Automotive Journalist Elana Scherr Wants You in the Car Industry

Elana Scherr is one of the most prolific and wide-ranging voices currently in automotive media. Her résumé includes a stop at HOT ROD, serving as the editor-in-chief of Roadkill Magazine, and contributions to a litany of prominent titles as a freelancer, and Scherr is currently Car and Driver’s senior features editor. She’s won awards for her writing, which is observant, poised, and introspective. Which makes sense, because that’s how she is as a person.

It’s hard to believe she didn’t actually start out wanting to be an automotive writer at all.

At the Intersection of Interest and Talent

Originally, Scherr planned a career in fine arts. But as she told MotorTrend in a recent interview, “[It became] quickly clear to me it was just not something most people are going to be able to pay their bills doing.”

On the side and at the same time, though, she was nursing a budding interest in cars. Scherr got her driver’s license relatively late in life and had bought a 1973 Plymouth Duster with a 318 V-8 to learn how to fix it. “The first thing I did was put a four-barrel carburetor on it,” Scherr said. “The second thing I did was change the starter when it left me dead on the side of the road and I got a parking ticket.”

Turns out, Scherr really enjoyed fixing the car. And naturally, she enjoyed reading car magazines so she could learn the vocabulary and begin to understand what people were talking about when they discussed cars.

Scherr changing out the power steering pump on her and her husband’s 1981 301 Turbo Trans Am. Screengrab courtesy of Elana Scherr / <a rel=

“I thought, ‘This would be a really fun job to work for one of these magazines,’” Scherr said. “After all, I had photography and writing skills because I minored in history and English. It wasn't outrageously beyond my imagination that I could write something. But I didn't know anybody who was doing it. These people seemed like celebrities to me. I was like, ‘How do you even get that job?’”

Scherr occasionally applied for writing gigs but never got a call back. In the meantime, she busied herself with industry-adjacent jobs: fabrication work for motorcycle racing, public relations for an aftermarket automotive agency. The PR job brought her in contact with a lot of magazine writers. “That meant when there was an opening, I wasn’t just sending a résumé into a void,” Scherr said. “I was able to actually ask somebody about it specifically.”

That someone was David Freiburger, and the position was at HOT ROD in 2012. As first jobs go, it was a hell of a place to start.

Cars as a Vehicle (Heh) for Community

Look through Scherr’s bylines, and a pattern emerges: Whether she’s writing about new cars, old cars, or cultural observations, everything is almost always centered around people.

Scherr pictured with Bob Bondurant.

“What’s really interesting about cars is not the car itself but what we as people do with cars,” Scherr said. “I don’t think that’s the common way people think about cars when they talk about being a car person, you know? There’s the more mainstream one, which is a numbers and parts approach: What engine is in this car? How many cubic inches is it? How much power does it make? Those are fun to do, as well, especially when it’s an interesting engine or it goes very fast. There’s nothing wrong with this approach. But for me, I like the community part.”

Scherr pointed to “This One-Owner 1968 Camaro Was Found in Griffith Park” as one of the stories she was proudest of writing.

“[The car] was always [at Griffith Observatory],” Scherr said. “I always wondered about it. I finally tracked it down by making a bunch of phone calls.” Turns out, it belonged to the director of the observatory. “We had an interview with him. He was a great guy, and it was a really fun story to do.”

More recently, Scherr’s story “In Washington, D.C.’s Secret Carpool Cabal, It’s a Daily Slug Fest” on Car and Driver got to the bottom of a secret-but-not-secret grassroots rideshare system in the nation’s capital.

“I went to cover it right after the pandemic,” Scherr said. “A lot of the previous message boards and Facebook groups that had been devoted to it were no longer active because it had stopped during the pandemic for obvious reasons.

<em>Scherr with Don Prudhomme.</em>

“I just went to various places where I thought it might be happening and asked total strangers about it,” she continued. “At one point, my photographer and I were driving around the Pentagon and got pulled over. The cop was like, ‘What are you guys doing here?’ And I was like, ‘I’m trying to figure this carpool thing out.’ And then he told me all this stuff about it, which in the end wasn’t even correct. Even the cop at the Pentagon didn’t totally understand how it worked! But it gave me enough of a starting point to find another person to ask. It was really challenging and super satisfying when I was able to finish the story.”

The story went on to win first place in the 16th Annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards by the Los Angeles Press Club.

