autoevolution team

Daniel loves writing, or so he claims. and he once loved to use his 10-words-per-minute typing skills to bring you a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry, rather than keeping you up to speed with new vehicles and their performances.

Following several years off the grid, Daniel is back at autoevolution, and seeing how the great crisis of the past decade made the auto industry boring, he grew bored with it too, so he slowly shifted his focus to custom cars, custom motorcycles, and other weird stuff. He also loves ranting about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.

During his time at autoevolution, Daniel put his name on more news articles, coverstories, auto guides, reviews, and editorials than we care count. To slow him down a bit, he was given more responsibilities not long ago, so he is now also in charge with coordinating the editorial team on autoevolution.com.

Long time ago, Daniel also translated Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “The Fountains of Paradise” to Romanian for Paladin Publishing.

Sergiu’s passion for cars was instilled from an early age, when he used to ask his father about every single type of car they saw together while going out for walks. Staying with relatives just outside of Baltimore in the late 80s, he would marvel at the large wagons, trucks and semis people drove in the United States, and how different they were from what he would usually see back home.

Not long afterwards, they started showing Knight Rider on TV and suddenly there was nothing cooler to him than a man, his invulnerable talking car, and the open road. Later in life, he decided to invest all that passion in the car industry and make a career out of it.

He has now spent more than 15 years working for local publications and international outlets, driving and subsequently spilling the beans about pretty much every type of car there is. Fun fact, he realized he was getting old when overall comfort behind the wheel became more important to him than handling or acceleration.

That being said, the first real car he ever fell in love with was his dad’s Fiesta XR2 supermini, so his appreciation for cars that are also very fun to drive has never wavered.

Presently, if he’s not busy working or spending time with family, you’ll likely catch him watching some astronomy-related documentary, trying to figure out what it all means. Well, that or outside, kicking butt on the basketball court.

Alex handled his first real steering wheel on his father's lap when he was five (on a field) and started practicing “Scandinavian Flicks” at 14 (on non-public gravel roads, of course).

His parents almost called the police the day after he got his driving license, suspecting their car had been stolen. Little did they know that Alex had went for a 24 hour joy ride with his friends and had forgotten to announce his parents that he was going to “borrow” the family car for the trip.

In case it's not obvious enough by now, he lives and breathes cars. He considers himself an oldschool petrolhead who is well aware that the automotive industry is a polluting business but he's also sick at heart knowing that someday we're all going to drive kitchen appliances with digitized V8 sounds.

Following some time at the University of Journalism, he landed his first real job at the local franchise of Top Gear magazine a few years before Mircea. Not long after, Alex entered the New Media realm with the autoevolution.com project, which he believes is changing the face of online automotive coverage.

During various periods of sabbaticals from autoevolution he also got a few writing and/or editing gigs at websites like Carscoops, Top Speed, and also did some freelancing work, but his first online passion kept calling him back at the car site he helped launch back in 2008.

Ancuta's first foray into the automotive world was as a copy editor, courtesy of ther English and Spanish degrees. This gave her the opportunity to meet people passionate about cars – people who inspired her with their ideas and creativity.

Nowadays, her favorite things to write about are unusual car designs and out-of-this-world concepts that show designers can still push the boundaries.

Once upon a time there was a little boy that didn't know his age but dreamed of reaching high in the sky alongside the absolute best aviators. He was passionate about reading books (action and Sci-Fi), grew up with many great authors and soon discovered the mirage of cinema.

There he understood anything is possible if you work hard and passionately strive to follow your imagination. This is how at the age of 16 he managed to fulfill the first dream – flying alone in a glider plane. He was no Tom Cruise, of course, so young adulthood brought him back to reality.

With every kick in the familiar *utt comes a chance to step forward, so a seemingly unimportant ad in one of his favorite automotive magazines brought a dilemma - follow through with the current job or dare to achieve greatness by deploying (previously) unknown literary skills.

