Jean Jennings

Jean Marie Jennings (née Lienert; February 3, 1954 – December 16, 2024), also known as Jean Lindamood, was an American journalist, publisher and television personality covering the automotive industry. She focused on making the industry more accessible for others and for mentoring new automotive writers, editors and designers.

After writing for Car and Driver (1980–1985), she co-founded Automobile, where she continued to write her column Vile Gossip after becoming the magazine's editor in chief (2000–2014) and president (2006–2014).

She was the automotive correspondent for Good Morning America (1994–2000) and the Oxygen network. ; hosted her website JeanKnowsCars.com along with its corollary Youtube channel; and continued to write the Vile Gossip column intermittently for Autoblog.com (2020).

With Jennings as editor and President, Automobile was the first car magazine to win a National Magazine Award — for a column by Jamie Kitman. Jennings herself was honored by the Detroit Press Club Foundation; won the Motor Press Guild’s 2016 Dean Batchelor Award for Lifetime Achievement; was a 2021 inductee to the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame

David E. Davis, with whom Jennings co-founded Automobile magazine, said Jennings "changed the nature of the readers' response" to automotive journalism.

Background Jennings was born in Detroit on February 3, 1954. She grew up in a Catholic family with five brothers on a farm near New Baltimore, Michigan, the daughter of Audrey Jean Lienert (née Gagnon) and Robert Marcellus Lienert. Her father had a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern, was a copy editor at the Detroit Free Press, and later became the editor of Automotive News. Her oldest brother, Paul Lienert, became a noted automotive journalist, managing editor of AutoWeek, and a correspondent for Thomson Reuters. Jennings once described her family as "the Barrymores of automotive writing."

Having learned about cars from her father,

At 14, Jennings was an exchange student in Ecuador where she learned to drive in a Jeep-like Toyota, in the Andes mountains. She attended St. Mary's Queen of Creation school from 1960 to 1970, and later attended the University of Michigan (1970-1972), dropping out after three incomplete semesters.

"Once on the road, it was as you would expect. Old ladies wanted me to drive slowly, special needs kids wanted me to drive as fast as possible and honk the horn a lot, and out of town conventioneers told me rape jokes while sitting directly behind my head as I drove them to the airport.

Once I picked up a guy who made every hair on my body stand up when he got in the back seat. I secretly opened the mic button and talked for my life all the way to his (bad neighborhood) destination. The next day I read in the paper that he’d escaped from the State Hospital, murdered his wife, then he called a cab. Mine.

I took a bank robber to a local town to rob a bank. I picked up the actor Jason Robards. I carried a drunk whose head was covered in blood from a bottle fight over my shoulder and into his house. I propped him on the toilet and cleaned him off with alcohol while he screamed bloody murder."

At eighteen, with a 318 V-8, painted it yellow, installed a roof light and a meter, and joined the Yellow Cab Company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as an owner/operator. When that car was totaled, her second cab was a Plymouth Fury, also with a 318 V8. While at Yellow Cab, she redefined the city taxicab boundaries, trained and created a training manual for new cab drivers, and was elected president of the Yellow Cab board. She married Tom Lindamood, a taxi dispatcher, in 1979. Five years later, with the taxi driving having become increasingly dangerous, and wrote for its award-winning union newsletter. Jennings had Type 2 Diabetes, sat on the board of directors of the Metro Detroit and Southeast Michigan chapter of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and had emceed the organization's Promise Ball Gala.

In a 2016 interview, she counted as large influences on her life a Catholic upbringing "with a heavy emphasis on reading, Latin, and the pursuit of nothing less than perfection"

Career In 1980, at her brother Paul's encouragement, one month after she was laid off at Chrysler, she applied at Car and Driver and was hired as a staff writer by editor David E. Davis (1930–2011). Though she considers herself a poor automotive prognosticator, The division folded sixteen years later, in 2000.

In 1985 she left Car and Driver with Davis, co-founding Automobile magazine and becoming its first executive editor. Under the motto "No Boring Cars," the magazine competed directly with three other successful automotive magazines, Motor Trend, Car and Driver and Road & Track with and the only one of the four to be perfect bound (not stapled)

At Automobile, Jennings became known for her automotive adventures with some of the most prominent and important people in and out of automotive culture. She spent 9,000 miles in the first of Brock Yates' One Lap of America with Parnelli Jones in a panel van disguised as a Stroh's Brewery truck; was close to auto writer and racer Denise McCluggage for 30 years; mooned race car drivers Dan Gurney and Phil Hill; drove to the top of the world with Swedish rally driver Erik Carlsson; spent a day in 1990 and drank Johnnie Walker Red with Porsche design chief Tony Lapine and 90-year old champion Bugatti driver Eliška Junková (Elizabeth Junek) at her apartment in the Swedish embassy in Prague, just after the Berlin Wall fell;

Jennings was periodically estranged from Davis, whom she described on his death in 2011 as "the most interesting, most difficult, cleverest, darkest, most erudite, dandiest, and most inspirational, charismatic and all-around damnedest human being I will ever meet. I have loved him. I have seriously not loved him."

Jennings was profiled by Susan Orlean for The New Yorker, appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and was a regular on-air contributor, including on Fox Business Network; CNBC's Closing Bell, Squawk Box, Behind the Wheel, and Power Lunch; MSNBC; CBS's This Morning and Evening News; and CNN's American Morning and Headline News.

In 2014, she was a judge for the ten-episode, Chevrolet-sponsored reality show Motor City Masters, which highlighted car-based design challenges.

In 2012, while still with Automobile, Jennings founded a self-branded website and blog, JeanKnowsCars, with the backing of Automobiles owner, Source Interlink, online and in 18 newspapers nationally. Source Interlink reshuffled its holdings in 2014, letting go of Jennings as Editor in Chief at Automobile and firing 90% of its staff. Her website and blog remained active until about 2018.

Awards and recognition Jennings received the 2016 New England Motor Press Association's Lifetime Achievement Award; the Motor Press Guild 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2007 International Motor Press Association annual Ken Purdy award for Excellence in Automotive Journalism for her June 2006 Automobile cover story, "Veyron in the USA."