The Drive is a fresh website in the spirit of the greatest car magazines
Down deep, most car people are magazine people.
Times switch, however. Media has moved online decisively, and automotive journalism needs to adjust.
The Golden Age of print-auto writing may have faded, but the U.S. car market is better than it has been in a decade. That’s why Time Inc. just launched a fresh site, The Drive.
It’s a risky proposition and a big bet on fresh media by and old-media company. Previous digital ventures in the auto-journalism space have been scrappy: Jalopnik embarked out with a petite group of oddball car guys and some modest support from Gawker Media. Autoblog was identically bloggy and small-time until it was bought by AOL, but even now, it retains its bloggy, obsessive spirit.
The Drive, by contrast, is launching this week with a roster of strong hitters from the media and auto-writing world, including Lawrence Ulrich, who made his bones behind the wheel for the Fresh York Times; and A.J. Baime, who wrote a good book about a legendary race, “Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Boy’s.”
The site will also, in contemporary startup style, be occupying space in Brooklyn, far from the Time-Life citadel in Manhattan. There will reportedly be a garage, optimized for movie production and seeking to create the kind of automotive content that appeals to a generation not raised on Motor Trend’s printed comparos but on Motor Trend’s YouTube channel – and re-runs of “Top Gear.”
Fresh York state of mind
I dropped by Time-Life this week to talk with both The Drive’s editor, Mike Fellow (formerly of Maxim, and on the phone from the Frankfurt Motor Display) and Matt Bean, SVP of Editorial Innovation at Time Inc. There were two big takeways.
Very first, The Drive is going to have a strong Fresh York flavor. This is a micro-trend in the car business: the resurgence of Fresh York as a place where people care about cars. Cadillac recently moved its sales and operations to Fresh York and has be re-branding itself as a luxury car maker closely connected with Fresh York in all its fashionable, gritty glory.
This links The Drive with the Car & Driver on the 1960s and ’70s – they’re packaging what Car & Driver did during the heyday of writers and editors like Brock Yates and P.J. O’Rourke for a much junior audience.
Jalopnik attempted to do something like this when it commenced out in the mid-2000s, blending snappy sentences with an compulsive desire to embrace the Internet’s meme-making machine. Jalopnik proceeds to feature very stylish and opinionated writers in the auto-blogosphere, but The Drive is pushing the revival of this type of car writing in a much better capitalized, less outsider-y direction.
2nd, The Drive is going to stress a throwback affection for words.
Will it work? Well, The Drive does check some boxes. It has a feed for up-to-the-minute automotive news, and it also isn’t shying away from big, high-impact visual features. In digital car coverage it’s utterly significant to demonstrate the cars. And the displaying won’t be limited to photos. There will be movie and lots of it.
Creative car writing
What’s interspersed with that is a slightly mixed bag at the moment. Ulrich’s review of the Cadillac ATS-V, a 464-horsepower sports coupe intended to steal share from BMW, is punchy and thrusty and authoritative, if not truly groundbreaking.
Baime’s take on the fresh Ford Shelby GT350 Mustang is ripped from the track – Laguna Seca in California – but a tad workmanlike in execution.
Boy shows off some chops at the keyboard, with his investigation of the fresh Mazda MX-5 Miata.
Writer-large-Brett Burke deliveries some elegant comparisons, in response to a drive of the fresh Ferrari four hundred eighty eight GTB. ” Flooring a Bugatti Veyron pulverizes your senses. Flooring a Lamborghini Aventador terrorizes them. Flooring the four hundred eighty eight releases a flood of endorphins, fight and flight.
And Max Prince’s post about wrecking his one thousand nine hundred ninety seven BMW contains this: ” Just before winter, I had a drag-out argument with my then-girlfriend, mostly because she didn’t realize we were dating. On the drive home, I listened to Tom Waits and thought about buying a piano. Unrequited love is a bitch. So are dump trucks.”
But the real tell that The Drive is spiritually connected to the car writing of the ’60s and ’70s comes from a standout feature from racing legend Mario Andretti about the tragic glory of his very first Formula one World Championship in one thousand nine hundred seventy eight (he was the last American to pull this off), when he won the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, but lost his friend Ronnie Peterson to injuries sustained in a crash. The best car publications always reserve space to remind us that the boys and women who race cars are miles above anyone who merely writes about cars. The Drive is no different.
Bucking a trend
The site is bucking at least one online-media trend, simply because it’s so big (its launching with dozens of stories, after being in stealth mode for months). This makes it a fully fledged play for a large audience, rather than an attempt to capture a niche readership, something that enthusiast sites like Hodinkee have done for see nuts and that numerous fellows’s style blogs have done for classic menswear and heritage made-in-USA products.
Man and Bean are optimistic that the readers will come and come in force. And at launch, they’ve certainly made good on providing those readers something to read.