Since 2006, he’s been perfecting them at Automondial, Supercar, Cox, Autoshow, Autopro, Auto Motor & Sport, and more magazines plus their online versions. After driving some of the best and worst cars in Europe and around the world, he’s part of the autoevolution team, where he aims to develop his best-ever form.

As one of the youngest automotive/aerospace journalists in North America, Benny Kirk's writing prowess is rooted in the deepest pits of nerd and geek culture.

Only after he acquired a degree in journalism did his penchant for scouring the Internet at two in the morning to learn cool facts about cars, airplanes, spaceships, and computers become remotely useful.

His real-world experience includes live coverage at major North American and international auto shows, racing events, NASA space launches, and a portfolio of test drives and reviews from major OEMs in both the automotive and powersports sectors.

Recently he's started covering nuclear energy news as a special beat project, just for the kick of it, so you know there's nothing Benny's afraid to write about. Still, he's more than happy to apply his craft to give some genuinely helpful consumer advice.

Bogdan keeps an eye on how technology is taking over the car world, and more often than not, you’ll see him writing about the whole thing with a typing speed that a traffic camera could easily issue a ticket for.

He typically carries both an iPhone and Android device because there’s no such thing as the perfect phone, and he drives a car that some say is blue, others say is green.

His guilty pleasure is finding bugs in Android Auto (cc @Google, you’d better keep an eye on his reports, as these could actually help you refine the experience behind the wheel), and he occasionally tries out all kinds of weird gadgets that many people didn’t even know they exist.

His daily tech arsenal also includes a smartwatch and earbuds because that’s how geeks rock, as well as a laptop that has nothing in common with fruit.

Bogdan’s long-term goals are buying an 18-wheeler because he needs more space in the trunk for his kid’s toys, as well as convincing Google and Apple that Android Auto and CarPlay deserve at least as much attention as the phones that these two companies build.

When he’s not writing about cars, Bogdan’s probably trying to fit a bike in the 375-liter trunk of his car or posting tech stuff for autoevolution’s sister site Softpedia.

Chase has been talking about cars for nearly as long as he's been alive. In fact, his very first word was "truck," though his parents insist that isn't a reflection on the development of their child's social skills.

He's been getting paid to write about cars for several years now, but only after deciding that law school could wait and power slides couldn't.

When Chase isn't writing about cars or talking about them to a camera, he's out enjoying Colorado's great outdoors in a broken German sports car of some variety. Occasionally, there may be a mountain bike or some skis strapped to the back of it.

A long-time classic car and motorsport nut, Ciprian has been writing about four-wheeled vehicles of (almost) all kinds since 2008. 

You'll never catch him drooling over the latest supercar but he could spend hours talking about why he loves 1940s windshield visors, Mopars, and Studebakers. Naturally, most of his stories are about barn finds and rare classics. 

He can give you several reasons why speed and power are more about motorsport than silly street wandering, and Can-Am machinery tops his ridiculously fast all-time favorite car list. He claims he could die happy after a Rattlesnake Raceway ride in a Chaparral and a cup of coffee with Jim Hall on the other side of the table. 

Before landing on these pages, Ciprian's work has been published on outlets like TopSpeed, AmericanMuscle, and ThisWeekInMotors.

Codrin just loves American classics, from the 1940s and ‘50s, all the way to the muscle cars of the '60s and '70s. In his perfect world, we'll still see Hudsons and Road Runners roaming the streets for years to come (even in EV form, if that's what it takes to keep the aesthetic alive).

A University of Portsmouth graduate, Codrin seized the opportunity to jump into the automotive world after having been a gaming/tech TV journalist for quite some time.

He feels there's something incredibly special about having the opportunity to write about things you're passionate about, and at the end of the day... get to pay the bills too.

As a child, he grew up among tractors and heavy machinery and was covered in grease from tip to toe most of the time. It was a tractor that he drove for the first time and when asked what he’d become, he candidly replied: “tractor operator”. Later on, he drove all kinds of vehicles, from heavy trucks to off-roaders, all outside of public roads until he got his driving license.