It Takes a Village

Needless to say, Scherr is very good at what she does. Beyond her work, though, she’s an advocate for women in the industry. Scherr is very aware she can’t possibly speak for everyone, but her experience as a woman in automotive media is to be part of a smaller group.

“There’s no denying that being the minority of anything means you don’t have as many people to back you up if you disagree with the majority,” she said. “You’re on a team that doesn’t have as many players on the board. That means your players have to be better and stronger, because the expectation is you’re going to be able to pull your own weight. That can be a lot of pressure. At most jobs, there’s enough space to learn how to be good. I always felt I had to come in strong from the get-go, that there were no soft landings if I wasn’t good at something.”

Scherr noted that even though you should never read the comments, she does it from time to time. And she’s noticed that while commenters are equally cruel to men and women, women are usually grouped together because of that minority status, whereas men are attacked individually.

Staying ahead of this mental trap means being confident. “Speaking for myself, I know I’m doing a good job,” Scherr said. “I know that I know a lot about what I’m writing about. I do a lot of research. I work very hard at it, and I really enjoy it. So what I try to do is just concentrate on how much fun I’m having and chalk up most criticisms as coming from a place of jealousy or ignorance.”

Externally, Scherr does her best to defend other women when she’s in the position to do so. “That is an active decision I made, that I had to work on, and that I occasionally still have to work on,” she said. “When I was coming up, there were a few other women in the industry who were supportive of other women, but most of them were playing under the Highlander Rule: There can be only one. ‘If there is a younger, prettier one, she’s gonna take my spot.’ I noticed it, occasionally felt it in a room, and I had to say to myself, ‘Look, I’m not gonna be like that.’”

Getting older means getting hit with all the typical insecurities. You ask yourself if you’re past your prime. Are you uncool? Are there other people doing a better job than you?

“I had to actively say to myself, ‘It doesn't matter because they’re going to be doing their thing. I’m going to do my thing,’” Scherr said. “At the end of the day, I want [other women] to be here more than I want to be a special shiny star. I’m glad they’re here. They’re making us all look good.”

Looking forward at the industry now—and considering how a young person may enter it—Scherr advises learning some light video work (basic on-camera techniques and sound and video editing) because there’s so much more happening on social media and YouTube channels. It might actually be easier to break into the industry this way than via traditional written media.

If you can drive, that’s great, too. Beyond just normal driving for a review, which is great, there’s a ton of use for someone who has excellent car control and driving skill. “Someone who can flick a car into a controlled drift for a photographer or someone who can talk while driving on track,” Scherr said. She personally knows how to drive a lot of different eras of cars and is quite good at it.

“The more specialty skills you have behind the wheel, the more places there are for you to use them,” she continued. “Outlets will have a hired hot shoe for their supercar stories, or there’s often testing teams who need to be able to drive cars quickly in a repeatable way so that they can get numbers and be safe. If you have the ability to learn those skills, they give you a leg up over someone who’s not so comfortable behind the wheel.”

Scherr working on her 1970 Nova SS. Screengrab courtesy of Elana Scherr / <a rel=

Karting, autocrossing, practicing in empty and snowy parking lots, and driving simulators are all great ways to get started for relatively little money as compared to a full-blown track day.

When Scherr first became interested in cars, the number of women with the same interest and who raced and wrote about cars was about a third of what it is today. There has been progress.

“We’re on a little bit of a downslope in terms of diversity in the automotive industry right now, but I have faith that we will bring it back up,” Scherr said. “In the grassroots and side gigs, like social and YouTube videos and stuff, there are a ton of women who are comfortable talking about their cars, getting van projects, going racing, writing books about racing. I’m very optimistic, honestly, that we can make real changes in motorsports and the general automotive community within the next 15 years.”

Scherr’s hope is one day, women in the automotive industry will become so numerous and so normalized that it’ll remove the need for the prefix—no more being thought of as “a woman in racing” and just being a race car driver.

“I can’t wait until we get to where it’s just not a topic of conversation, [that it becomes] so normal it’s not weird,” she said. But for now, it’s still unusual enough to be a woman in cars that people are going to notice it.

So in the meantime, Scherr wants to keep talking about it. “I do think it is very helpful to hear other people’s stories,” she said. “If you’re starting out, or even if you’re deep in it and you’re feeling a little bit lonely or lost, most of the other women in this industry are happy to talk to you. I’m happy to talk to you, at least!”