In June 1981, six-year-old Tony Quiroga was grocery shopping with his mom in West Bloomfield when he wandered to the magazine rack and saw a photo of a still-secret Corvette on the cover of Car and Driver. He was mesmerized.

“I picked it up and was like ‘What is this?’,” he recalls. He was too young to understand the technical parts—the specifications, the engineering, the design. But from the way he pored over the photos, he says, his mom could tell that he was “super into it.”

She bought him a subscription, and he dived deep into automotive enthusiasm. Reading the magazine felt like “magic,” he says. There was “this crew of crazy people” in Ann Arbor who shared “this joy around cars and this life devoted to cars.”

He wanted to be part of it. But for the son of two immigrant physicians—his father from Bolivia, his mom from Colombia—“it seemed so unobtainable!”

After graduating from Cranbrook, he went to Vanderbilt as an English major. He also tried engineering, but realized he’d be “a terrible engineer.” So he decided “‘I’m going to put my passion into writing, on the off chance that maybe I’ll get a job writing for a car magazine,’ because that was my dream.”

Back in the real world, though, he started down the family career track. He moved back to Michigan, took pre-med courses and the MCATs, and applied to medical schools. But while waiting for interviews, he emailed a friend of his sister’s: Eddie Alterman, a senior editor at Automobile magazine, which was then also based in Ann Arbor. “Hey, do you have any positions open?” he asked. “I’ve got some time in between stuff. I’d love to get my foot in the door, be a gofer.”

When Alterman said they needed one, it felt like a magic door had opened. Quiroga nixed his plan for medical school and signed on.

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Gofers are the bottom tier of automotive journalism. Then-editor Jean Jennings “put it in perspective very quickly.” As he recalls it, she told him, “Today we don’t need a writer. Today we need someone to go buy the toilet paper.”

“I wouldn’t call it hazing,” Quiroga says, but “I once vacuumed toenails out of the back of a PT Cruiser.”

It paid off. When an editorial assistant left, he moved into that role. Another opening got him promoted to car scheduler and road test coordinator. Then Alterman left to start a new car magazine and offered Quiroga a job there.

It was tempting, but he really wanted to be at Car and Driver—and he’d heard that someone there might be leaving.

Csaba Csere, then the magazine’s editor in chief, was looking for an engineer, Quiroga says, “but we hit it off.

“I told Csaba that I had this offer from [Alterman], but ‘I’m sitting on it because I’m waiting to see what’s going to happen here.’ Csaba asked, ‘Have you told them anything?’ ‘Yeah, I told Eddie I’m not going to take it on the off chance that I’m going to get this job.’

“Csaba said, ‘You’re hired.’”

That was in 2004. Over the next eighteen years, Quiroga held “nearly every editorial position in print and digital and also helped produce our early YouTube efforts,” according to a 2022 release from Car and Driver’s owner, Hearst Magazines. It announced his promotion to editor in chief.

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Quiroga had been based in L.A., so at first he commuted to the magazine’s office on Eisenhower Pl. He stayed in a hotel at first, but in June of last year, he and his fiancée drove together from L.A. to Ann Arbor—“I was in my 1995 [Porsche] 911 and she was in her Ford Escape”—to move him into a downtown apartment.

In February of this year, he made the drive again, in a Genesis SUV pulling a trailer. “Finally, in March, I rented a Penske moving truck and trailer and hauled the rest of my house to Michigan with my then-fiancée’s Escape on the trailer.

“So, it’s been three cross-country drives. What can I say? I love driving, the beauty of the West, and listening to podcasts and new music. It’s a meditative experience, especially when you’re going seventy in the right lane in a Ford E350 box truck.”

The couple were married in April. For their honeymoon, they drove a BMW M3 Competition station wagon across the Alps from Munich to the French Riviera.

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When Quiroga started, Car and Driver sold more than one million copies every month. Now it’s about 500,000, and it comes out ten times a year. “I’m delighted the print magazine still exists,” says Csere, the former editor, but it’s “very thin compared to where it used to be.” 

Quiroga points out that they also average 14 to 15 million visits a month on caranddriver.com, but acknowledges, “It’s definitely a challenging environment.”

Although today’s six-year-olds are far more likely to discover automotive enthusiasm on TikTok and YouTube than on a magazine rack, Quiroga is living his six-year-old self’s dream. “It has so many advantages. We travel on press junkets. (I don’t do them so much anymore because I don’t have the time). You get to create art. You get to create a product in the print magazine [and] on the website. And you work with all of these like-minded people who absolutely want to be here.

“And it’s their dream, too, to be here. So everybody is just focused on that goal and everybody’s here to have fun and everybody’s here to share the fun with the readers, too.”

He’d recently watched Oppenheimer with his wife. “About an hour and a half in, I look at my wife and we’re both grinning … saying ‘This is amazing’—and she turns to me and says, ‘You just love this because it’s about work.’

“I said, ‘Right! They’re all collaborating! They’re all working together. He has all these advisors and he’s listening to all these people.’ That’s really the ideal work experience. And the office side of it is the smart-ass-ness, the smart-aleck-ness.

“I want Car and Driver to have the smartest people in the room but also the funniest. That’s the ideal for this place. This is magic—this is exactly what I’ve wanted to do my whole life.”

How do his parents feel about his decision to chase his automotive dream over following them into medicine? “They are absolutely thrilled,” he says.