He did not become a tractor operator, as you can tell already. Instead, he got interested in journalism and pursued a career finding stories for local newspapers and radio stations. But the first love is never forgotten, so when presented with the chance, he seized it and became a motor journalist in 1995.

Having found the perfect job to mix his passion for cars and journalism, he couldn’t help exploring other areas, like science, computers, and mobile devices. He took stints working for a computer magazine for a couple of years, and it was then that he had his first contact with new media. But cars always remained his passion, so he returned to motor journalism when Auto Bild started its local branch. Later, he became an internet junkie, and moving online felt only natural.

In the meantime, he also became obsessed with technology, electric vehicles, batteries, and whatnot, so he writes a lot about those. He found autoevolution a fertile ground for exploration and so he discovered his passion for RVs and campers, but also solar panels and new energy solutions.

Our interview with Mr. Curmei was cut quite short due to the following response: “There’s really not much any man can say about himself that does not come across sounding egocentric. I’m gonna try and stick to that.”

He was born in Romania, yet left at the age of six. Destination? U.S. of A. Grew up in Chi-town for the first two years of his life, followed by the remaining 14 years in Phoenix, Arizona. A history of musical and martial arts made him the ‘crazy’ human he is today. Majors in Chemistry and English ‘endowed’ him with with a joy for jumbling letters, sometimes making people laugh in the process. His true joy and ultimate goal.

His love of expression, in any form, has led to a large stack of notebooks on his coffee table. Some stories are about love. Some stories are about clarity. Some stories are about trials and tribulations. All of them are about what it means to be a human. Most recently you’ll even find stories about anything vehicles, transportation, and more.

Growing up in the communist regime, little Cristian knew the local cars, whose models you could count using the fingers on one hand, by their sound. Scale models were a luxury back then, so he turned to old magazines for glimpses of famous models sold in the West.

Shortly after the regime fell, he started school and got his first four-wheeled toys. Not long after, he experienced the "brute force" of an old Dacia (long before the current Renault era) far away from public roads - and he instantly knew that his life won't have any meaning for the next 10 years or so, when he could get his license and take on the roads on his own.

As years slowly passed, his father started teaching him the basic parking and turning maneuvers. And before he knew it, he turned 18 and got his prized license. He spent the next few years going to car meets and the occasional drag race, as part of local clubs, and when he finished school and started earning his first money, he knew what he had to do: modify an old Dacia (his first true love) and go rallying.

So the arduous process began. Finding a good engine, transmission and suspension, upgrading the brakes and reinforcing the chassis. An old Renault 5 Alpine supplied the power unit, whereas the suspension and brakes came from a Dacia factory rally car.

Countless sleepless nights later, his baby was almost ready to hit the asphalt, gravel and other fun surfaces. Unfortunately, a string of events that included a garage fire, among others, killed his dream. So, he moved on to drive press cars and write for a living, and the rest is history.

He worked for several automotive online journals and now he's back at autoevolution after his first tour in the mid-2000s.

I have been obsessed with cars and motorcycles for as long as I can remember. From agreeing with dentist appointments only in exchange for diecast cars, to buying diecast cars with my lunch money in elementary school, to spending hours and hours playing any video games with cars and bikes in it.

The Fast and the Furious series has had quite an impact on me back in the day, and Tokyo Drift made me realise that drifting would be one day a part of my life, and that I would also absolutely have to go to Japan and experience the amazing car scene over there for myself.

A few years later I was graduating from the MyWay Drift School in Hungary, and actively being involved in the professional drifting scene in Europe. Attending the SEMA Show for a few years in a row only added to my love for cars, and experiencing Japan first hand on two different occasions ultimately almost had me relocate so that I could go immerse myself deeper into the drifting scene.

Instead, I chose to follow up on two other dreams, and I ended up spending a good chunk of my life savings buying a rotary powered, 1991 Mazda RX-7 FC3S Turbo II, which I had been actively dreaming about for more than a decade. And because the love for two wheels never faded either, I even went on to ride a few race bikes around the local racetrack, alongside with buying a 1999 Suzuki SV650-S for daily adventures.

