a variety of replacements. We actually took four people to uh replace Pat. He was so incredible. Yes, he was and and all of those had a significant internet uh internet presence, including our youngest uh Giuseppe Ayatarola, who has Giuseppe's garage. He's a child prodigy. Of course, he's almost 14 now. But uh, you know, when he was uh 10 and started with us, uh there was no one else like him, and actually there still isn't. So we'll draw information from everywhere, but we still get quite a few. Hey, I'd like to be in automotive journalism. What have you got open? And how do you start? And my first response is well, just be prepared to starve to death. But if you can handle that, uh you're you're cut out for automotive journalism. Yes, if you can subsist on water indefinitely, this might be the job for you. That's right. You know exactly what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_01:

Amen. Amen. Good stuff. What what do you think, Doug? Should we kind of uh venture uh back into the past? Did you want to talk with him uh right now about any any current projects he's working on?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, um, no, I think uh I can't wait.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh would you mind if I plug something? Please, please. Okay, on uh on the 8th of November, starting on the 8th of November at PBS stations around the country will be the special 45th anniversary edition of Motor Week. And uh it'll be that weekend, the 8th and 9th, on most public television stations around the country. It's a really good, jam-packed half-hour look back at everything we've done over 45 years. And if you're not wondering how we go about doing things, it's got a lot of that in it, including how we produce our road test. And on Sunday, the 9th, it'll actually go up on our YouTube channel at noon Eastern time. So if you can't catch it on the PBS station, it'll be there.

SPEAKER_02:

That's my point. Love that. Thank you. I love that. So thank you. Thank you. Perfect, perfect. Yeah, no, Christian, I I think it's uh time to talk about John's early cars.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, you have something? I just wanted to say before we hop in the way back, before we hop in the DeLorean and go 88 miles an hour. I was curious as to 45 years in, John, what what surprises you sitting in that office this time forward, doing uh, you know, see all the world has changed, uh in the automotive industry has changed. What kind of strikes you from where you sat in the beginning to to what you see now around you?

SPEAKER_00:

It's the level of driver assistance systems that help everyone become a safer driver, which of course, for an outgrowth of this, um it's turning out so far to be kind of a fantasy of looking for the autonomous vehicle. Yes. And on the way for that to develop that, uh, all of these things like lane keep assist and even rear traffic alert and all the rest of them had to be um become perfected for autonomous driving to arrive. And that semi-autonomous aspect that provides an extra little safety margin for drivers, uh, I did not expect that. I mean, we knew any lock brakes were coming, we knew skid control, but to extrapolate that into this almost cocoon-like that modern cars have, uh, I did not expect that. And but I'm a big technology guy, so as soon as I saw it, uh, we started embracing it. But no, I would say that that surprised me.

SPEAKER_01:

And it's such an interesting point because I remember, and I don't know, just this weekend, I was kind of thinking about a couple of decades ago when my family was young, we would go on vacation and meet this other family, and I would pull out an atlas, a paper map, and have it spread on the dashboard and looking for country back roads. And now you have on any phone this GPS, which is in essence a map that talks to you. I mean, how safe is that? That small little thing in your pocket, a map that talks to you. Keep your eyes on the road, and your phone says, okay, uh, uh, uh, 500 yards, you're gonna take a right. That small thing on top of what you're saying is it's just remarkable.

SPEAKER_00:

It is remarkable. I mean, to the point that I really don't go anywhere without GPS now. And I plug it in and put in a destination just to make sure there's no traffic, you know, situations I'm not aware of. But I gotta say, there is no substitute for being able to spread out a big map, pinpoint where you are, and look at everything around it, which is something effectively you cannot do on GPS because once you zoom out, the roads get too small. You can't even stay on show up. So I miss big maps and the big map books, but you know, I use uh the phone like everybody else, plug it in, put the destination in, and go.

