
Journalism standards


Is ‘peak car’ being held off by lack of urban housing construction?
Daniel Knowles, the midwest correspondent for The Economist, grew up in the United Kingdom and as a reporter has traveled extensively around the world. So when he recently wrote a book about the automobile, he […]

Laurence Iliff’s Automotive News story on EV truck sales lacks nuance and balance
Automotive News recently asked why electric-powered trucks have sold in much smaller numbers than initial hype promised. Reporter Laurence Iliff (2025) offered some background before concluding that high prices and inadequate range have limited EV […]

Auto history: A bastion of older white male privilege?
My perception is that there has been a fairly good gender balance at the auto shows I regularly attend at the LeMay Collections at Marymount. Thus, I wonder why so few women appear to participate […]

Automotive News staff struggle to transcend paper’s checkered past
The May 19th print edition of Automotive News ran two commentaries that debated California’s ability regulate pollution caused by the automobile industry. In the first commentary, Reporter Larry P. Vellequette (2025) acknowledged that the industry […]

Why does Joe Ligo’s PBS series sanewash AMC’s mid-70s recklessness?
I have mixed reactions to Joe Ligo’s (2025) fourth episode of his six-part television series on American Motors. This 30-minute program focuses on the automaker’s two final big-ticket redesigns before losing its independence: the 1974 […]

Is JVL right that ‘Trump killed Tesla’ as a viable automaker?
Last week political commentator Jonathan V. Last (2025d) declared that Elon Musk’s close association with President Trump has “killed Tesla.” That was happy news to Last, who had previously argued that a good way to […]


Do car ads need to talk down to people in order to be engaging?
One of the laziest kinds of clickbait in the auto history media are posts of old advertisements, commercials and various types of marketing videos. All too often the text that accompanies the ads could be […]

Joe Ligo’s third AMC episode suffers from analytical weaknesses
One downside of partnering with another automotive historian on a media project is that you inevitably have to negotiate editorial details. That can be particularly challenging if one of the partners has considerably more stature. […]