When Jean Jennings first confronted Mexican federal police, they had just arrested one of her friends for urinating in public.
That was in 1983. She was participating in an eight-vehicle road test in Baja California as a writer for Car and Driver magazine. Thinking quickly, she called her friend a serdo (pig) and handed over a fine to the police.
A few days later, police caught them speeding outside La Paz, near the base of the peninsula. She twisted out of the ticket and showed the officers the Datsun's fancy electronic voice system. She was later arrested for running over a cow. This time, she avoided a $50 fine by coaxing an officer into driving his patrol car and giving his girlfriend a manicure.
Mrs. Jennings, who died on December 16 at the age of 70, was not only one of the greatest writers in automotive journalism. She was also, by all accounts, the most interesting person. She won the demolition derby, rode a motorcycle across China, and drove a 1916 Mercedes across New Zealand. All of this during a 30-year career, first at Car and Driver and then at Automobile, where he was editor-in-chief.
Mrs. Jennings had no formal training in journalism. But she knew about cars. Before joining Car and Driver in 1981, she drove taxis, repaired engines and crash-tested prototype Chryslers at the company's proving grounds outside Detroit.
Her husband, Tim Jennings, said she died in a nursing home of Alzheimer's disease.
Cars, and writing about them, were once (and still are) primarily a man's world, but Mrs. Jennings had no problem making it her own.
“The first big slap nearly threw me into the back seat,” she wrote about that demo derby in a 1983 column. “When the car wouldn't start again, I noticed that the little alligator clip that was sending electricity from the battery to the ignition coils had come loose. I reconnected everything and ran it in time, and it was gaping. I could see the trunk heading to port at 10 knots.
Mrs. Jennings was hired at Car and Driver by David E. Davis Jr., a prominent figure in automotive journalism. In 1986, after Rupert Murdoch offered to support a new type of car magazine, Automobile, aimed at a discerning audience and featuring writers such as PJ O'Rourke, David Halberstam and Jim Harrison. , took her. Mrs. Jennings proved quite capable of keeping up with them.
“She and David were the only ones writing anything other than fanboy notes,” Kathleen Hamilton, a childhood friend who later went to work for her at Automobile, said in an interview. “It was written by a passionate writer who brought an adventure to readers in the automotive world.”
Mrs. Jennings also wrote for non-automotive publications such as Esquire and New Woman, tailoring her words to suit her audience.
In New Woman, she wrote about how to negotiate with car salesmen. In Esquire, she wrote: “If your butt is small, your heart is big, and you can get some extra points on your driver's license, the most exciting car sold in America is definitely this little horror, the first Lotus is coming to the US after 15 years. ”
She was the automotive correspondent for “Good Morning America,” talked about engines with Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show,” and taught Oprah Winfrey and viewers how to change a tire.
Mrs. Jennings then moved into editorial work, eventually replacing Mr. Davis as editor-in-chief of Automobile magazine. She kept the magazine's readership and writing steady. Under her leadership, in 2009 Automobile became the first automotive magazine to win a National Magazine Award for Jamie Kitman's column.
By then, Mrs. Jennings had become a member of the auto industry, befriending race car drivers, socializing with car executives, and traveling the world to test drive Ferraris. .
“There wasn't a car company president that didn't love her,” said Scottie Reese, who runs the website A Girl's Guide to Cars.
Jean Marie Lienert was born in Detroit on February 3, 1954 into a family of journalists and grew up in the far northern suburbs of New Baltimore, Michigan.
Her father, Robert, was the editor of Automotive News. Her mother, Audrey (Gagnon) Lienert, wrote for the New Baltimore newspaper. And one of her brothers, Paul, also became a prominent automotive journalist.
A straight-A student, Gene graduated from high school in 1970 at age 16 and enrolled at the University of Michigan that fall. However, the university challenged her and she dropped out after an incomplete third semester.
She bought a used Plymouth sedan, painted it yellow, and joined the Yellow Cab Company in Ann Arbor as a driver. To save money, she taught herself to repair cars on the side.
“I didn't shave my legs. I smoked cigars. I was pretty cool,” she wrote in a 2014 entry on her blog, Jean Knows Cars. “We used to put a bottle of wine under the seat and if the person in the back seat liked it, we'd offer them a slug.”
Her brother Paul, then the editor of Autoweek magazine, found her a job as a mechanic and test driver at the Chrysler proving ground. There she edited the union's newsletter between shifts, her only journalistic experience when Mr. Davis hired her.
Her first marriage, to Tom Lindamood, a taxi dispatcher, ended in divorce. She married Tim Jennings in a ceremony in Geneva in 1996, not because she wanted a fashionable destination wedding, but because the Geneva Auto Show was being held nearby. Bob Lutz, president of Chrysler, was the best person.
In addition to Mr. Jennings, she is survived by her brothers, Paul, Ted and Tom;
Mrs. Jennings started the blog in 2012 and retired from Automobile in 2014 (the blog ceased publication in 2020). She shut down her blog in 2016, but continued to write freelance articles and record on-the-spot videos at car shows.
She was instantly recognizable on the show floor with her flashy hat and the scrum of auto industry celebrities crowding around her. Attention was never on her head.
“It's like living a jet-set lifestyle on a pauper's salary,” she told the blog Motorhead Mama. “I go to German castles, French chateaus, five-star restaurants, and then I come home to remove the moldy laundry from the washing machine and wash the hard dishes.”