SPEAKER_01:

Such a good point. And I have no use for paper maps, yet, as you say, they're beautiful, and I can't throw them with so in the back of each of my cars, there's a map of Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, uh, Pennsylvania, all these places. And there's just there's more to a map, you know, there are ads, places to stop, relative differences in that clever little grid. But okay, great. I think it's time, Doug. Let's uh let's go back in time. Thank you for that answer, John. And and John, how did it all start for you? What was the first car you either bought, learned to drive on?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I don't know how far back you want to go, but let's uh let's at least start with uh the first car I owned, and it was a reflection of my family. My family was a Ford family. And I grew up during uh my teen years, during the um when NASCAR was first coming on, the uh the first getting its popularity in the masses, and we would go to races at the North Wilkes Barrow Speedway in North Carolina with my dad, and we were a Ford fan, so we were uh fans of Fred Lorenza, who was a the uh prominent Ford driver at the time. But you know, we saw people like uh uh the Petties, the you know, Fireball Roberts, you name it, they were all out there competing. But in those days, it wasn't so much about the driver as it was the car brand. So, you know, Ford, Chevy, Dodge, whatever, Pontiac, even at times, uh, that's what we followed. So my first car was a 1967 Ford Mustang. I bought it in '69. I was still in college. Um, it was a bare bones uh coupe, uh maroon in color, automatic, nothing special, six-holder, didn't even have an eight. It was a couple years old at that time when I bought it. It had a bad valve, so that was uh really one of the few times I've ever torn into an engine to repair something deep inside. And uh I had that car through uh undergraduate school and through uh graduate school for my MBA until I left to go to New York in 19 uh seventy two. And then when I come back, you want me to keep going? Oh, Doug, I did no, no, no.

SPEAKER_02:

I mean, it obviously going to New York, no need to do it.

SPEAKER_00:

No cars didn't want. However, I'll tell you what I did. I missed driving so much. Yeah, I was crazy. So uh a fellow I worked with, his family lived out on Long Island. I lived in Manhattan. So on the weekends, I would get on the train, drive out, uh, take the train out to his town, get off, walk about a mile and a half to his street, and he would leave a car with the keys under the mat so I could get in it on a Sunday, drive out to the end of Long Island and come back and then go back, leave the keys, go back into the city. So I could get back to driving. When I would come home, it was fine. But I at that point I didn't actually have my own car. I had sold it. Uh, so I was crazy without being able to drive routine. I missed it so much.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. And when when um obviously you must hang your first car, but when did the love affair and and second, that's right. When did the love affair of cars start for you?

SPEAKER_00:

Uh the love affair for cars started with me and actually with all things mobile. Uh I was uh from an earliest age, and I still have the doodles in my basement. I drew car designs, I drew airplanes, I drew it, love it. I did, I did model rockets, I did model airplanes, and you know, all that stuff. So I knew I wanted something to move. I, of course, went into engineering school because of that, but I couldn't really uh afford to take flight lessons. So the car was not only was the car my source of freedom from the time I was 16 on, but it became uh bigger than that because it was almost like a substitute for not being able to do to go flying. So uh it it took off from a very early age and just progressed from there. Then I got away from it a little while, of course, while I was in um uh in New York, even though I was covering transportation uh uh uh companies. Uh and then when I came back to uh well came to Maryland in 1972, that's when the second Mustang uh came into my life. And it was almost a clone of the first, except it was a little bit newer. It was a 60, it was uh um, geez, I've forgotten now. It was a 69.

SPEAKER_01:

So and Doug, let me break in here real quick. As we were talking through his early life, when when when Doug Doug and I were talking about you over the weekend, John, and we saw where you went off to to to New York City. And we thought, well, oh, got kind of a departure from uh from uh uh studying cars, being involved with cars. But then we learned you were a transportation analyst when you were in the financial industry. So it's it's these things that have engines is really the through line of your entire life. You know, your passion is younger to your job all these years later. I that's that's just so wonderful to me. It seems so fitting.