I have been actively working on various media projects, mostly revolving around motorsports since 2009, and joining Autoevolution has come as sort of a natural progression, as I aim to share my love for cars and motorcycles with the world and further experience more of what the automotive industry has got to offer.

It all started when Dragos was 15 years old and met some guys who were into BMWs AND had their own garage! They took Dragos under their wing and taught him how everything works in this vast, incredible, beautiful world of machines on wheels.

Since then, Dragos has spent every day with his hands inside engines and everything related to them, which is how he developed a true love for cars, bikes, and everything powered by an internal combustion engine.

Time flew by, years passed, and now he’s part of the autoevolution team, sharing his passion and everything he knows about things that take us from point A to point B, either in style, comfort, or as quickly as possible. You can see his work mainly in our section dedicated to motorcycles.

Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use.

She has covered automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, ranging from the regular and all the way to celebrity culture, film, and music.

More than anything, Elena loves to tell stories about unusual or very special projects, but you can also count on her if you’re looking for the perfect e-bike.

Her work has been published on Softpedia News, InOut Star and, since 2018, autoevolution.

Elena's story does not begin with "Once upon a time" but with a phone call that turned her life around. She was 18 and a first-year student when she started out as a TV sports reporter. She watched soccer, tennis, car racing, everything with a ball or without, and wrote about them all, day in and day out.

Years passed, and she realized television was a bug. You can't live with it, and you can't live without it. She got promoted to senior editor at 23 and was planning to keep that job until she retired in her late 80s.

But then there was another phone call, and she ended up in the car media. Test drives followed, lots of writing, lots of traveling, off-road courses, track courses, defensive driving courses, too, and diplomas (they're completely useless, she says. But what she learned is not!).

The mental pace was back. Not complaining, just bragging. Because once you start, there is no turning back. Tell her something more intoxicating than going down a steep hill in a V12-powered G-Class, and she won't believe it! Tell her there's something more thrilling than driving along winding roads in a convertible yellow Mustang, and she'll think it's a joke. Don't argue with her there! We all have our soft spots!

In 2022, another phone call brought her to this team. Again, she's not complaining. Just bragging.

As a child, I was starstruck by anything and everything car related.

Years passed and I found myself more and more in love with cars. It wasn`t about their speed or their looks. Heck, it wasn`t even about clout, but about the freedom they represented, the happiness they provided and the magnitude of options that were available to each and every type of driver.

After witnessing a lot of TV coverage for some of my favorite cars, I decided that it`s time to act on what I like. I started by watching random TV shows and ended up loving British presenters. I bought a lot of magazines and found out that I simply cannot ignore the shape of a Ferrari - especially a yellow one. That may the influence of my father who had a Fiat Tempra. Nowadays, I`m leaning towards enjoying a F-150 Raptor, rather than exploring the Riviera with a small car.

That being said, years of just reading, listening and watching turned into a passion for discovery. That is why I started to write about what I know, experience or find out to be interesting. After 5 years of news for print and online outlets, travels and a whole lot of test driving, I joined the autoevolution family to spread this passion and share relevant information.

Florin's passion for cars is only surpassed by his love of photography. You can find his work in our car reviews galleries. He also contributes to our vast car models & specifications section.

Motoring writer since 1998, Gustavo wants to write relevant stories about cars and their shift to a sustainable future.

Got any tips? Feel free to contact him through his LinkedIn profile or Threema: R6F4J872.

Gustavo knew he would make a living with writing. The options were a career in law and journalism. After a quick research, he learned that law professions would help him earn ten times more than a reporter. Knowing how it feels to be broke, he took no effort in going to law school.

Having grown up reading anything about cars his father would put in his hands, he started driving late: Gustavo wanted to buy his first car before learning to drive. But life is funny, and his law internships demanded him to have a driver’s license so that he could go to courts driving company cars. That was the only fun he had in the world of legal affairs.

