Automotive Journalist, Host & Hagerty Media — Jason Cammisa on the Icons

Jason Cammisa's Apple Watch: The Man Who Tracks Every Car He Drives in a Spreadsheet Wears the Watch That Tracks Everything Else

Nearly 3,000 cars driven. Over 450 million YouTube views. Webby, Telly, IMFA, and IAMA awards. Automobile, Road & Track, Motor Trend, and now Hagerty Media, where Jason Cammisa on the Icons has redefined what automotive video journalism can be. Jason Cammisa is the most decorated automotive journalist of his generation — and on his wrist, an Apple Watch. He tracks the cars in a spreadsheet. He lets the watch track everything else.

Jason Cammisa — Apple Watch on wrist. Source: Hagerty Media

Jason Cammisa — Hagerty Media host, Icons, Revelations, stunt driver, classic car collector

Jason Cammisa is Italian-American, was educated partly at the Frankfurt International School and then at the University of Pittsburgh — where he completed a degree in psychology, international business, and German language — and has described his relationship with cars as beginning before he could talk. The formative moment he returns to is the summer of 1987, at sleepaway camp, where he read every car magazine he could find: Car and Driver, Road & Track, Automobile, and Motor Trend, which he quickly dismissed for its typos. When he came home, a friend had done the same thing. "Cars gave us both a place to fit in," he has said. "I was very nerdy and very unpopular, and my interest in cars made me part of a community." That community has since given him back considerably more than he put in.

He joined Automobile Magazine in 2006 after cutting his teeth in automotive media, and spent the following decade-plus on staff at Automobile, Road & Track, and Motor Trend — writing, testing, and appearing on camera in 46 episodes of the Motor Trend video series Ignition and Head 2 Head beginning in 2012. He served as Technical Consultant on Supercar Superbuild and appeared in the Porsche 911-themed episode of Megafactories. He is known for doing his own stunt driving — his T-shirt motto, printed on the garment he wears on set, reads: "Professional idiot on a closed course." He has, to date, driven nearly 3,000 cars, every one of which he tracks in a personal spreadsheet. The spreadsheet currently shows 50 different Ferrari models.

In August 2020 he joined Hagerty Media, where he hosts Jason Cammisa on the Icons — an essay-format video series on iconic automotive subjects that has accumulated over 450 million YouTube views and won multiple Webby and Telly awards — along with Revelations, in which he drives his own classic cars on California back roads while talking through what makes them significant. He also co-hosts The Carmudgeon Show with former Road & Track editor-at-large Jack Baruth. His car collection, housed in a Northern California garage decorated with a giant disco ball, includes a blue BMW E30 Touring, a BMW 850 CSi, a pair of 1980s Volkswagens, and a 1975 Ferrari Dino 308 GT4. He describes his cars as his children.

"I was very nerdy and very unpopular, and my interest in cars made me part of a community." — Jason Cammisa, on discovering car magazines at summer camp in 1987

Insight, Not Just Observation

Cammisa's Instagram description reads: "Automotive Journalist: insight, not just observation." His LinkedIn, tongue-in-cheek, calls him "a highly influential automotive journalist" — never an influencer. The distinction he draws is important and consistent: he is not in the business of describing what something looks like from the outside. He is in the business of explaining what it means — why a particular car matters in its context, what its engineering decisions reveal about the people who made it, what it communicates through steering weight and throttle response to the person who bothered to pay attention. This is exactly the kind of engagement that Icons has made famous: not the car review, but the car essay.

The Apple Watch is, on Cammisa's wrist, the product of someone who has applied that same standard to consumer technology. He tracks nearly 3,000 cars in a spreadsheet because data without context is noise, and context without data is opinion. The Apple Watch earns its place on a wrist like his by being the device that does the most for the person who knows the difference between a feature list and a functional object. It does not announce itself. It does not require managing. It communicates insight, not just observation — and then stays out of the way while its wearer goes to drive something interesting.

The Community That Started With Car Magazines

Cammisa has spoken often about how car magazines at summer camp in 1987 gave him a community he hadn't found elsewhere. That origin story matters because it explains how automotive journalism — at its best — functions: not as consumer guidance, but as a shared language for people who care about things that most people drive past without noticing. The Icons series has 450 million views because it speaks that language with unusual fluency and refuses to dumb it down. The Apple Watch on Cammisa's wrist is, in its own category, the same proposition: a product built for people willing to engage with what it actually does, rather than what it looks like from a distance. He was a member of that community long before it was called one.

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And at Spot.Watch — that's always worth noticing.