The first time Jean Jennings encountered the Mexican federal police, she had just arrested one of her friends for public urination.
It was 1983 and he was participating in an eight-vehicle test along Baja California, which he had joined as a writer for Car and Driver magazine. Thinking quickly, she called her friend cherdo – a pig – and spoke to the police about a fine.
A few days later, police caught them speeding outside La Paz, near the bottom of the peninsula. escaped a ticket by showing officers his fancy Datsun electronic voice system. Still later, he was arrested when he hit a cow. This time he pressured a cop to let her drive his squad car, gave his girlfriend a manicure and got away with a $50 fine.
Ms. Jennings, who died on December 16 at the age of 70, was not just one of the best writers in automotive journalism. it was also, by all accounts, the most interesting. She won a demolition derby, rode a motorcycle across China and drove across New Zealand in a 1916 Benz, all during her 30-year career first at Car and Driver and then at Automobile, where she was editor-in-chief.
Ms. Jennings had no formal training in journalism. Cars, though, he knew: Before joining Car and Driver in 1981, he had driven cabs, overhauled engines and crash-tested Chrysler prototypes at the company’s proving grounds outside Detroit.
Tim Jennings, her husband, said she died of Alzheimer’s disease in a care facility.
Cars, and writing about cars, were (and still are) very much a man’s world, but Ms. Jennings had no problem making it her own.
“The first big smack almost threw me into the back seat,” he wrote in a 1983 column about that demo derby. “When the car wouldn’t start again, I discovered that the little alligator clip that ran juice from the battery to the ignition coil had popped. I reconnected and ran in time to see an open hull heading to my port side at ten knots.”
Ms. Jennings was hired at Car and Driver by David E. Davis Jr., a renowned figure in automotive journalism. In 1986, he took her with him after Rupert Murdoch offered to support a new kind of car magazine, Automobile, aimed at a more discerning readership and featuring writers such as PJ O’Rourke, David Halberstam and Jim Harrison. Mrs. Jennings proved more than capable of keeping up with them.
“She and David were the only ones who wrote anything but fan notes,” Kathleen Hamilton, a childhood friend who later worked for her at Automobile, said in an interview. “It was enthusiastically written and brought adventure to the car reader.”
Ms. Jennings also contributed to non-automotive publications such as Esquire and New Woman, calibrating her words to suit audiences.
For New Woman, she wrote about how to negotiate with car salesmen. for Esquire, wrote sentences like: “If your ass is small, your heart is big and your driver’s license is open to a few extra points, the most exciting car for sale in America is surely this tiny terror, the first all-new Lotus in the US in 15 years.
She was the auto correspondent for “Good Morning America,” talked about engines with Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show” and taught Oprah Winfrey and her audience how to change a tire.
Ms. Jennings later moved into editing, eventually replacing Mr. Davis as editor-in-chief of Automobile. He continued to steadily build the magazine’s readership and writing. Under her guidance, in 2009 Automobile became the first automotive publication to win a National Magazine Award, for a column by Jamie Kitman.
By then, Ms. Jennings had become part of the auto industry — befriending race car drivers, dealing with car executives and flying around the world to test drive Ferraris.
“There wasn’t an auto company president who didn’t love her,” said Scotty Reiss, who runs the website A Girl’s Guide to Cars.
Jean Marie Leinert was born into a family of journalists on February 3, 1954, in Detroit and grew up in New Baltimore, Mich., a far northern suburb.
Her father, Robert, was the editor of Automotive News. Her mother, Audrey (Gagnon) Leinert, wrote for the New Baltimore newspaper. and one of her brothers, Paul, also became a well-known motoring journalist.
A good student, Jean graduated from high school at age 16 in 1970 and enrolled at the University of Michigan that fall. But college challenged her and she dropped out after three incomplete semesters.
He bought a used Plymouth sedan, painted it yellow and joined the Ann Arbor Yellow Cab Company as a driver. To save money, she taught herself auto repair on the side.
“I didn’t shave my legs. I was smoking cigars. I was so cool,” she wrote in a 2014 entry on her blog, Jean Knows Cars. “I used to keep a bottle of wine under the seat and if I liked the person in the back seat I’d offer them a slug.”
Her brother Paul, then an editor at Autoweek, got her a job as a mechanic and test driver at the Chrysler Proving Grounds. There, between shifts, she was editing a union newsletter, her only journalistic experience when Mr. Davis hired her.
Her first marriage, to Tom Lindamood, a dispatcher for her taxi company, ended in divorce. She married Tim Jennings in 1996 in a ceremony in Geneva — not because they wanted a trendy destination wedding, but because the Geneva Motor Show was nearby. Bob Lutz, the chairman of Chrysler, was the best man.
Along with Mr Jennings, she is survived by her brothers Paul, Ted and Tom.
Ms. Jennings started her blog in 2012 and left Automobile in 2014 (ceased publication in 2020). Although he closed the blog in 2016, he continued to write freelance articles and record videos on location at car shows.
She was easily recognizable on the show floor for her fancy hats and the crowd of world celebrities flocking around her. The attention never went to her head.
“It’s like living a jet-set life on a pauper’s salary,” she told the Motorhead Mama blog. “I go to castles in Germany, towers and five-star restaurants in France, and then I come home and remove the moldy clothes in the washing machine and wash the crusty dishes.”
