by Doug DeMuro
And so, ladies and gentlemen, there you have it: Doug’s tips on how to become a car journalist. If you really want to join this profession, read through them. Consider them. Maybe even follow them. And remember one final, crucial rule that ties the rest of these together: if your instincts tell you to do something else, go with that. I’m usually wrong.
Behind the Scenes
Have you ever wondered about the stories behind the stories? You know what I mean: you’re watching a movie, and you think to yourself, I wonder how they filmed that. So you Google it, and then you Google it a little more, and then you spend the next four hours going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole that only ends when you’ve read the entire history of the regulation-sized toothpick.
Well, today I’m going to help you out by telling you some of the stories behind my stories. Are these stories as interesting as discovering how they filmed some crazy scene in your favorite movie? Absolutely not. But you’re going to read them anyway, because you’re on a plane, and what the hell else are you going to do? Start a conversation with the guy next to you? Be reasonable. That guy was dumb enough to book a middle seat. You’re not going to talk to that guy.
Anyway, here’s some stuff that happened in the background throughout the last few years that you didn’t find out about.
My Relationship with Land Rover
As you probably know, I spend a lot of time and energy writing columns about how my Range Rover breaks and then CarMax pays money to fix it, because I have this incredible CarMax warranty that will cover my Range Rover until it’s twelve years old, even though Range Rovers are only designed to last for about forty-eight total minutes before washer fluid starts coming out the lug nuts.
So CarMax is happy, because I say all these great things about the CarMax warranty, and how well it works, and how it’s totally worth the additional cost. But what about Land Rover?
Well, here’s the situation: I hear from Land Rover’s head of communications once every two or three times I post a negative column about my Range Rover—usually only when the column gets really popular.
The last time I heard from him was about a year and a half ago, right when I moved to Philadelphia. He e-mailed me and told me—I swear this is true—that he thinks the reason my Range Rover is so unreliable is that I bought it from CarMax. He told me something like: “The problem with used cars from non-franchised outlets is that you never know what happened in the past, and how the vehicle was used.” I politely informed him that I had service records from Land Rover dealerships going back to the car’s original sale in 2006.
That ended that line of questioning, but it began another: Could he have a technician take a look at it and see if it has any other faults? (In other words: Can we go over this vehicle with a fine-toothed comb and replace every single thing that might possibly fail?) I politely declined this offer, too.
It didn’t end there. In that very same column, I was a little negative about my dealership experience. Or maybe slightly more than a little negative. As I look back and read the column now, it turns out that what I actually said was: “Land Rover dealers are so horrible that I get the sense, after dealing with them, that I might have a better experience if they outsourced my entire service visit to a country where goats outnumber automobiles.”
Although I didn’t name the dealer in the column, I told Land Rover’s head of communications which dealer was involved when he asked me—and two days later I received an apologetic call from not the service manager, not the general manager, but the dealership’s owner. I’m not sure what the goal here was, but he succeeded in one way: this experience was so awkward that I will never return to that particular dealership for service ever again.
The Hummer and the Racetrack
Sometime last year, I brought my military-style Hummer to New Jersey Motorsports Park and raced it on an actual racetrack. I did this because I got an e-mail from an instructor with a club who races at the track, and he asked if I wanted to bring along my Nissan Skyline GT-R. I replied and told him that I had a slightly … different idea. Two weeks later, I was sitting in the driver’s seat of my Hummer, cruising down the back straight, giving absolutely no thought to legal consequences of any kind, until the following week when I received a phone call from the general counsel of the racing club.
The racing club was NASA, also known as the National Auto Sport Association, and they’re one of the best-known car racing clubs in the United States. The general counsel was calling from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he had watched the video and probably thought to himself: I wonder if this stunt follows even a single one of our rules.
So he called me, and we spoke, and while I was worried he would be stern, it turns out the general counsel of a group of car racers is, not surprisingly, an automotive enthusiast himself. So while he was personally amused by the whole thing, he told me he was going to get some calls from the people at New Jersey Motorsports Park, and maybe an insurance company or two, so he wanted to know what went on.
I tried to cover for the guys who let me on the track: They were slow parade laps! We only did five laps! During lunch break! We barely broke sixty miles per hour! I had an instructor in the car the whole time! Once the general counsel heard everything he was going to get from me, he thanked me for my time. I never heard anything back from him, but I can only assume he then performed a mob-style hit on NASA’s entire Southern New Jersey Region.
The Time I Got Banned from Reddit for Solving a Hit-and-Run
Although I could go on for hours about my personal feelings on the social networking site Reddit, let’s just say I have a love-hate relationship with it. Namely, I hate the politics, the confirmation bias, the echo chamber opinions, the uninformed users, the drama, and the anonymous posting. I love the pictures of cute dogs.
I’ve also come to really like Reddit’s car community, which I find to be largely free of most of the above annoyances. So about a year ago, I was browsing some part of Reddit that’s focused on dash cam videos, and I ran across this one where some guy in a Buick Verano crashes into another car and then takes off. The guy who posted the video was making an appeal for any information leading to the capture of the person in the Verano.
