The High-Octane Truth, fourteen years later.

By Peter M. De Lorenzo

Detroit. If you had told me back in 1999 that I’d still be producing Autoextremist.com fourteen years later I would have probably laughed and said, “Really?” It doesn’t seem possible even now, but yet here we are.

The truth is that when Janice (aka WordGirl) and I started this Internet weekly, there was no plan beyond that week’s issue.

There still isn’t.

“Autoextremist” was originally going to be the title of an all-new car magazine for enthusiasts. A no-holds-barred, pedal-to-the metal journal that would accept no advertising – ironic considering we were both longtime practitioners in the craft – so that we could give readers the “Bare-Knuckled, Unvarnished, High-Octane Truth” about cars and the people who created them.

This would have required gargantuan financing, of course, especially since we would have had to purchase all the cars we evaluated, as no self-respecting auto manufacturer would have let us near their cars unless there was a certain guarantee that we would write nice things about them. And since that wasn’t going to happen and I was still immersed in my ad career back in 1986, the idea for “Autoextremist” stayed on the shelf.

Fast forward more than a decade later and the moment seemed right for “Autoextremist” – only this time it would see the light of day on the Internet. My radical idea for a monthly car magazine would now become an Internet weekly, and it made its debut on June 1, 1999. (The same day that Napster had its initial release, ironically.)

Writing under an assumed name – a blend of my middle name and my mother’s maiden name – Autoextremist came out of the gate firing on all cylinders, with my first column entitled “White Boy Culture,” a devastating diatribe aimed at the heart of the car business as practiced in Detroit, exposing the “cover-your-ass” mentality that tainted everything about the business back then.

I’m happy to say that it was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before and it was happening right under the noses of the staid automotive establishment - including the car companies and the media that covered them – and they simply weren’t ready for it.

After spending 22+ years in the automotive advertising and marketing arena, and watching the rampant incompetence and sheer ineptitude up close and personal, I had grown sick and tired of watching the Detroit automakers stumble around in a fog while they ran one of this nation’s key industries right into the ground. 

So I named names and I called people out. I had inside knowledge of how things worked and how things were – or weren’t - done. I didn’t play by established journalistic rules because they were wildly irrelevant when it came to an industry that deemed reporting as only being “good” when hired scribes regurgitated the company line to a “t” and didn’t deviate.

I also knew in my gut that the Internet would change the status quo, and in a hurry too.

Back then PR handlers would quietly take their CEOs or other executives aside and whisper that there was a “bad” story coming out in the next day’s The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times and that they would try to mitigate it somehow, or deny the offending reporter access to that company’s executives, which was tantamount to the Death Penalty for working journalists. (PR operatives never had to worry about the local Detroit newspapers or the Crain automotive publications, of course, because back in the day the “go-along-to-get-along” school of reporting was a matter of course in this town and nary a discouraging word was heard, or if it was, it was dealt with swiftly.)

The initial promotion for the site was generated by an email campaign aimed at journalists and PR types from a car company’s media list that we stumbled upon unexpectedly, and it worked. The buzz grew louder over that summer and since I was still at my last ad agency – Campbell-Ewald – it made for some amusing moments as I listened to people speculate as to who “that Autoextremist guy” was, including the chairman of the office who wondered out loud while sitting right next to me in one of my final meetings there.

When I exited C-E on September 17th – a Friday – my real name appeared on the website the following Tuesday (our publication day back then) and the buzz ratcheted up even further. I fielded calls and emails from former ad colleagues and people at the car companies suggesting that, “I should have known it was you all along.” I even heard from those insisting that I should never have come out from behind the nom de plume, because it was much better and more interesting to continue the speculation.

And then of course the critics came out of the woodwork, too, insisting I was nothing but a disgruntled crank who would run out of things to say and that the Internet irritant would be over in a matter of moments.

Well, let’s see, after approximately 3.5 million words and counting, I’m still here and I still have a lot to say. And Autoextremist.com is heading into its fifteenth year.

Are things different today? In some cases dramatically so, yes. 

The Autoextremist imitators have come and gone but there’s no doubt that the tone and tenor of the coverage of this business have fundamentally changed, and I’m happy to say that this publication had a lot to do with that.

The hoary notion of “denying access” by PR honchos is now laughable, because everything about their respective charges is “out there” on the Internet and there’s not a damn thing any of them can do about it. And with the frequency of media events growing exponentially, concealing the realities about who some of these people really are is getting harder and harder to do.

Is there still “spin” going on? Absolutely. But the willingness by the media to blindly go along with it is miniscule. (Well, at least for most journalists, anyway. But never fear, there are still enough relentless hacks out there to balance things out and embarrass themselves, unfortunately.)

The business, at least as practiced here in the Motor City, has undergone seismic shifts in the past fourteen years.

Two of the Detroit-based auto companies couldn’t wake up and face the brutal competition from Asian and European manufacturers fast enough on their own, especially when the economy tanked back in 2008, so they had to endure gut-wrenching bankruptcies and the devastating fallout associated with it. How devastating? One of those manufacturers is no longer an American-owned company

This near-death experience has forced these automakers to get their act together and fly right, because most of these executives know (note the key word here being most) that there won’t be another chance.

Consequently the companies are leaner and they’re placing renewed emphasis on the product – which is remarkable given some of their previous missteps – and they’re fighting with everything they can muster.

But the landscape is dramatically different now. Even though Toyota and Honda are rejuvenating themselves as you read this, and VW is still on its mission to conquer the world, the Korean manufacturers have become a force to be reckoned with and the U.S. market continues to be cut up in smaller and smaller pieces, with manufacturers fighting each other to the death for a percentage point of market share.

And that doesn’t even begin to cover the knife fight that the luxury market has become, with Audi, BMW, Infiniti, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche squaring-off against each other while Cadillac gets feisty on the perimeter and Lincoln tries to become a player again.

And let’s not forget that the largest automobile market the world has ever seen – China - is still in its infancy, and it will dictate the future of this business – good and bad (well, mostly bad) – for decades to come.

So yes, since we started this publication an awful lot has changed. But then again, much of the business remains entrenched in the same ol’ same old, I’m sad to say.

This industry is still compromised by vast bureaucracies overrun with legions of recalcitrant twerps, malicious naysayers and flat-out bad actors who wreak havoc on this business every day and who contribute immeasurably to its relentless two steps forward, three steps back dance of mediocrity.

This business is still, amazingly enough, overrun by managers who place their personal agendas before what’s good for the overall health and competitiveness of their respective companies, even after having witnessed the bankruptcies almost destroying their livelihoods once and for all. (You would think this would have sunk in for some by now, but alas, no.)

And this business is still guided by too many woefully underqualified executives, spineless weasels who have been propelled to their respective posts by the sheer inertia ingrained in the bureaucracies and who, unencumbered by any level of competence or the ability to think rationally, make horrendous decisions that cost these companies dearly every day.

But still, in spite of those ugly realities all is far from lost.

I am absolutely certain of one thing after a decade and a half of doing Autoextremist.com and that is that as long as these companies have squadrons of True Believers - the people who bring their very best each and every day and understand completely that this business always has been and always will be about the product - then there’s a reason to remain genuinely optimistic about the future of this business and the great things to come.

And as long as the True Believers are present and accounted for, I will be too.

And that’s the High-Octane Truth, heading into our fifteenth year.