The Last Autos Editor
by David Shapiro
Last Wednesday morning, The New York Times announced that it would stop publishing the Automobiles section, a standalone section that comes out on Sundays, at the end of the year. I thought, like, “Damn, I love that little section.” It’s like Car Talk in that you don’t have to care about cars, or know about cars, to get something out of reading it; it’s full of quirky stories about people obsessed with their cars, e.g., Swedish people obsessed with classic American cars that look like they’re rotting. And a lot of the car reviews feature copy that could have been plucked from deep in the Styles section. (From the new Mercedes S550 review: “A cabin atomizer infuses the air [inside the car] with four scents: Nightlife Mood, Sports Mood, Downtown Mood and Freeside Mood. They all smell like money to me.”)
But I guess the Automobiles section is to the Times as an automobile is to most New Yorkers — you don’t need it, though it’s fun to have one around (at least long as you have advertisers!). Yesterday, I called Jim Cobb, who’s been the section’s editor since its inception in 1994. He’d just come back from a long weekend in Florida following the announcement that the section was being killed. He sounded bummed, but eager to talk about the section he birthed, raised, and is now burying.
Where do you live? What do you drive?
I moved out of Manhattan a few years ago — I live just across the river in New Jersey. And I have — this is crazy — a Dodge Ram Sport 4X4 with the off-road package! The door sills come up to about my thighs. It’s just a big honkin’ truck and it looks mean. Beyond that, my partner has lease vehicles. And I drive test cars.
Ah, I sort of expected you to drive a Prius. I guess, like, as the Times Automobiles editor. But you’re also a car person, and I know car people generally hate those…
That’s not gonna happen. Not that there’s anything wrong with it for what it is, but it’s the automotive equivalent of seven-grain bread.
How did the section start?
It was started in April of 1994. I got involved because I’d worked in the business/finance section; I’d lived in Detroit; and I liked cars. So I met the three criteria they had in mind. My understanding was that the advertising department had been pushing for some time to do a freestanding Automobiles section and they had been rebuffed by the newsroom because it wasn’t Timesian. But eventually, they wore the newsroom down. Max Frankel, the editor at the time, relented, under the proviso that whatever criticism we did, we would do it it in a Timesian way: We would hew to our ethics standards and wouldn’t buy into the usual way automotive journalism is conducted — lots of free trips and paid launch events. We would also pay for the use of test cars. To this day, we still pay rental fees.
What does it cost to rent a BMW i8?
Well, we cap it. We pay within reason. A Rolls Royce for a week? Who even knows what that’s worth.
What in the section are you very proud of?
Well, fairly early on, we raised some very skeptical eyebrows at the proliferation of in-dash infotainment controls that can be very distracting. I reviewed the BMW 7-Series in 2001 — it was one of the first BMWs with iDrive [a Windows-based computer system, controlled by a knob, which is used to adjust things like the navigation, air conditioning, and sound system in BMWs and famously shitty and nearly impossible to use], which was fairly revolutionary for the time. It was… a bit of a mess. We jumped on that. Is this really a good idea? To have menus and submenus and a Windows-based computer screen in your dashboard when you’re driving at seventy-five miles per hour? We were among the first to start raising the alarms about that.
The complexity of the technology in cars and trucks right now — it’s all just a little too much! It’s refreshing, these days, to get into something like a Mazda3 or something as prosaic as the Volkswagen Golf, and to feel how simple the act of driving can be. Without the submenus that torment you, features you don’t need and largely can’t understand. The complexity really bothers me.
So the BMW 7-Series review earned me my first footnote on Wikipedia. Of anything I’ve written, that review and the sidebar that went with it were among the things I’m more proud of.
And we’ve had great reviews from a lot of great contributors, including some that caused a lot of grief from the manufacturers!
