In the automotive world, John Davis is a man who needs no introduction. MotorWeek made him an automotive legend, and somehow, that little car program on Maryland public television has been going for 45 years, with John Davis still at the helm and zero hosts fired for punching a producer over a sandwich. And for the latest episode of the MotorWeek podcast, America’s Car Dad isn’t the host — he’s the guest. Which means you get 90 minutes of stories about his life, his career, and the show that made him a household name.
When you woke up today, were you planning to listen to John Davis talk with Jessica Ray for an hour and a half? Probably not, but now that you know you have the option, I guarantee that’s what you’ll be doing today. I mean, it’s John freakin’ Davis.
Seeing how successful he’s been with MotorWeek, it would be easy to assume Davis was always destined to end up in automotive media. After all, that’s clearly where he belongs. But as he explains in the episode embedded below, we very well may have never gotten MotorWeek if the traders he worked with on Wall Street hadn’t been so boring to talk to. Oh, you didn’t know he used to work on Wall Street? Consider that another reason you’ll want to give this whole episode a listen.
Dull conversation made John a sad boy
The way John tells it, he got interested in things that move as a kid growing up in North Carolina, which naturally meant majoring in engineering at NC State (go Pack!) before getting his MBA from UNC Chapel Hill (boo Tar Heels!) and taking an analyst job at Kidder, Peabody & Company. At that point, he was especially interested in the airline industry, not cars, and if he had stayed on Wall Street, he probably would have lived a very different life, and MotorWeek wouldn’t exist.
The thing is, though, John didn’t grow up in some random town in North Carolina. He grew up in Durham, home of Duke University and one of the three cities that now make up the Research Triangle. As he put it on the podcast, “We had three major universities immediately adjacent to where I lived, including Duke University in Durham. You had multiple smaller colleges. … And so everybody was pretty sharp. It certainly wasn’t any kind of, um, it wasn’t a backwoods place. It was where the research triangle ended up going in. Anyway, I missed that. I missed that level of informed conversation that I was not finding in New York.”
Put off by that lack of “informed conversation,” Davis began looking for other jobs, which led him to Maryland, and the rest is history. So, the next time you watch a MotorWeek video, remember to thank the drunk Wall Street traders from the ’70s who spent so much time talking about money that they bored John Davis into leaving New York City altogether. Without their valuable contribution, the automotive world wouldn’t be what it is today, and for that, we thank them.
