The first time Jean Jennings confronted the Mexican federal police, they had just arrested one of her friends for public urination.
It was 1983, and she was part of an eight-vehicle road test along the length of Baja California, which she had joined as a writer for Car and Driver magazine. Thinking fast, she called her friend a cerdo — pig — and talked the police down to a fine.
A few days later, the cops caught them speeding outside La Paz, near the bottom of the peninsula; she wriggled out of a ticket by showing officers her Datsun’s fancy electronic voice system. Still later, she was arrested when she hit a cow. This time she wheedled an officer into letting her drive his police car, gave his girlfriend a manicure and got away with a $50 fine.
Mrs. Jennings, who died on Dec. 16 at 70, was not just one of the best writers in automotive journalism; she was also, by all accounts, the most interesting. She won a demolition derby, rode a motorcycle across China and traversed 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.
Mrs. Jennings had no formal training in journalism. Cars, though, she knew: Before joining Car and Driver in 1981, she had driven a cab, repaired engines and crash-tested prototype Chryslers 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) largely a man’s world, but Mrs. Jennings had no problem making it her own.
“The first big smack almost threw me into the back seat,” she wrote in a 1983 column about that demo derby. “When the car wouldn’t start again, I discovered that the little alligator clip that was running the juice from the battery to the ignition coil had popped off. I got everything reconnected and running in time to see a gaping trunk heading for my port side at ten knots.”
Mrs. 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 type of car magazine, Automobile, which was aimed at more discerning readers and featured writers like P.J. 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 writing anything other than fanboy notes,” Kathleen Hamilton, a childhood friend who later worked for her at Automobile, said in an interview. “It was enthusiast writing, and she brought adventure to the car-world reader.”
Mrs. Jennings also contributed to nonautomotive publications like Esquire and New Woman, calibrating her words to fit the audience.
For New Woman, she wrote about how to negotiate with car salesmen; for Esquire, she 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 U.S. in 15 years.”
She was the automotive correspondent for “Good Morning America,” talked engines with Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show” and taught Oprah Winfrey and her audience how to change a tire.
Mrs. Jennings later moved into editing, eventually replacing Mr. Davis as editor in chief of Automobile. She continued to build the magazine’s readership and writing stable; under her guidance, in 2009, Automobile became the first car publication to win a National Magazine Award, for a column by Jamie Kitman.
By then Mrs. Jennings had become part of the automotive establishment — befriending racecar drivers, hobnobbing with auto executives and flying around the world to test-drive Ferraris.
“There wasn’t a president of an automotive company 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 Feb. 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, became a noted automotive journalist as well.
A good student, Jean graduated from high school at 16, in 1970, and enrolled at the University of Michigan that fall. But college challenged her, and she dropped out after three incomplete semesters.
She 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 car repair on the side.
“I didn’t shave my legs. I smoked 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, found her a job as a mechanic and test driver at the Chrysler Proving Grounds. There, in between shifts, she edited a union newsletter, her sole journalistic experience when Mr. Davis hired her.
Her first marriage, to Tom Lindawood, a dispatcher at her cab company, ended in divorce. She married Tim Jennings in 1996 at a ceremony in Geneva — not because they wanted a fashionable destination wedding, but because the Geneva Auto Show was taking place nearby. Bob Lutz, the president of Chrysler, was the best man.
Along with Mr. Jennings, she is survived by her brothers Paul, Ted and Tom.
Mrs. Jennings started her blog in 2012 and left Automobile in 2014 (it ceased publication in 2020). Though she shuttered the blog in 2016, she continued to write freelance articles, and to record on-the-spot videos at car shows.
She was readily recognizable on the show floor for her gaudy hats, and for the scrum of auto-world celebrities who would flock around her. The attention never went to her head.
“It’s like living a jet-set life on pauper’s wages,” she told the blog Motorhead Mama. “I go to castles in Germany, chateaus and five-star restaurants in France, and then I come home and remove the mildewed laundry in the washer and wash the crusty dishes.”