SPEAKER_00:

I mean, that's very true. And of course, I I missed, you know, one thing that we haven't talked about was when I was in college in my undergraduate year, that's when I got involved with electronic media, specifically radio. And so from about 67, 68 on, I was either on the radio at the uh North Carolina State University on the weekends. I would work for a couple of different commercial stations, one in Chapel Hill where UNC is, the other in Durham, where I'm my hometown is, and then eventually gravitated to a local um television station in Durham, WRDU. But that was the media background. So I had the engineering, the media, and then the business background. Oh, I went on to New York, abandoning the uh the uh journalistic aspect, thought it was a great way just to work my way through college, but not really what I wanted to do as a career. Lo and behold, I got out of New York, got very bored, didn't like what I was doing, had an opportunity to come to Maryland Public Television to work on Wall Street Week because they were looking for someone with a business and broadcasting background. I had to write uh stuff for them, and my resume almost stops there.

SPEAKER_01:

No, your resume just came back home at that point. It was time to sit in the driver's seat for good. Go ahead, Doug. Back to you. Yeah. No, no.

SPEAKER_02:

That's uh very uh, yeah, it's a it's a a great story, right? And we all wonder. And I think pulling into Motor Week, right? We've talked about your second car being uh another Mustang. Pulling into Motor Week, what car were you driving? Sorry, Maryland Public Television, what car were you driving then? That was the 69 Mustang. Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

I bought that within a week or so of actually coming to MPT and being hired. And I drove that car for let's see, one, two, three, three years, I think. Two to three years. Uh it got rear-ended very badly uh in Richmond and kind of never was the same again. Uh, but then during that period, you know, I was a young single guy. Uh I was I was interested in something a little bit more than that. I had some spare cash. But what I really wanted was something, quote unquote, like an exotic car, but that had an American engine that I could work on. I wasn't really interested in doing anything European. It would be way beyond my skills. And there were two particular cars that were making the rounds that were reasonably affordable on the used market at that point. One was the Jensen Interceptor, which had a Chrysler uh V8 in it, and the other was the Di Tommaso Pantera, and before that the Magusta, but the Magusta was nothing but trouble. Of course, so was the Pantera, but less so. Um, I don't remember how I narrowed it down, but I came across a uh two-year-old, and this is 1975 now, a two-year-old Pantera down in Norfolk, Virginia. So a 73 model, which was what was the first, what they call the L model, which meant it had rubber front bumpers to meet the U.S. safety standards. I went down to Richmond. A family had bought it for their son, you know, as a high school graduation project. And I think he he promptly wrecked it, they got it repaired, they sent him off to the Navy. I drove the car home, completely took it apart, filled up my uh little one-bedroom apartment with car parts everywhere, and pretty much rebuilt uh everything that uh didn't move and uh drove that until uh 1979. So, and I still miss that car today.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, yeah, no. And and it's a Ford, right? Ford drive train.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, I I tell you, you know, it had a Mustang engine, of course.

SPEAKER_03:

Yep.

SPEAKER_00:

Uh had dual point distributor, which was nothing but trouble. One point sets points would close up on you because of vibration, and you'd have to pull off the side of the road because it would die, it would short out. And I could get out of the car, take off the cowling, open up the distributor, disconnect one set of the points because it would run fine on one, put it back together and be back in the driver's seat well under five minutes, which I had to do in the rain, in the snow, almost uh you never knew when it was gonna basically creep up on you. You physically couldn't tighten the uh tightening screws humanly enough to keep that from happening. I mean, there were I was under it every weekend keeping it running, but I still missed that car today.

SPEAKER_02:

And that and that was your daily driver, it sounds like for many years. It was wow.

SPEAKER_00:

And I I had to the only real modification I did to it was I put on what was then called the Saudi Arabian package, which was it had a radiator in the front with two fans on it, a long run to the mid-engine. But they had a second set of fans you could put to draw air through the radiator. And um that was I put that on there so it wouldn't overheat on our hot summer days. Uh but that and uh different radio, that was it. When I finally did sell it, uh that was the only two uh things I had added to it, except I did have to rebuild the transmission and a couple and a lot of other stuff.

