The Petersen Museum’s CarStories Podcast and My Start in Auto Journalism Wasn’t Entirely Lost

Not bad as far as podcast logos go.Image: Petersen Automotive Museum

So, I’ve been an automotive journalist for a while now. Before I was here at Jalopnik, I was at CNET’s Roadshow for around five years, but before that, I was one of the hosts of the Petersen Automotive Museum’s very popular CarStories podcast. The site that hosted all of our episodes kicked the bucket earlier this year, and I had thought that all the episodes were lost to history forever, but this week I found out that they survived because of Archive.org.

If you don’t know what CarStories was, it was the Petersen Museum’s first shot at getting in on the podcast boom of the mid-twenty-teens, and its first host was a guy named AJ. He ended up moving on to a different career, and I was working for the Petersen’s PR agency as a content creator at the time, so when the hunt for a new host started, I half-assedly volunteered.

Of course, understanding that even I wouldn’t be interested in me talking for an hour, I suggested we find a co-host, which we did in the form of James McKeone of the NoBraking.com website. James and I didn’t know each other at the start, but over a hundred or so episodes, we became pals. During the course of CarStories, James and I were able to interview some truly incredible humans, some of whom became actual friends.

Sadly, James passed away earlier this year, and after CarStories ended, we drifted apart, and I hadn’t spoken to him in a few years, but sitting down and listening to some of my favorite old episodes makes me both happy and sad. He was a generous co-host, a profoundly weird dude, and while he wasn’t always the easiest dude to work with, I miss him, and looking back on our CarStories period always makes me smile.

These are a few of my favorite episodes, and hopefully, you enjoy them too, or at the very least, you can put them on to drown out your parents during their holiday visit this year.