In the third year of college, dying of boredom, he took part in a journalism training course. Loving cars was what landed him his first job as a motoring writer. But he also fell in love with journalism and how powerful it can be when things are not right in the world.

The profession was as unstable and low-paying as predicted, which eventually became a problem. That made him try to go back to the legal world working as a trainee. Ironically, it was at Ford, where he missed his days as an automotive journalist. That drove him back to newsrooms and made journalism turn into a professional refuge: he could always count on it.

Accepting that the life of a reporter is full of ups and downs – aren’t them all? – Gustavo fully accepted he was a journalist. That helped him earn a few prizes, work in multiple places, visit almost every major auto show in the world, meet a bunch of nice people, and feed his family while working with what he loves. He thanks for that privilege every single day.

At autoevolution, he found the right environment for journalism at its best: it can be fun to have a purpose.

Born in Bucharest, Romania, Mircea was lucky to have the opportunity to travel the world. He encountered various cultures and explored the English language at a young age, so playing with words always seemed to come naturally.

After Mircea's first trip to a theme park, he sought other ways of getting the feeling of adrenaline. He ended up getting a skydiver's license, and nowadays, he tells everyone he meets to jump out of an airplane at least once in their lives.

When Mircea discovered he could get a motorcycle license as early as 16, he started learning more about two-wheeled machines and chose a Yamaha R125 as an introduction to the moto world. Back in his native city, he had already been roaming the streets on bicycles.

Years later, armed with a driver's license, he jumped at every opportunity to experience different rides, whether two or four-wheeled. He also developed a dream of building a campervan.

Mircea’s work on autoevolution ranges from e-bikes and other EVs to RVs of any kind, and just about anything that moves.

Little did he knew back then, but a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO is what sparked Mircea’s interest for cars when he was just a kid. Despite studying mathematics and informatics in high school and economics in university, Mircea turned his passion for all things automotive into a job.
 
Interning for Top Gear was his first foray in automotive journalism, and not long after that, a full-time position was opened for Mircea to seal the deal. Just about three years later, autoevolution became his new home.
 
Especially interested in American ponies and muscle cars, Mircea also finds the Japanese domestic market appealing thanks to the quirkiness of kei cars. Full-size pickups like the Ram 1500 and off-roaders such as the Ford Ranger Raptor and Jeep Gladiator Rubicon are much to his liking as well.
 
A self-described master of pasta and an avid CCG player, Mircea’s past-time activities include playing his Epiphone Les Paul Special Vintage Edition electric guitar, discovering the wonders of the Carpathian mountains by foot, and driving to the Black Sea to get a well-deserved tan.

Like any other petrolhead out there, Oraan fell in love with cars in his infancy, so it was only natural for him to become student at a University specialized in the automotive field. In 2000, he became a car journalist and for almost 15 years he tested all kinds of cars, wrote industry analysis articles and expressed his opinions on automotive subjects.

Unlike many petrolheads out there, Oraan-the-engineer increasingly became aware of downsides of combustion engines. At the beginning of the 2010s Oraan-the-car-journalist transformed at a fast pace from a nothing-to-worry-petrolhead to an environment-responsible-electrohead.

At that time everybody was mocking Elon Musk for his Tesla “secret plan”, so Oraan-the-electrohead became the outlaw-advocate-of-electromobility in the petrolheads world. In 2014 he decided to start his own online project aimed to inform and educate the public about green technologies and so-called unconventional-propulsion for cars.

In recent years, Oraan involved in other projects out of the car industry. But he’s still a vigilant “devil’s advocate”, especially since he’s a daily EV commuter. That’s why he couldn’t miss the opportunity to debunk EV myths, explain green tech breakthroughs and share the news in this field to autoevolution audience.

Otilia believes that if it’s eco, green, or groundbreaking, people should know about it.

A master’s in International Relations, as well as working in online media for more than five years, have given her a deeper perspective on how people everywhere can inspire each other.