SPEAKER_02:

Sounds uh sounds a lot like my DeLorean in many ways.

SPEAKER_00:

I wanted one. I wanted one of your DeLoreans very badly, and I came very, very close to actually buying one. Uh, but what happened was is DeLorean would not send out test cars. They had them, but they kept putting everybody off. And uh a former automotive rider was doing their PR. Finally, because their headquarters was less than two hours up the road. Finally, we controlled a car out of them. And one of the test roads that we use near work has a 90-degree turn that is a 30 mile an hour or less turn. Turn. Well, because of the rear weight bias and the DeLorean, that turn at 30 miles an hour would cause you to the rear end to break away and you would spin. You wouldn't go in a complete circle, but you lost all traction, despite the fact I think it had the widest rear tires on it in any car we had ever tested. So that kind of chilled my enthusiasm for it. And it wasn't too long after that that uh John DeLorean, who was a personal idol up to that point, yeah, uh, got into trouble and uh his downfall began.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, yeah. Well, the um yeah, there's a special place, Christian knows this story, but special place in my heart for that car. Of course. Even going back before Back to the Future, I remember living in Saverna Park, Maryland, and somebody said, Wow, the new DeLorean's out, it cost$20,000. It was really$25,000 in 1981. And I saw one in the parking lot, and I just it was amazing.

SPEAKER_00:

That's exactly the way I felt about it. I I really wanted one. I believe you know, I had followed John DeLorean's career, I knew everything he had done at General Motors, and even though there was some controversy, he really was the father of the GTO. Yep, he was and um, you know, I had a uh he was doing advertisements after he left Ford, I mean General Motors, and I had a Cuddy Sark uh poster of him and uh in my uh office, you know, and so I was I was absolutely crushed when the the the whole uh drug situation erupted. Uh but you know, there's a case that the man basically had a passion and he was trying to keep it going. And uh even though he certainly took a wrong move, I understand the motivation.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, yeah. And it was uh, you know, a really great social experiment that came out of it, trying to help Northern Ireland with their low unemployment. And like that, that's something to be proud of. And you know, I I can't help but thank uh Christian how blown away we were. We had uh John DeLorean's daughter on that our 10th episode. Yeah, and that was just for me, that was like I feel today, right? That's as close as I was gonna get. In this case, I'm I'm right there.

SPEAKER_00:

But even in the same state, but I think I actually'm sorry, I'm talking all over so rude of me. No, I'm pretty sure I met uh DeLorean once. Um I think it was at the Detroit Auto Show. It was totally brief. Uh but uh yeah, I I um I thought he was the quintessential car guy. And he really understood cars and what and what to do with them, how to make them how to make them live.

SPEAKER_02:

Yep, uh and how to sell them, right?

SPEAKER_00:

That's unfortunately I was also a fan of Colin Chapman, and I don't think uh I don't think uh Colin really did uh John much uh uh a favor with the chassis he sold him.

SPEAKER_02:

So Yep, uh I think many would agree with you, yeah, probably myself included.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

So yeah, no, that's uh I'm trying to look at your other list of many cars. And uh actually you you mentioned uh replacing the radio on your Pantera. So I do have to ask, uh it doesn't have to be from the Pantera years, but what's a favorite song from your early cars, first car you heard on the radio?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, you're gonna laugh, but the first car theme that I ever remember was the Nelson Riddles theme to Route 66. And of course, that was then later followed by the the Route 66 um song, right? Whose whose uh whose um whose composer I has left my brain. Uh but those two songs were probably the first two car-themed music that I ever remember. But I was glued to the uh TV uh every week when um Martin Milner and um George uh Harris uh would come on with Route 66. And you know, my brother actually owned uh that uh a car very much like the uh Corvette they were driving across the country in. And so it had a lot of meaning to me.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and speaking of Corvettes, you are a Corvette guy, am I right?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, and uh after I had the Pantera what caused me to sell it, by that time I was getting ready to get married. Uh my wife and my soon wife to be and I decided we wanted to try and buy a house. So the Pantera I sold at a profit and used some of the money as a down payment of the house and had some left to put down on a 79 uh anniversary edition uh Corvette. So it's the only Corvette I've ever owned, but I did really love that car, and it was a it's still circulating around this area uh somewhere. I see it from time to time.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh wow. Also maroon. So also maroon, that's your favorite color. So but that was purely the luck of the draw.

