Hey there, Jalopnik. I’m Collin Woodard, the new road tester around here. Since most of you have no idea who I am, I wanted to take a minute to introduce myself.
Currently, I live in Athens, GA, which you’ve probably only heard of if you pay any attention to college football or 1980s alternative rock. That said, I’ll be moving to Detroit very soon. Turns out, if your job is to review cars, it helps to live somewhere that has a press fleet with cars to review. Sadly, I don’t think my manual E39 540i will be coming with me. Better to let it live out the rest of its days in a climate that isn’t actively trying to destroy it.
The good news is, even though it’s probably sub-optimal to move to Detroit in the winter, I’m not a complete stranger to cold weather. Sure, I spent the last several years living in Los Angeles, but before that, I lived in Boston. Do you remember the year Boston kept showing up in the news because it snowed so much that the city ran out of places to put the snow? Yeah, that was the year I moved to Boston. In January.
Unlike some writers, I don’t really have a specific brand or type of car that I’m loyal to. For me, it’s a lot more fun just to try something different. For example, I had a Fiat 500e back when I lived in LA because I wanted to see what owning an EV was like as a renter. Also because parking in Koreatown was a nightmare.
Before that, I had an SG Subaru Forester. No, it wasn’t the turbo, but it was fantastic for camping and shockingly good off-road. Besides, I’d rather spend my fun dollars on motorcycles. Not that I’ll be doing much riding in Detroit this winter. So maybe the jerk who stole my Monster earlier this year actually did me a favor.
Funny enough, even though I just started here, Jalopnik is also a big part of how I ended up becoming an auto journalist. Almost 10 years ago, some fool who worked here at the time (RIP Ballaban) front-paged one of my Oppo posts, which only encouraged me to write even more posts. I even got it in my head that someone might pay me money to write posts. Foolish, I know.
Eventually, I ended up at a site called The Cheat Sheet, where they paid me money AND provided health insurance, which was very nice. From there, I went to Road & Track, then joined MotorTrend, and eventually left MotorTrend to start a site called MotorBiscuit.
It’s been a wild ride to say the least, and now I get to say I actually work for Jalopnik. That’s just so cool.