So, I did what I do best: I used the wonderful Carfax app to figure out the guy’s license plate number. It wasn’t hard: four of the six characters were clearly visible, so I started typing in various combinations in order to find the last two. Lo and behold, I eventually found it, so I posted the information for the original poster to see.
Naturally, he was ecstatic, and so was the rest of the community. We found the hit-and-runner! Bring him to justice! Take it to the police!!! My post climbed to the very top of the “best of” section, and I was given several months of “Reddit Gold,” a premium subscription to the site, by several different users.
The next day I was banned.
Why was I banned? It turns out that many Reddit users hate Gawker Media, the owner of Jalopnik, for God knows what reason, and this moderator was incredibly angry that someone he considered a representative of Gawker Media (“I’m just a freelance writer!” I protested) would come in there and get so much Reddit glory. I am serious. People keep track of “Reddit glory.” So he banned me for “posting personal information,” which was the license plate number of the vehicle that committed the hit-and-run.
I asked: Aren’t license plate numbers visible all the time? Including in dozens of photos and videos? Posted on Reddit all the time? These questions didn’t seem to matter, though I suspect they would’ve if I hadn’t been an “employee” of “evil” Gawker Media.
Now I mostly just look at pictures of cute dogs.
I Played God with the Time in Washington, D.C.
Right when I sold my Ferrari, at the end of 2014, I wrote this column about how owning a Ferrari was a huge disappointment because, well, it was. I had to constantly worry about it, and fear for its safety, and I had to always make sure it wouldn’t get damaged by the roa
ds, and that it wouldn’t scrape on ramps, and I was always getting talked to, and stared at, and pointed to, and approached by people who thought they were tremendously original by asking if I wanted to trade for their 1990s pickup truck.
Trust me: Ferrari ownership is not cruising down some twisty road close to the Mediterranean with a supermodel sitting next to you, occasionally sending seductive glances your way. Ferrari ownership is complete strangers approaching you at a gas station and asking what you do for a living.
So I wrote a column about all this, and I talked about how I hated it, and someone from the Australian version of Good Morning America read the column and they asked me to appear on the show via satellite. It just so happened I was in Washington, D.C. that particular weekend, so I agreed to do the show at around 5 p.m. local time, and they agreed to hook me up with a studio in D.C. where I could appear. As it turned out, the studio was a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol, so I took a break from afternoon sightseeing to stop in for the interview.
Then I had my mind blown: right before the interview, I discovered that I wouldn’t be able to see the people interviewing me. I could hear them through a tiny device in my ear, but mostly I would just sit by myself in a gray room in an office building, facing a single camera, speaking to people located six thousand miles away. So that kind of threw me off. But nothing surprised me more than when I discovered we could play God with the time of day.
You know when you see politicians being interviewed from Washington, D.C., and there’s an image of the Capitol building behind them, and you think: Gee, that television studio must have a cool view of the Capitol! Well, it turns out there’s no cool view of the Capitol. They’re sitting in a gray room in an office building, facing a single camera, just like I was. That view of the Capitol is actually a giant photograph of the Capitol, and here’s the kicker: they have one for night and one for day. So because it was 5 p.m. when I did my interview, and the sun was setting, the studio guy actually let me choose whether I wanted Australia to believe it was night or day in Washington, D.C. I chose night. It looked cooler.
In the end, I would say the interview went pretty well, though I stumbled on a couple responses and I couldn’t hear them once or twice. But who could blame me? I was exhausted, on account of it being so late at night in Washington, D.C. As verified by the Capitol building behind me.
The Murano CrossCabriolet Review
Since basically the first day I started writing about cars, my readers have wanted me to review a Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet. For those of you who don’t know what this is, imagine a Nissan Murano SUV, except it’s a convertible. If you’re thinking this doesn’t sound like the most attractive vehicle, you’re not alone. I once wrote that it was apparently designed by “six guys at Nissan using RoseArt markers and a hot glue gun.”
So anyway: when I moved to Philadelphia in the middle of 2014, I asked Nissan if they happened to have any Murano CrossCabriolet press cars lying around, and the answer was that they didn’t. I suspect this answer was true, as the Murano CrossCabriolet had been cancelled by then, on account of the fact that they sold approximately ninety-four total units, mainly to beach-going retired couples, both of whom were legally blind.
So then I set to work finding one of my own.
It took a while, but I eventually did it: my friend Matt sent me a link to one that had been listed on the Philadelphia-area section of RelayRides, now called Turo, which is this website where you can rent other peoples’ cars. This person wanted—I swear this is true—$280 per day to rent his Murano CrossCabriolet. I strongly suspect I am the only one who ever paid it. But pay it I did, and that’s the story of how I happened to get a Murano CrossCabriolet, even when Nissan didn’t have one to send me.
