Bob the Car Guy is, depending on who's asking, a publication, a newsletter, or a particularly long-running excuse to talk about cars on the internet. It is the work of four contributors who agreed to write together because we've all been doing the same thing independently for years and figured a shared masthead would force us to be a little more disciplined about it.
The "Bob" of Bob the Car Guy is Bob — full name available on request, but his preference is the diminutive — who started the site in 2019 after finishing a long restoration of his father's 1990 Carrera. The original site was a Wordpress install with three articles, written in the front seat of that 911 with a coffee on the dashboard. Marcus Whitford joined the same year because Bob and Marcus had been arguing in the comments section of a different automotive site for two years and finally agreed they would do less harm if they argued in the same place. Brian Petrocchi came on in 2021 when his independent valuation work generated enough opinions about the used market that he needed somewhere to put them. Sarah Chen, who had been writing on Substack about auction comps for collectors who couldn't fit a spreadsheet onto a yacht, came on in 2022 after we ran out of pretending we could cover collector-market reporting without her. Lena Hashimoto joined most recently, after twelve years of HPDE instruction without enough good places to send students who wanted to read about driving rather than buying. She balances the rest of us out.
What we do
We write about cars — owning them, buying them, taking them to track days, watching what they do at auction, and occasionally just looking at them in a parking lot. We publish one to two pieces a week. We don't run sponsored content. We don't run affiliate links. We don't run "Best 10 Sports Cars Under $50,000." We don't run anything that would embarrass any of us at a PCA dinner.
If you have read a piece on this site, you have the basic shape of the operation: someone wrote a thing they had been thinking about for a while, and we let them. We edit each other lightly and try not to lose anyone's voice. We do not have a content calendar. We do not have an audience strategy. We have approximately three meetings a year, one of which is a track day.
What we don't do
We are not a buyer's service. Brian does buyer's representation work outside the site, but he keeps it strictly off the platform. We are not an insurance brokerage, though we will tell you when your policy structure is wrong. We do not appraise cars by email. We do not have a YouTube show planned, no matter how many times someone asks. We will not write an article comparing your three current finalists if you email us asking. Sorry.
How the site stays afloat
The site costs money to run, but not very much. We host on a tiny VPS that costs roughly $19 a month. The contributors are not paid by Bob the Car Guy because Bob the Car Guy does not have revenue, except for very occasional one-off donations from readers who insist. Our day jobs in the car world — Brian's brokerage, Sarah's market research consulting, Marcus's occasional ghostwriting for collector catalogs, Lena's instruction schedule — pay the bills. Bob has a quiet day job he prefers not to discuss in public because it has nothing to do with cars and he likes it that way.
If we ever change this arrangement, you'll know because we'll tell you in plain language at the top of the page. We have no plans to.
Reaching us
The contact form is the best way to reach us, and the only way besides the comments — which are turned off because nobody enjoyed moderating them, including Bob. Editorial inquiries and reader notes go through the contact page. Please don't pitch us — we don't take pitches, and ignoring them doesn't feel good. If you have a correction, send it via the contact form and we will fix it and credit you if you'd like.
Thanks for reading. Drive carefully and don't text in traffic.