SPEAKER_00:

It was the only one I could find. I mean, that was a hot property in those days.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. And your current one of your current cars, and I know Christian wants to ask you about the uh the EV portion, is a 2024 Fiat 500 E. Is that also maroon, John? No, it's red. Okay. Close.

SPEAKER_00:

Um, I got tired. I mean, we test everything 150 cars a year, plus or minus. We've driven everything electric, and I almost bought a couple of different electrics in the last seven years. But I got to the point where I said, look, we get them in to work, we drive them for a couple of weeks, occasionally we have one for longer. I wanted to actually, because it looked like we were heading down that road, I wanted to live with one on a daily basis. And one of my cars is a 2002 Mini Cooper. I wanted something to replace the Mini. Uh, it was, yeah, I still have it, it didn't get replaced. So I was looking around. I had seen the first generation Fiat 500E, not enough range. When the second one came out with a 150-mile range, I thought very interesting. I'd owned, you know, various and sundries, or I'd driven various and sundry fiats when I was a teenager, but they wanted too much money. And literally, I was at a North American car of the year drive, and I was talking to the Stellantis rep, and he said, Oh, by the way, we just dropped the uh lease fee on the uh 500E to I think$200 a month with virtually nothing down. I went home that night, looked up the uh two nearest fiat dealers, started communicating with them, and within about four days, I took possession of one. And uh because it was, they were practically, they weren't giving them away, but it was so inexpensive, I felt our family could afford it. And so it is one of my daily drivers. And uh, but I've actually bought it for my spouse who likes something the size of many of the mini to run into town and come back. So she drives it as much as I do.

SPEAKER_02:

Gotcha, gotcha. What other cars are in the garage?

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, let's see. Well, I mentioned the 2002 Mini Cooper, one of the very first ones that came into the US. There was a story of I hated it when I until I drove it and then I fell in love and bought it immediately. Uh, I have a 2003 Ford Ranger. I wish somebody made a nice little tidy pickup that size again. Uh, the only other uh interesting car I have is a 2014 um Mercedes uh SLK 250, uh, which I used to have a Miata, but my we sold it. My wife said it'd be nice to have a convertible again. And then I've got a uh a Hyundai Palisade that's uh our dogmobile, which uh I'm very fond of.

SPEAKER_01:

So yeah, no, that's and and and it's it's really high praise that you would buy something, John, because as you said before, just about everything made in this country kind of crosses your kind of crosses your your your garage, so to speak, at work. So um yeah, high praise for anything that gets the permanent stamp of approval there.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and Christian, as we were talking before this, I and I think I shared this with John. I think John slash motorweek has driven every car I've ever owned.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh you're a young man, so you know, give me positive.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, not quite. Good point. Good point.

SPEAKER_00:

By my standards, you are both of you.

SPEAKER_02:

1989, I think, was my first car. So yeah. And it was a Dodge Daytona.

SPEAKER_00:

Good choice.

SPEAKER_02:

Which yes, I saw plenty of those on your uh on the show, and I still go back to it. But uh what is uh obviously uh the Pantera, I know you said you'd love to have it back. What's a dream card that you would share with uh share with our listeners?

