Speedhunters Seems Dead, And It’s A Loss For Us All

Speedhunters, the car culture site that always put out some of the best photography and most engaging stories in the business, seems to be dead. Its last article was published on April 8, its last Instagram post went up on March 17 and its last Facebook post was only a few days later on March 26 (the site hasn’t touched Twitter in years). Its contributors, according to Caleb Jacobs over at The Drive, say the end is here. It’s a damn shame. 

Speedhunters began as a deeply weird project, a way for Electronic Arts — publishers of the “Need for Speed” series — to get its foot in the door with car culture. EA backed Rod Chong, a creative director who worked on “Need for Speed,” with the money necessary to go out and find automotive talent. Not drivers or builders, but writers and photographers who would themselves find the builds, the races, the shows, and the stories. For over 15 years, the system worked — Speedhunters was always full of gorgeous photos and interesting stories, and it shone a light on people who may not have gotten the same focus elsewhere.

To let you all in on some inside baseball from the auto writing world — you’ll know all this if you work in media, you won’t if you don’t — there are a lot of types of story that a site or magazine can publish. There are breaking news stories, SEO content, reviews, all sorts. Most prized among them, though, is the feature. Features are long, they’re time-consuming to write and edit, they often require resources to make them work — plane tickets, gas money, event entries, even just paying a writer for the time they spend working on one long story instead of a mass of quick-hit posts.

Features are the stories that readers remember, that writers are proud of, but they’re an endangered species — as media is increasingly gobbled up by private equity with a single-minded focus on quarterly profits at the expense of all else, features get harder and harder to justify. No one can get the investment from management to seek out big stories, no one can take the time to write and edit them. Except, of course, for Speedhunters. From 2008 to 2025, most of what Speedhunters published were true, honest-to-god feature stories. EA’s backing gave the site the funds and the breathing room to seek out the best of the automotive world, and shine its perfectly photo-ready light on the dim corners of car enthusiasm that could do with some illumination. 

Maybe, then, it shouldn’t be surprising that Speedhunters is gone. The profit-hungry next-fiscal-quarter-at-all-costs mindset that has ruined so much of the internet — a mindset Jalopnik is all too familiar with — has spread far and wide, infecting industries to their very roots. The video games industry has seen this for years, as cancellations and layoffs get ever more ruthless — including at EA, which has cut hundreds of workers this year alone. The conditions under which Speedhunters was founded, where companies would spend on subjects that could offer long-term gains rather than immediate profits, no longer exist. 

Speedhunters gets much of the credit for the popularity of RWB and Akira Nakai in the United States. It’s where many folks first saw the work of Larry Chen. On both sides of the camera or keyboard, Speedhunters introduced people to beautiful parts of the automotive world — and, crucially, introduced those parts of the automotive world to people who would go on to become supporters and fans. There are still outlets with that interest in the places other outlets aren’t looking — you’re reading this on Jalopnik, after all — but the loss of Speedhunters, and what it could do with the resources it had, is truly a blow to the car-loving world.