Like that Mitsubishi Mirage review? [“Low expectations don’t guarantee happiness, but at least there isn’t much disappointment. The reborn Mitsubishi Mirage lowers expectations, strangles them and buries their remains in a deep unmarked grave. If this car wasn’t disappointing, it wouldn’t be anything at all… A 5-speed manual transmission is standard, but $1,000 buys the (C)ontinuously (V)ariable (Transmission). C.V.T.s are easy to hate, but this one is particularly loathsome in operation. As the engine slogs to its peak torque of 4,000 r.p.m., the C.V.T. seems to be trying to smother it. Once at the peak, the powertrain settles into a bleak drone as the car grimly builds something like speed. The sound is flatter than the electroencephalogram of a dead hamster.”]
Never heard from them about that! But I have a bulging file of letters from executives of the old General Motors, from the nineteen nineties — they thought we hated them, but they were making crap cars. They seemed to think we were overly harsh.
Dan Neil, the first automotive writer to win a Pulitzer, came onboard early in the early nineties. I won’t say I plucked him out of obscurity, but he was writing down in North Carolina for some alternative papers. Hell of a writer, terribly astute, sometimes a little “out there.” At one point, he called the Pontiac Grand Prix out as having a Hitler mustache. GM didn’t think that was funny at all. We had go-arounds with several Cadillacs that were not so well-received. I’m a big fan of Cadillac today, but they were making some dreadful stuff in the nineties.
How is car culture different today than when you started?
Collector car culture is just huge and getting ever bigger. We’ve waded further into the collector milieu with a lot of auction coverage and a lot of collecting coverage; baby boomers are driving a lot of the interest. The prices of vintage cars have soared — all the things I wanted to own in the early nineties, like a ’65 Mustang or a Mercedes 280 SL Pagoda, cars that were fifteen, twenty, twenty-five thousand dollars back then — they suddenly cost six figures. It’s just insane.
What led to the section’s demise? Was it the classified ads?
The classifieds have been a moot issue for years — they dried up and went away long ago, with the arrival of Craigslist and everything else. There were some, but not page after page like the real estate listings. What does support us is dealer advertising and dealer associations, like the Lexus Dealers of Greater New York, that has its own marketing budget, and then the individual dealers in New Jersey, Long Island, Westchester. That advertising has fallen off quite a lot. At one time, our sections were twenty-four, twenty-eight, maybe thirty-two pages, but of late we’re running six pages, eight pages, maybe ten. With house advertising.
Did you fight to save the section?
I had no chance to fight it. The decision had already been made.
It’s a sad thing, and it’s been fun, but there’s so much I wish we could have done. We’ve had lots of plans, and now the realization that we won’t do those things…? It’s sad.
Tell me about, like, a fond memory of working on a story.
Oh, gosh. [Pause.] I don’t know why this springs to mind first, but we did a whole section, and a digital presence, on the centennial of Chevrolet in 2011. We had a lot of fun with it. We had the blog going then, we asked people to contribute their photos and memories of Chevrolets. We had some cool videos, slideshows, a lot on Chevy design and the technology that was pioneered by Chevrolet.
Also, one of our contributors, Paul Stenquist, owns a 1955 Chevy Bel Air convertible, and we assigned a review of it in 2011 as if it were just coming out today. [Laughs.] We had a lot of fun with it.
Michael Winerip, of the NYT staff, had severe flood damage from Sandy, and it totaled out his beloved VW Cabrio. So he followed the car through the disposition process, from insurance claims to salvage yard to, finally, the crusher.
In the course of reviewing the new Chevy Cobalt in 2005, Jeff Sabatini (well, his wife) experienced the ignition-switch problem that has led to millions of recalled cars. Little did we know then how widespread the problem was, but we wrote about it.
We have also tested a hovercraft and a lunar rover.
And, of course, I put the incredible Dwight Garner, book critic deluxe, into a Lamborghini, just because I love the way he writes.
What do you think you’re going to do now?
[Pause.] None of that has quite shaken out yet. There are a lot of changes coming to the Times in the next couple of months, so everything is sort of up in the air. I’m waiting to see where the pieces fall.
Correction: The Chevrolet centennial was in 2011, not 2012.
David Shapiro is the author of You’re Not Much Use to Anyone
Photo of Cobb being driven by Arthur Vogel of the Woodstock Motor Club in a Model T courtesy of Jim Cobb.