The Drive is a fresh website in the spirit of the greatest car magazines
The Drive is a fresh website in the spirit of the greatest car magazines
Down deep, most car people are magazine people.
Times switch, however. Media has moved online decisively, and automotive journalism needs to adjust.
The Golden Age of print-auto writing may have faded, but the U.S. car market is better than it has been in a decade. That’s why Time Inc. just launched a fresh site, The Drive.
It’s a risky proposition and a big bet on fresh media by and old-media company. Previous digital ventures in the auto-journalism space have been scrappy: Jalopnik embarked out with a petite group of oddball car guys and some modest support from Gawker Media. Autoblog was identically bloggy and small-time until it was bought by AOL, but even now, it retains its bloggy, obsessive spirit.
The Drive, by contrast, is launching this week with a roster of intense hitters from the media and auto-writing world, including Lawrence Ulrich, who made his bones behind the wheel for the Fresh York Times; and A.J. Baime, who wrote a fine book about a legendary race, “Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Boy’s.”
The site will also, in contemporary startup style, be occupying space in Brooklyn, far from the Time-Life citadel in Manhattan. There will reportedly be a garage, optimized for movie production and seeking to create the kind of automotive content that appeals to a generation not raised on Motor Trend’s printed comparos but on Motor Trend’s YouTube channel – and re-runs of “Top Gear.”
Fresh York state of mind
I dropped by Time-Life this week to talk with both The Drive’s editor, Mike Boy (formerly of Maxim, and on the phone from the Frankfurt Motor Showcase) and Matt Bean, SVP of Editorial Innovation at Time Inc. There were two big takeways.
Very first, The Drive is going to have a strong Fresh York flavor. This is a micro-trend in the car business: the resurgence of Fresh York as a place where people care about cars. Cadillac recently moved its sales and operations to Fresh York and has be re-branding itself as a luxury car maker closely connected with Fresh York in all its fashionable, gritty glory.
This links The Drive with the Car & Driver on the 1960s and ’70s – they’re packaging what Car & Driver did during the heyday of writers and editors like Brock Yates and P.J. O’Rourke for a much junior audience.
Jalopnik attempted to do something like this when it embarked out in the mid-2000s, blending snappy sentences with an compulsive desire to embrace the Internet’s meme-making machine. Jalopnik proceeds to feature very stylish and opinionated writers in the auto-blogosphere, but The Drive is pushing the revival of this type of car writing in a much better capitalized, less outsider-y direction.
2nd, The Drive is going to stress a throwback affection for words.
Will it work? Well, The Drive does check some boxes. It has a feed for up-to-the-minute automotive news, and it also isn’t shying away from big, high-impact visual features. In digital car coverage it’s enormously significant to showcase the cars. And the displaying won’t be limited to photos. There will be movie and lots of it.
Creative car writing
What’s interspersed with that is a slightly mixed bag at the moment. Ulrich’s review of the Cadillac ATS-V, a 464-horsepower sports coupe intended to steal share from BMW, is punchy and thrusty and authoritative, if not indeed groundbreaking.
Baime’s take on the fresh Ford Shelby GT350 Mustang is ripped from the track – Laguna Seca in California – but a tad workmanlike in execution.
Fellow shows off some chops at the keyboard, with his investigation of the fresh Mazda MX-5 Miata.
Writer-large-Brett Burke deliveries some elegant comparisons, in response to a drive of the fresh Ferrari four hundred eighty eight GTB. ” Flooring a Bugatti Veyron pulverizes your senses. Flooring a Lamborghini Aventador terrorizes them. Flooring the four hundred eighty eight releases a flood of endorphins, fight and flight.
And Max Prince’s post about wrecking his one thousand nine hundred ninety seven BMW contains this: ” Just before winter, I had a drag-out argument with my then-girlfriend, mostly because she didn’t realize we were dating. On the drive home, I listened to Tom Waits and thought about buying a piano. Unrequited love is a bitch. So are dump trucks.”
But the real tell that The Drive is spiritually connected to the car writing of the ’60s and ’70s comes from a standout feature from racing legend Mario Andretti about the tragic glory of his very first Formula one World Championship in one thousand nine hundred seventy eight (he was the last American to pull this off), when he won the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, but lost his friend Ronnie Peterson to injuries sustained in a crash. The best car publications always reserve space to remind us that the studs and women who race cars are miles above anyone who merely writes about cars. The Drive is no different.
Bucking a trend
The site is bucking at least one online-media trend, simply because it’s so big (its launching with dozens of stories, after being in stealth mode for months). This makes it a fully fledged play for a large audience, rather than an attempt to capture a niche readership, something that enthusiast sites like Hodinkee have done for observe nuts and that numerous boys’s style blogs have done for classic menswear and heritage made-in-USA products.
Fellow and Bean are optimistic that the readers will come and come in force. And at launch, they’ve certainly made good on providing those readers something to read.