I had been hoping to publish the Cardinal/German Ford Taunus story before the end of June, but I’m still waiting on Ford Motor Company archives to see whether I can get permission to use some historical images, and that was delayed by the U.S. Independence Day holiday. The text of the article is done and I’ve laid in the other images, but I’m really hoping to use some factory archival images if possible. I think the article would be better with them than it would be if I went forward without them, so I opted to delay a bit to see if I can get that sorted. So, watch this space?

I have decided to start an Ate Up With Motor Patreon page. I set up an Ate Up With Motor shop, which currently offers author’s notes for the electronic fuel injection, “Turbos for the Turnpike”, and rope-drive Tempest articles. The logic is that the articles themselves remain freely available, but people can buy the bonus content separately, which is also a way to support my work. I also set up an option for recurring payments (which Patreon calls “membership”), at $5 USD a month; at present, I’m not sure about multiple tiers or anything like that, but given the severity of my financial predicament, it seemed a reasonable place to start.

I’ve once again been contemplating options for monetizing the site to keep it (and me) alive, which brings me back to the Patreon idea. This is something that people have suggested for years, and I’ve always been wary of it, but I wonder if it might be a better idea than I had thought. One big advantage of Patreon is that it’s opt-in, and is not (insofar as I understand it) dependent on harvesting unwitting visitors’ personal data for ad profiling purposes — I aggressively block most online advertising myself, and such advertising can now have complicated legal implications. Patreon also appears to offer much greater flexibility and platform support for options such as recurring payments (something that’s theoretically possible but legally and administratively stressful with PayPal).

However, there are a lot of questions to wrestle with:

1. I’m very reluctant to put articles behind a paywall. It wouldn’t be in my commercial or professional interests — with content whose appeal is already somewhat rarefied, I might as well just bury it in the desert at that point — and if my goal is to expand the general understanding or address misconceptions about a topic, making the content harder to access seems counterproductive.
2. I don’t know if readers would have any interest in “bonus content” for Patreon subscribers, or what kind. I took a stab at creating “author’s notes” for the two most recent articles, which ended up amounting to rather verbose section-by-section footnotes; whether anyone would want those on top of the already-lengthy existing articles, I dunno. (They seem like they would be of most interest to someone researching their own book or paper.)
3. I’m not sure what kind of content schedule I could reasonably commit to. Patreon, like most Internet content models, presumably works best with regularly scheduled, frequent updates, which I’m not sure is realistic for Ate Up With Motor. The fuel injection and Jetfire/Corvair turbo articles proceeded at a relatively brisk pace given their length and complexity, but the former involved three or four weeks of more or less full-time work (which isn’t always feasible), while the latter took around 10 weeks at a slightly less feverish pitch. There is of course the possibility of aiming for shorter chunks of content that aren’t as time-consuming to research and write, but this raises the question of whether it should be specifically for Patreon (which gets back to the paywall issue) or whether it would be better to treat Patreon as a supplement/alternative to the existing PayPal button rather than as a separate content outlet.
4. I don’t know to what extent there’s still actually an audience. I feel like the most substantive thing I have to contribute in the realm of automotive writing is actually doing my homework, or trying to; for instance, a lot of my research for the fuel injection article involved poring through sources while muttering, “That seems wrong,” or “That doesn’t make chronological sense,” and then trying to distill those pieces into a coherent, factually consistent narrative. This isn’t something that lends itself to short and punchy 800-word essays with clickbait headlines, which is what the Internet most rewards; that’s fine, but when it comes to Ate Up With Motor, my assumption is that if people wanted a quick summation, they’d just read the Wikipedia article. However, this is an admittedly esoteric approach to already-esoteric topics, which at times leaves me feeling like Bertie Wooster’s newt-fancier friend Gussie Fink-Nottle. Is there still a place for that? Again, I dunno.

I welcome any thoughts or suggestions, particularly from people who’ve used Patreon (either as a patron or as a creator).

Two more past Ate Up With Motor articles of which I’m particularly proud:

• High-Tech High Roller: 1981–2001 Toyota Soarer Z10, Z20, and Z30: I get the feeling that sometimes the things that fascinate me may leave some of you rather cold, which I fear is the case with the Toyota Soarer. Not sold in the U.S. until its third generation, the Soarer was a darling of Japanese yuppies of the ’80s, a sporty coupe related to the Toyota Supra, but with a personal luxury flavor, festooned with advanced technology (much of it laughably primitive today, but very flashy back then) that made it the kind of car you’d see in a cyberpunk anime OVA set in some distant future age like, say, 2013. I only wish I’d had more pictures to illustrate its retro-future ambiance.
• The Perilous Success of the 1976 Cadillac Seville: Still a controversial piece, although I stand by my conclusion: that the 1976–1979 Seville worked out well for what it actually was (an easier-to-park Cadillac with a stylish new approach to the traditional Cadillac look), but was not successful as what it set out to be (a Mercedes-fighter that would lure in younger import luxury buyers). I’m currently trying to put together a tangentially related article, which I’ll hold off on revealing until it’s a little further along. (ETA: It’s now live!)

Another Ate Up With Motor article of which I’m especially proud:

• Party Downsize: The Ford Fiesta Mk1 and Mk2: When I chronicled the early history of Ford’s B-segment hatchback back in 2013, I wouldn’t have guessed that the party would be over within a decade — Ford ceased production in July 2023 to allot more factory capacity for the SUVs and crossovers the auto industry has decided we must all drive now. The Fiesta was never the phenomenon in the U.S. that it was in Europe, but it was a landmark product for Ford, one of the defining models of its segment and consistently one of the most entertaining to drive. It will be missed.