SPEAKER_00:

If I had the money today and I had no really other responsibilities and I just wanted to go out and play, I'd buy a first generation uh Dodge Viper. Uh it uh you know it's crude uh in every aspect. It was designed by probably the most brilliant management team that Chrysler has had in modern history. Uh, I knew Francois Gastang, I knew um all the folks involved with that project. Yeah, the car made absolutely no sense. Um it's loud, it vibrates, but there is no, it was, it was the first modern car that, if you can call it that, that seemed to embrace the driver as a vital piece of the experience, not just someone along for the ride. I mean, it had a terrible top, it was hard to get in and out of. You could you could nearly burn your legs every time you got near the if it had the side exhaust, all that. But, you know, it was long hood, short rear deck, a top that was a joke, but just up last to drive, and it required enormous amounts of skill to do much of anything with it. It was a and still is a real driver's car. And then when they kept modernizing it, it lost a little bit along the way. But that first gen Viper, uh, that's probably the closest thing I have to a dream car today. Okay. The uh the other would be uh the old Lotus Esprit, uh, which I also thought was just a fabulous car.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, yeah, beautiful, beautiful car.

SPEAKER_00:

Or if I could get my uh my D Tommaso uh Pantera back.

SPEAKER_02:

Yep, yep, exactly. So on uh you mentioned Lotus and that, and we're jumping around a little bit, but uh one of the one of the questions we had in our uh in preparation was what's the most dangerous car you've been in, driven or been in? And it was a lotus. Yeah, and I'd love to hear why.

SPEAKER_00:

Um, I was in the market for that 69 Mustang or something like it. I didn't know what I was gonna buy. And uh I popped saw one ad for uh a lotus y lawn. And uh the uh I made arrangements to uh go see it, and the guy really wasn't sure he wanted me to drive it yet. So the first thing he had to do was take me for a ride. And if you remember, they were very small, low to the ground, and and largely plywood underneath the body. So I got in it, and your uh butt's about uh four inches off the pavement. And uh so any, you know, 30 miles an hour felt like 6070. So driving around in this, you know, rudimentary seat belts, totally exposed in the environment, and with somebody you really didn't know, I think uh that was the closest. It had the feeling it I said, if there is a unique feeling, and I know there is, of flying in an open cockpit airplane, this was the closest I'd probably ever get to that.

SPEAKER_02:

Yep, for sure.

SPEAKER_00:

So now the guy was a good driver, he didn't, there was no problem. But at that point, I said, you know, this may be just a little too way out for me to drive back and forth to work every way.

SPEAKER_02:

Yep. So um as we uh keeping a keeping track of time, and there's so many things. I I did want to ask. We gotta let him eat dinner at some point. You cannot keep him here all night.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, all right, all right.

SPEAKER_00:

We uh Do I look like I need food? Probably not.

SPEAKER_02:

We um we did want to ask you. So after 45 years, like what do you think has made Motor Week um um last the uh test of time?

SPEAKER_01:

Great question. Great question.

SPEAKER_02:

Keep going, and you know, you guys have mu weathered all the changes, including the internet along the way and YouTubers to your point.

SPEAKER_00:

I would say it's consistency. Um you know the format hasn't changed, but the most single most important thing is on our show, most TV shows are built around a personality. I chose to be the host of it only because we couldn't afford to hire anyone else. I had been on the air, but only as news. I did not want to be the uh the host, but I had no choice, and I was so dreadful and so deadpan that from the beginning we said this is a show about cars, not the people driving the cars. So the cars are the stars, yeah. And that has been our mantra to this day. I mean, when you think about it, you hear me a lot, but on the average show, you probably only see me about two and a half minutes out of 26, 46. So uh it's uh it's the cars, and we always put them first. And I think also one more thing is that when you hear our opinion, it is not one person or two persons' opinion, it is a group opinion of all the folks that work on the show. They all get plenty of time with the vehicles, they all contribute to the road test. Yeah, so you're getting a wide view and not a narrow lens when it comes to what we think about it.

