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After 45 years of automotive writing and vehicle testing, Moblr is where everything I've done is all going to come together.

The first 18 of those years – after 'almost' working for Briggs Cunningham at his amazing Costa Mesa museum where I'd have gotten to polish his Bugatti Type 41 Royale (!) - were spent at Road & Track (the real Road & Track in Newport Beach), starting as an intern. Yeah, I was the guy who drew most of the road test data panel's acceleration curves in the 1980's. (Tools? Graph paper, a sharp pencil and a stack of French curves). That morphed into assisting in car testing, then becoming the Road Test Editor for a decade, and finally, a Senior Editor, typing my little fingers off. Highlights? One was simply being a part of the magazine's World's Fastest Cars programs (Ruf Yellowbird ring a bell?); a runner-up was creating our no-rules cornering analogy to drag strip racing called the 'R&T Skidpad Challenge' which resulted all kinds ground-effects fan-car concepts and even a Lotus Eleven with a sailboat mast plus sail (tacking depended on whether the car was skidpadding clockwise or counterclockwise). But the topper was helping test – over a period of months – the Voyager airplane that circumnavigated the globe, non-stop, non-refueled in 1986/87 (it was deemed the last milestone of flight). My role was to collect acceleration data at different fuel loads at Mojave Airport and sometimes Edwards AFB, for designer Burt Rutan to predict the maximum fuel load the plane could lift off with. It was an incredible experience, and how often do you work on a project that winds up in the Smithsonian?

Unbelievably, all that started to feel repetitive, and in 2000 I was invited to join something exciting called a website. Driving.com was short-lived but it was a breath of fresh air because, unlike established magazines, we were literally re-inventing what automotive content was. My job was to create our interpretation of a 'road test'. The result was 'Road Tests for Real People' where I measured how you experience a car in your everyday life instead of how it performs at a test track at the limits of tire grip or horsepower (irrelevant for 99% of the public). I ultimately tested over 100 cars, mostly very late at night on public roads, measuring things like ride quality, interior noise, handling response, and so on. It was presented via Flash Animation (if you remember that). Anyhow, the Dot-Com bubble burst shortly afterwards and Driving.com ended with me carrying the server out the door as the landlord was on his way to lock it. It was so exhausted that when it was over, I literally slept on a floor for three days. But I'd do it again.

Following that was a project from a company called Maritz who were contracted by Toyota to create a technology where – during dealer presentations of a new car (in this case, the 2^nd gen Prius) a telemetry feed from an instrumentation package in the car while it negotiated real-world 'challenges' on the course, would create an animated presentation on a big screen in the tent. It was actually pretty cool. As the car was real-time doing various tasks (accelerating, or driving over speed bumps) the Prius's live data was being compared, instant-by-instant to the pre-recorded data of a Honda Civic Hybrid (the Prius's nemesis) via look-up tables.

Finally we arrive at Motortrend where I spent 16 years, and painfully witnessed the decline of traditional automotive media. Ownership passed from EMAP to Primedia to Source Interlink (The Enthusiast Network!) to Discovery. Every one, a budget cut and a soul-killing round of lay-offs. When I started, MT occupied a high floor of the Peterson Building on Wilshire Blvd, near Beverly Hills, with a view of the Hollywood sign. Shortly after it was my turn to be laid off, it was in a former clothing store in a shopping mall in El Segundo.

Remember that job I mentioned about polishing Briggs Cunningham's Royale (he'd directly bought from the Bugatti family after WW2)? Actually, I was hand-shake hired. But upon showing up bright and early on Monday morning, John Burgess, the curator, blankly stared at me. Then apologized profusely, saying he'd hired me by mistake, and they already had a guy. Mr Burgess later died of Alzheimer's, but he was a lovely man (a wonderful painter of early American racing too) who I'll be ever grateful to because a few days later, I got the call from Road & Track. Yes, I was available.

And now this one from Moblr where you'll see those 45 years of lessons merge with the start-completely-over, blank-slate, fresh thinking we need to understand today's furiously-changing automotive landscape. Let's get started.

After 30 years in media, 10 years of building companies, and a decade in the university classroom, Moblr is where my engineering training, automotive passion, and AI-driven vision finally converge.

The core of my journey was spent at Road & Track (the legendary publication in Newport Beach), where I rose to Executive Editor. In those years, I helped lead the magazine's transformation from a traditional print publication into a modern, multi-channel media brand. While I didn't draw acceleration curves by hand, I did drive over 1,500 different cars and crafted stories about some truly "out-there" adventures. Highlights? Driving a Ferrari across the rugged landscapes of India and through the mountains of Tibet to Lhasa, or piloting a Mercedes through the heart of Russia. But the absolute toppers were the experiences that pushed the limits of physics: pulling G's in an F-18 Super Hornet Navy fighter jet (I was Maverick before Tom Cruise!) and experiencing weightlessness aboard NASA's "vomit comet". I even got to test my own limits, racing a Maserati Coupe to a 5th-place finish in class at Germany's grueling Nürburgring 24-Hour race.

Eventually, solving problems of traditional media transitioning to digital led me toward my entrepreneurial ambitions. With a background in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, I've always been a problem-solver at heart. I moved into strategic consulting and startup advisory through Quantum Ventures, advising companies like PriceHub bring transparency to the car-buying process. I even secured a patent for a quantitative analysis method, proving that my engineering roots remained a vital part of my professional DNA.

For the past 10 years, I've served as a communications professor at the University of California, Irvine's Samueli School of Engineering and have also founded Prenostik, a National Science Foundation-funded AI startup. Building "My Learning Coach" taught me how to ethically leverage AI to help students become better critical thinkers, resilient, and self-determined to succeed in the ever-changing world.

And now, I am bringing that experience to Moblr. My history here actually began years ago, when I was the Road & Track Road Test Editor, clocking in the performance numbers with instrumented testing, and get blamed for being a tenth slower than other media counterparts. Today, I am leveraging my decades of automotive journalism and expertise in building AI-powered platforms to continue my lifelong passion for the automotive industry. At Moblr, we are merging veteran test-drive insights with a particular point of view, alongside proprietary data and AI-driven analysis to give every car enthusiast and buyer a clear, honest picture of how a vehicle actually performs. It's time to bring intelligence in motion to the road.