What Linkedin Doesn’t Say About Tamara Warren, car journalist, CEO of Le Car, and cultural producer
She'll never forget her roots as an "old-school journalist," telling stories for NY Times, Detroit Free Press, and about her Auschwitz-survivor grandfather.
Meet Tamara Warren, 49, living in Brooklyn for 21 years
File under: entrepreneur, journalist, car expert
Let’s connect here: tamarawarren.com • lecar.co • Linkedin
Instagram: @tamarawarren @lecarco
I’m in the midst of: writing a book, building a company to empower women through education about cars, keeping up my chops in multi-media journalism, and producing a documentary film.
Available for: Speaking, car-buying advice, creative writing, and storytelling. I have many stories to tell.
Previous locations: Detroit and a 90-mile surrounding radius and short stints in Berlin and Brussels.
Relationship status: Married with two city kids, ages 16 and 9.
Partner’s age and profession: 64-year-old artist, Lee Quinones
My income: It varies!
Expenses in a nutshell: Ask me after my kids are grown.
Primary personal debts: The ancestors and the people who have helped me get where I am.
Work remotely or onsite? I’ve always had a home office.
A typical weekday schedule in a nutshell:
6 am-ish: Wake up to get kids out the door by 7. I try to soak a bit of sunlight and take a brisk walk before I hover over my screen.
8 am: Because I use a range of skills in my work, I build my schedule in chunks to be the most effective. I have days where I block out writing time for deep concentration and other chunks that I set aside for meetings or strategic planning for events and collaborations.
Noonish: I take a mid-day break for a walk that usually involves a phone call, and then back to my desk.
4 pm: My daughter gets home from school. I spend an hour with her, prep dinner, often go see one of my son’s baseball or basketball games, which gets me some seat time in cars that I need to test-drive.
8 pm: The kids are older now, so bedtime is way more chill for them and for me in this life stage. I might work for another hour or two or watch a little bit of a show if I am too tired, and then unwind by reading a hardcover book before bed.
At least one day during the week, I carve out time to go into Manhattan, where most of the action goes down that makes NYC life so stimulating.
Ideal schedule: I’m good and crushing it when everyone is healthy, where they need to be, and there’s no crises that throws me off my game. This week we’ve had one family member down with the flu and another with an injury, so my game is a little wobbly.
How much my career is tied to my identity: I’ve been calling myself a writer since I was like 9.
My happiness meter: I am pretty happy. These days, I work to maintain focus, study the lessons of history, and stay true to my course to find peace and a way forward.
My career trajectory: Well, it’s not linear, but my goals have stayed consistent: to write, to make an impact, and to learn new things. Here’s the long version you won’t see on LinkedIn:
In college, I worked with Amy, founder of The Midst, on our school newspaper The State News and her Venus, a wonderful music zine constructed from a feminist lens. As a ’90s club kid I went to see bands or DJs almost every night in Detroit and around Lansing. What fun! During those years, I started writing a book about my grandfather, an Auschwitz survivor, after completing a thesis in college. It was heavy stuff and the dichotomy between my nighttime adventures and mission-based daytime work was a good balance that’s taught me a lot about how my brain works.
After college, I moved from East Lansing to downtown Detroit to be closer to my grandfather, who lived in a retirement community in the suburbs. I conducted hours of interviews and supported myself by working for Detroit techno labels, planning tours, and album releases. I wrote articles about Detroit music for international magazines. After a while I ran into some barriers — I couldn’t find a publisher for the book and I didn’t have enough money to finish the film, so I swerved in another direction. I spent a summer working in the Daimler-Chrysler newsroom cutting clips and then applied to law school. I went to law school for two-half years and made some real mistakes in my personal life (bad relationship) and needed a fresh start.
In 2003, I quit law school, and started writing for The Detroit Free Press and ran after-school art programs in Detroit Public Schools. I was learning how to cobble together a freelance life and to embrace “writer” in my career. I found an internship at AutoWeek, a weekly car magazine, and learned how to test-drive cars. In my spare time, I wrote about music, art, and on many random topics, like inner-city Detroit baseball and women’s health clinics for magazines.
That summer, I attended a writing seminar in upstate New York, where I met a mentor who invited me to house sit for her in Brooklyn. I moved to New York for a month, and basically never left. This mentor suggested I keep writing about cars, so I did, along with every other topic I could find.
Example: I wrote about mutual funds, and anyone who knows me knows that I am not a mutual-fund expert. I wrote about surfing, though I’ve never surfed. I’m from the old-school of print journalism, trained that an industrious reporter can write about anything through careful research, thoughtful questions, and chutzpah. Over that decade I wrote for over 100 magazines and edited an art and design publication. I started a blog called GoTryke with one of my friends from the Detroit techno scene, mixing my interest in cars, culture, art, and design.
“I’m from the old-school of print journalism, trained that an industrious reporter can write about anything through careful research, thoughtful questions, and chutzpah.”
Yet I was feeling burned out by the constant grind of internet journalist and declining pay, and longed to get back to creative writing. I entered an MFA creative writing master’s program at the New School at night after work, when my toddler was sleeping. At that time, I made my life goal come true – my first New York Times byline and became a regular contributor, which gave me a huge boost as a working writer.
I wrote for a lot of the legacy car mags like Car and Driver and Automobile. I wrote about celebs for a couple of the airline magazines. I had a music column in a defunct men’s magazine. After the Times car section folded, I questioned the future of journalism (again) and considered a career change, only to be recruited by The Verge in 2015 to report on transportation and tech. Later I became the Transportation Editor. Cue my expertise on EVS, autonomous cars, and the company that everyone asks about in this space.
By 2018, after so many years in journalism, I was looking for a new challenge. I realized that my friends, predominantly women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, didn’t read much of my work on cars. I was their go-to person for car recommendations. I wrote articles that helped me understand the inequity in the auto industry on a deeper level — women buy more new cars than men, make all the decisions, and yet are largely left out of the education process.
I quit my job at Vox, and prepared to launch Le Car with my mother, who had recently retired from a public health career. We got into Techstars, a tech accelerator and launched the Le Car app in 2019. I also co-hosted a weekly gig at Cheddar that broadcast from the New York Stock Exchange during this time.
At Le Car, we’ve had a ton of mentors, some who have come and gone, and some who’ve stuck with us. We were teed up to raise money and chase the hockey stick curve that startup culture peddles after Techstars. I swerved again and realized that’s not what I wanted. So, in 2020, we launched the LeCar.co website, started producing events, and slowly building a community of solid women and some men who come to our events and seek our car-buying advice. Le Car provides advice, education, and connect all the ways cars impact our lives from design, to travel, to style, and safety. My mom and I work with fantastic teams and contractors, and we collaborate with artists, designers, and engineers.
I’ve also learned to embrace my multi-hyphenate approach to living. Over the last couple years I hosted a Vox media podcast about Tesla and edited an artist monograph. In the summer of 2023, I decided to pick up the book on my grandfather again, a full-circle moment, and I am working on that now. I’ve got a Detroit ’90s music scene novel going, too. I’ve found the balance I had when I was 22, managing people and multiple projects, along with the chaos of all of my grown-up responsibilities. Who knows what’s next? I’m sure I’ll keep learning.
“I’ve found the balance I had when I was 22, managing people and multiple projects, along with the chaos of all of my grown-up responsibilities. Who knows what’s next? I’m sure I’ll keep learning.”
My superpower: Curiosity and a cool head.
Menopause journey: Fully in it. At 40, I was told my estrogen was dropping. Six weeks later I was pregnant …
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