The Automotive Influencers Shaping Car Taste Right Now

An automotive influencer is somebody whose primary distribution is an audience they own rather than a publisher's masthead — and the useful ones are identified by a format rather than by a number. The follower count tells you how many people arrived. The format tells you why they stayed.

That distinction is worth making because almost every list on this subject is a ranking by audience size, which is the least stable and least informative thing about any of these people. Counts move weekly and are impossible to verify at the moment a page is published. A format is durable: you can describe it, recognise it, and predict what the next video will be.

So this page sorts by what somebody invented rather than by how many people watch it, and it is deliberately short. Everyone named below is here on public record only, and a note that belongs at the top rather than in small print at the bottom: none of them has any relationship with us — not commercial, not promotional, not a loan, not a discount. We rent cars in Los Angeles and they make things about cars. That is the entire connection.

How this list was chosen, stated before the list

Four rules, applied before anybody was named.

• Publicly documented. Everything asserted below is a matter of record and can be checked without asking anybody. Where a claim would need somebody's private cooperation to verify, it is not here.
• Still working. A list of people who shaped taste a decade ago is a history article, and this is not one.
• Identified with a format. Not a genre, a format — a repeatable structure other people have since copied. That is the actual evidence of influence.
• No numbers that expire. No follower counts, no view totals, no rankings by audience. Those change between writing this and reading it, and a figure that is wrong by the time it is read is worse than no figure.

What that leaves out is a lot, including several people with far larger audiences than some of those below, and it leaves out every regional and non-English creator entirely, which is a real limitation of a page written in Los Angeles in English. It is a shorter and duller list than the internet's usual version, and every line in it is checkable.

The formats, and who is identified with each

The forensic walkaround

A single car, filmed at length, examined feature by feature, with the quirks treated as the point rather than as filler. Doug DeMuro built this format and then built a business on the audience it produced — he wrote for The Truth About Cars and Jalopnik before the channel, and founded the online car auction site Cars & Bids in 2020. The structural insight was that the walkaround is not a review at all. It is an inventory, and an inventory is repeatable in a way an opinion is not.

The influence is measurable in imitation: the fixed segments, the running score at the end, the deadpan close reading of a switch nobody else would film. Every marketplace listing video on the internet is now shot in some version of this shape.

The driver's review

Chris Harris is a British automotive journalist and a licensed racing driver who wrote and edited for Evo, Autocar and Jalopnik, presented on television, and was one of the three main presenters of Top Gear from 2017 to 2022. His format is the opposite of the walkaround: very little about the car standing still, a great deal about what it does at the limit, and an explicit refusal to be diplomatic about a car that is not good.

What made it influential was the credential underneath it. A racing licence is not required to review a car and it is impossible to fake, and it changed what audiences expected a review to prove.

The ownership diary

Tim Burton, who publishes as Shmee150, is a London-based car vlogger whose channel documents travelling to see exotic cars and running his own collection. The format is longitudinal rather than episodic: not "here is a car" but "here is what happened to this car over three years", including servicing, depreciation and the parts that break.

It is the format that most closely resembles what our own customers actually want to know, and the one manufacturers have the least control over. A press loan lasts a week. An ownership diary lasts until something goes wrong, and then it covers that too.

The reach-first social format

Alexandra Hirschi, who publishes as Supercar Blondie, is an Australian presenter based in Dubai whose automotive videos run across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube rather than being anchored to one platform. The format is short, vertical, and built around a single reveal — a door that opens strangely, a car nobody has filmed — and it is optimised for people who were not looking for a car video at all.

This is the one purists dismiss and the one that has done most to move cars into general culture. Whether that is influence over taste or influence over attention is a fair argument, and the honest answer is that the two are harder to separate than the argument assumes.

The crossover from another beat

Marques Brownlee built one of the most-followed technology review channels and then opened a separate automotive channel, Auto Focus, from that base. The format is a technology reviewer's: software, interfaces, charging, the things that make an electric car good or bad to live with, treated with the seriousness a phone gets.

The reason it belongs on this list is that it describes where the category is going. The most consequential automotive reviewing of the next decade may not come from car people at all, because on an electric car a large share of what there is to review is not mechanical.

The collector's archive

Jay Leno's Garage began as a web series and became a television one, and it is included here for a specific reason rather than a famous name: it is the only long-running format on this list made in Los Angeles, about cars kept in Los Angeles, and it is the closest thing the city has to a public record of its own collections. If you want to understand why this particular city produces automotive culture at the rate it does, that archive is a better starting point than any list of channels.

Why Los Angeles keeps producing this

Three reasons, and none of them is glamour.

The first is density of subject matter. There are more interesting cars per square mile here than anywhere in North America, and they are outdoors, because the climate lets them be. The second is light: the two hours after sunrise and before sunset in this basin do something to paint that a studio has to spend money to imitate, which is why so much automotive content is shot here by people who do not live here. The third is proximity — a canyon road, a coast road, a desert and a downtown are inside an hour of each other, so a single day of shooting can produce four completely different backdrops.

The Petersen Automotive Museum on Wilshire is the institutional version of the same fact, and worth a morning if the subject interests you beyond a feed.

If you are the one making it: what a shoot here actually involves

A meaningful share of our own bookings are people making something, and the gap between what creators expect and what a rental is turns out to be consistent. Four things worth knowing before the date.

• A rental is not a picture car. They are different bookings with different terms. If the car appears in commercial work — a brand shoot, a music video, anything with a client — say so when you enquire, because it changes the paperwork rather than being a detail. The picture-car side exists for exactly this.
• Filming on a public street needs a permit. Not sometimes. FilmLA coordinates permits for the City and County of Los Angeles and publishes what a film permit covers and how to apply. A tripod on a public sidewalk is the line most people cross without realising.
• Mileage is real and it is lower on the exotics. Saloons and SUVs run to 200 miles a day; the exotics are lower. A location scout that turns into three hundred miles of driving is charged per mile at the rate written into your rental agreement and assessed when the car comes back, so ask for the figure on your specific car before you sign.
• No track, no closed course, no stunt work. That is not a negotiation and it applies to every car here. Rolling shots on a public road, at legal speeds, with a permit, are a different matter and are done here constantly.

What people actually book for content, from our own log

Three cars, for three different reasons, and none of the reasons is horsepower.

The yellow Urus at $999/day is booked because saturated yellow survives compression — it still reads as yellow after a platform has finished with it, which black paint does not. The matte Dawn at $2,200/day is booked because a matte finish kills reflections, which is the single hardest problem in shooting a car outdoors in this city, and because an open cabin means the person is in frame with the car rather than behind glass. The green RS3 at $171/day is booked because it costs a fifth of the others and nobody else in the feed has that colour, which for a creator working alone is often the better trade.

Deposits set the mandatory cover rather than the rate does — $1,500 on the Urus puts it at $225/day, $2,000 on the Dawn does the same, and $750 on the RS3 puts it at $100/day. Deposits come back 5–7 business days after the car does. Collection from Robertson Boulevard is free and delivery to the partner hotels in Beverly Hills is complimentary; anywhere else, including the airport, is priced.

If the reason you are reading this is a shoot rather than an interest, how a photoshoot booking actually works is the practical version, and the production guide covers the paperwork side for anything with a client attached.

Picture cars and production bookings → Every exotic in the fleet →