Homes on wheels, aircraft or boats, these fresh, sometimes quirky, ideas from all over the world are worth sharing.

After nearly two decades in news television, Răzvan decided to look beyond the veils of daily bread and circus.

He’s been a field journalist, a TV producer, and a seafarer. Now he writes, finding this to be the closest to keeping wisely quiet.

Getting a degree in PR convinced him that trade job skills are more fun, but if all the schools Răzvan has been through taught him anything, it’s that he’ll never cease learning.

Many years ago, a young Silvian’s eyes were treated to the sight of a restored Jaguar E-Type Roadster cruising around the streets of Brighton, UK, and it was love at first sight.

A bit of an artist himself, Silvian sees two- and four-wheeled machines as a form of art, especially restomods and custom rides. Oh, and if you come across a cafe racer article on our website, it’s most likely his doing.

He spends his spare time hiking, hitting the gym and reading classic literature.

Tudor has been connected to cars since he was 5, when he began working on them, and his first driving lesson left parallel tire marks on the street. In 1996, while still in Journalism school, he started to write about cars. One year later he discovered his true calling when he began writing for a small car-magazine, and since then most of his career has been car-related.

He has a passion for old cars and thinks that the real ones were made up until the year 2000. As a journalist he went to various events around the world, covering races, new-car launches, international testings, and interviewing CEOs from big car companies.

His passion for cars took him from the heights of Pikes Peaks to the Moroccan desert, from 2 mph off-road trials to the corkscrew of Laguna Seca. He still doesn't completely understand electric cars and considers them not to be the true future, but only a step toward the future. A future where, sadly, petrolheads like him will be outlaws.

He published thousands of articles in over 20 years and still enjoys it. He joined the autoevolution team in 2020 and he is tasked with digging up info about forgotten cars and stories about once famous vehicles.

Having the memory of an elephant suffering from amnesia, I'm the exact opposite of an automotive encyclopedia. That's exactly why you can very often find me studying the spec sheets of cars or asking my colleagues who are very much more knowledgeable than me about facts and figures. On the bright side, though, that means I get to learn new things every day.


Contrary to most of the people here, I didn't get my driving license right after my 18th birthday, but it wasn't because I didn't want to. I won't get into details, but three years later I was the proud owner of that piece of plastic and a piece of trash car with which I quickly established a love and hate relationship. Mostly hate.

However, driving I loved, so that's what kept me going until my first decent car. By this time, I started thinking about mixing my degree in Journalism with my passion for driving, and so there I was working as an editor for a car magazine. A few good years later, nothing much has changed. But don't take my word for it, I tend to forget stuff. Now, if I could just remember where I parked my car...

At age five Vlad built a car cockpit out of wood, carboard and an old Trabant steering wheel under his desk and dreamed about driving the world’s most exotic cars. He grew up watching Michael Schumacher become a legendary driver, falling in love with speed and all things Ferrari in the process.

In high school, he crashed a communist-era Dacia 1310 with no brakes into a military base’s fence and almost got arrested on terrorism charges but bribed the base’s sentinel with three packs of cigarettes and only got in trouble for ruining the car.

He then decided to put his passion for cars on hold and concentrate on playing professional basketball. Due to a lack of talent, size, and a serious injury, he was forced to abandon professional sports and take a job as a video game tester. It was during this period that he discovered a passion for reading and writing after finding Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels on a park bench.

The author’s writing style was fascinating to young Vlad and he continued to read all his books while creating a blog where he wrote about controversial social issues, inspired by his favorite author.

Years later, he got back to his first passion, taking a job at a local car parts dealership. He worked his way up from the sales department to a successful regional manager position, but something was still missing.

His biggest dream was to write so, when Autoevolution approached him to become a member of the team, he quit his old job instantly, and has been passionately writing ever since.

When he’s not busy creating articles or playing with his two-year-old son, he can be found working on his old BMW 3 Series Wagon or shredding trails on a mountain bike he assembled himself.