When Caleb Miller was in high school, he thought he wanted to be a car designer. He might have become one if his parents hadn't both been journalists.
Growing up, he marinated in a home environment where reading and writing were highly prized. But in a "car-agnostic family," Miller was the one born with the car enthusiast's gene, something that cannot ultimately be suppressed.
By the time he was 13, he was blogging about cars, "mostly about design," he says. A stint on his college newspaper honed his journalistic skills further, and as a senior, he restarted the blog he'd left behind in high school.
Determined to find a way into the car-writing biz, he messaged Christian Seabaugh—now a senior features editor at Motor Trend, whom Miller had been following on Instagram—seeking advice, and was told to keep on blogging. He did, and it worked.
After missing out on a position elsewhere within Hearst Autos, C/D's parent company, Miller was pointed to an opening on the Car and Driver news staff. Voila! Soon, Miller was learning the ins and outs of being a member of the automotive media—and also learning how to drive a manual gearbox.
Like many of his generation, he'd never had a chance to learn how to shift for himself, something he remedied with the purchase of a stick-shift-equipped 2007 Honda Accord. Nowadays, Miller's gear-swapping is well-honed, as is his ability to write multiple news stories each day while still finding time to write vehicle reviews.
"I saw my dad doing cool stuff—the phone would ring, and it would be Ice Cube for an interview," says Miller.
He wanted to have that sort of experience in his area of automotive-related interest. And he has. Beyond his many published articles, his highlight reel includes attending the Lexus High Performance Driving School, the Skip Barber Racing School, and interviewing and befriending pro race drivers.
An inveterate race fan (his favorite series is IndyCar, about which his knowledge is encyclopedic), Miller's gotten to drive Honda's IndyCar simulator, and attended the Indy 500 and both the Daytona and LeMans 24-hour events. He's also one of our most accomplished sim racers.
As for that latent interest in automotive design, it still exists somewhere deep in his gray matter: his desk is covered with sketches of cool-looking cars that he doodles in the short pauses between pounding out late-breaking news stories.
Rich Ceppos has evaluated automobiles and automotive technology during a career that has encompassed 10 years at General Motors, two stints at Car and Driver totaling 20 years, and thousands of miles logged in racing cars. He was in music school when he realized what he really wanted to do in life and, somehow, it's worked out. In between his two C/D postings he served as executive editor of Automobile Magazine; was an executive vice president at Campbell Marketing & Communications; worked in GM's product-development area; and became publisher of Autoweek. He has raced continuously since college, held SCCA and IMSA pro racing licenses, and has competed in the 24 Hours of Daytona. He currently ministers to a 1999 Miata, and he appreciates that none of his younger colleagues have yet uttered "Okay, Boomer" when he tells one of his stories about the crazy old days at C/D.