Career
After selling an article to Motor Trend in 1957 for $50, Davis became a contributing writer in 1962 to Car and Driver magazine, at age 32. By the time he joined Car and Driver, Davis had "worked in four automobile factories, sold cars in three imported-car dealerships and one Packard showroom." At the magazine, he became friends with automotive luminaries including race car drivers Juan Manuel Fangio, Dan Gurney and Carroll Shelby. Davis left Car and Driver in 1967 – reported variously as either having been fired by Leon Mandel or having resigned as a result of a difference of opinion with management over his criticism of the Blaupunkt radio in his "Turn your Hymnals to 2002" column.
At Chevrolet's advertising agency, Campbell-Ewald, Davis wrote copy for Corvette advertisements alongside future crime novelist Elmore Leonard. He was named Vice President/Creative director. He is co-credited along with James Hartzell in creating Chevrolet’s tagline, "Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet" – a campaign that Car and Driver and other publications ranked as the best automobile commercial of all time.
He returned to Car and Driver in 1976 to serve as the magazine's editor and publisher – and moved its headquarters from New York to Ann Arbor in 1977. He resigned as Editor/Publisher in 1985 when Car and Driver was sold to CBS.
In 1986, he founded Automobile with financial backing from Rupert Murdoch – using the credo No Boring Cars. Davis introduced full-color photography and thick stock, increasing the magazine's literary standards to distinguish it from the other three U.S. automotive magazines, Car and Driver, Motor Trend and Road & Track. Murdoch sold the magazine profitably in 1991 to K-III Publications, which became Primedia – which was later sold to Source Interlink Media, the current owner of the magazine. When Automobile was acquired by K-III, Davis also became the editorial director of the company's Motor Trend magazine. Automobile celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2011.
Davis later left Primedia and in semi-retirement started the online automotive magazine Winding Road. In July 2009, he returned to Car and Driver as a contributor. Until his death, he continued to contribute to numerous automotive venues, including international publications such as the British magazine CAR.
Davis mentored a spectrum of automotive journalists, including Eddie Alterman, editor-in-chief at Car and Driver and Jean Jennings, current president and editor-in-chief at Automobile. At the University of Michigan he was member of the board of the Knight-Wallace Fellowship, a journalism program, and he encouraged Ford Motor Company to underwrite a fellowship for automotive journalism at the school. In 2004, he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Michigan, serving as its spring 2004 commencement speaker.
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