SPEAKER_01:

I love that. That's good. And in that hall market consistency, I know from watching it's been that way for decades and decades. So, Ed, we guide the podcast gently to the off-rent, John. I have to ask, now is the 45th anniversary, but what do you have planned for the 50th? We love scoops on this show. 50 is a big, nice, big round number. What's what's going on? Do we know yet? No. Great answer.

SPEAKER_00:

Uh, you know, God willing in the creek don't rise. There will be a 50th anniversary show. I would not predict whether I will be the host anymore. I might just be a throwback. But uh, I think the show's going to continue what it's doing, it has to continue to adapt. We talked about all the changes coming for the automobile. But one thing I don't think we will ever lose that will keep us being somewhat unique is we still do instrumented testing of all the vehicles we get in for a road test. And there's only about three publications that still do that anymore. And that's something we never want to lose. That scientific or at the minimum semi-scientific approach to try and have a level playing field. So you can read our road test and really compare one vehicle against another. But with the young staff, uh, we keep having being fortunate to hire. Uh, I think the uh young blood will keep us very pertinent uh as we go forward. At least that's wide open. I think that's it's what's it's what's kept us relevant so far.

SPEAKER_01:

It's a great plan. It's a great plan for sure. Well, what do you think, Doug? Any more questions on the way out? We're we're kind of up against a hard break here.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, so many. Um, I did want to ask John, let's see if he remembers. If not, I'll I'll remind him. Um, so you won an Emmy, right, for Motor Week? Do I have that right?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, we've won several Emmys, but not a national Emily. We've uh uh we've won Emmys for working uh with uh WGN in Chicago, producing shows about the Chicago Auto Show. I've gotten a couple of um, shall we say, long-serving survivor uh honors from the uh Chesapeake area Emmy uh folks, including what they call their uh golden circle, which, you know, it's basically if you live long enough and you keep in the in the business in this area, you get it. Uh we've never really been uh the type of show that wins national Emmys. It's very difficult for a small show uh that's as specialized as we do, but we are Emmy Award winning, and uh we're very proud of it. Absolutely. And we've won a lot of other awards along the ways, many of them from very generous uh journalists uh around the country and their organization. So we're very proud of uh of all of our accolades, and again, it was a team effort.

SPEAKER_02:

Right. And and uh the quote that we found in uh preparation was that Motor Week has been the love of my life easily. That was your quote.

SPEAKER_00:

My wife would agree with that. Okay, although she comes first, yeah, but you know, Motor Week is probably second. Yeah, maybe maybe my dogs are in there somewhere between the two. Uh but no, we've uh we decided not to have children early on, and so Motor Week's our baby, and I know she feels the same way.

SPEAKER_02:

That that is that's a partner you want for life, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Uh that in that aspect, I am the luckiest human being on earth.

SPEAKER_01:

There you go. There you go. You are indeed blessed, and it it's been really a pleasure to spend some time here with you, John. Um, I I was really excited when Doug got a hold of you, and it's great to see you and spend time with you, but the something about your voice is just magic. Um, so it's just been been a real real treat to spend some time with you. Thank you for making time for us today.

SPEAKER_00:

Christian and Doug, it's absolutely been my pleasure. And uh for the rest of the story, come back sometime. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

You got it. You have just heard the high revving, low mileage late model heard round the world authoritative podcast on automotive nostalgia. Check us out at carslove.com. You know where to catch John Davis. You have for the past 45 years, uh 45th anniversary, check out his YouTube, uh, motorweek.com, uh, public television, uh, all over the place. You'll know where to find him. If you like what you hear from us, let us know. He's at Doug at CarsLove.com. Check us out at carslove.com. Or can you give the link tree, Doug? Sure. L-I-N-K-T-R dot e slash carsloved. There you have it. So on the way out, I am sure we'll see you at the next local car show, showroom race trip, or concor. We appreciate just taking a laugh with us, and we'll see you next time.

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Christian

Host
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Doug

Co-host

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