But the story doesn’t end there. The week after I filmed my review of the CrossCabriolet, the column and video went live, and I got a lot of praise for truthfully describing the Murano CrossCabriolet as such a hilariously bad vehicle, in the sense that I called it “not very good,” and I described its styling as “like a soup bowl with a backpack,” and I said the structural rigidity was so bad that I thought the windshield might “dislodge itself from the body on some bump and fall into my lap like an airplane tray table.” In the end, however, I said I loved it because it was daring, and risky, and weird, and therefore cool.
Well, someone at Nissan must’ve only read the ending, because I heard from three separate friends who work at Nissan that the column was shared on a weekly e-mail to all Nissan employees that covers “Nissan in the news.”
That’s right: the column where I said the Murano CrossCabriolet “gets off the line with the same verve as a Winnebago” actually got picked up by Nissan’s own internal corporate newsletter and proudly shared to its employees. Meanwhile, I never heard from the owner of the car again after I returned it. I had told him I’d be filming with it, and he curiously texted me to ask what I was filming, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d be doing a YouTube video where I mercilessly teased the vehicle for six minutes.
Then again, I bet he wouldn’t have cared. His soup bowl with a backpack earned him $280 in a single day.
What Happened to All the Cars I Wrote About?
One major question I get from readers is: How the hell do you go about selling your cars? Or, more specifically, what the hell happens when you do sell your cars? Who is stupid enough to buy them? And do they know who you are? Well, here are the answers.
Cadillac CTS-V Wagon: Although a lot of my newer readers don’t know it, the very first car I ever owned and wrote about was a 2011 Cadillac CTS-V wagon with an automatic transmission that I drove across the country and back—including a 150-mph stint on the Bonneville Salt Flats, which is covered earlier in this book. I only made one video with this car, my first video ever, wherein I said goodbye to it in a hail of packing peanuts.
I sold my CTS-V wagon to a guy in Dallas, Texas, who worked at a Honda dealer and daily drove an old Civic Coupe. When he bought the car from me in Atlanta with the intent of driving it home to Texas, he asked me if I knew of anywhere to buy a gun, so he could feel safe as he drove through Mississippi. I politely informed him I did not. I considered asking him what the hell he thought lived in Mississippi, but I decided, at that moment, it would be best to speak to each another as little as possible going forward.
He must’ve made it home, however, because about two months later he texted me a photo of the car with its front end smashed in like it had just completed an NHTSA crash test. Apparently, he fell asleep at the wheel on a rural country highway in Texas, went off the side of the road, and hit a tree. As it turned out, it wasn’t Mississippi he should’ve feared. It was sleep.
Although he was uninjured save for a broken leg, the car was totaled before he could even register it. Almost two years later, I found the engine for sale on eBay in South Carolina.
Ferrari 360 Modena: The second car I owned and wrote about was a 2004 Ferrari 360 Modena, which was red over tan with a six-speed manual transmission. Selling this car was an enormous headache, and the sales process taught me something about Ferrari buyers: most of them are nuts. Although I documented the sales process in some detail on Jalopnik, I never posted the famous “final e-mail” I got from “Rod,” the first person who was interested in buying the car. Rod was aggressive, annoying, and combative, and he demanded a discount for virtually everything, to the point where I was wondering if he would soon start asking me to pay him to take the car.
Well, here’s that e-mail. Rod makes several interesting points in it, namely: he accuses me of lying about the number of interested buyers (people were calling on the car so constantly that it was hard to keep up), he angrily tells me how much the car will cost him after he buys it, and, near the end, he begins rambling about semantics.
He also mentions several items he considers to be flaws. One is a “Carfax mileage talking point,” which was a typographical error made by a dealer almost a decade earlier. Another is the “majo
r service omissions”: since the most recent major service had been performed by an independent shop, not a dealer, Rod felt he would need a “real dealer” to look it over to be sure it was done right. The “tire issue” is where I had the Ferrari dealership patch one tire about two months earlier. None of these are material flaws … except to Rod. Behold:
Doug,
It is without doubt your choice to whom and for how much you will sell your car. Unless you are referring to new people, when we spoke two weeks ago you informed me that only one potential customer had offered $80,000. All the others were in the 70s. After that you said I was the more serious person and would sell the car to me for $80,000 or slightly more, less any problems disclosed by the PPI. I would guess that you would have accepted or told me about any increase in those offers. WERE YOU LYING????
If I had known all that I know now at that time, I would not have offered ANYTHING until seeing the PPI, especially if I had known about the Carfax mileage talking point. Your own documents disclose the tire issue, the major service omissions and the brake question. The major service should include ALL fluids, engine tune including spark plugs and all filters, including pollen. These are NOT small items, do you understand? The major service items are approximately $2,000, as confirmed today by my dealer. At the suggested price I was already accepting the need to repair a wheel and a door scratch. NOW I DISCOVER the car has many many other serious issues or flaws that also need to be addressed IMMEDIATELY after taking delivery. DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW SERIOUS THIS IS?