Jesse Adams

Background

About Jesse Adams

I hate the word petrolhead. I feel it's a title coined by non-petrolheads. But if you're reading this, you should know that's what I am. I love cars, and I'm not ashamed of skipping tertiary education to spend my teens and twenties getting my hands dirty fixing them. On my way to becoming a qualified (ASE) mechanic I learned what they can't teach you at college. I learned some cars are engineered better than others. I learned there's more to cars than boot space, styling and performance. I learned to appreciate the oily bits under the shiny metal skins. Many years and a healthy stint in motorsport later, I graduated from the school of greasy fingernails and transitioned from under the hood to behind a keyboard. My new business card read 'Motoring Journalist' and though typing cohesive sentences about cars was a new territory for me, knowing what makes them tick offered a unique perspective on the news and reviews I was responsible for. I spent almost 15 years in this profession and I value every minute I spent on flights, on deadline, behind a laptop and behind the wheels of many, many automobiles. Today I'm in public relations. Automotive PR to be specific. I call Jaguar Land Rover, WesBank, NADA and InspectaCar clients, and I'm still using my mechanical, motorsport and journalistic experience to give my daily duties a petrolhead skew. I also still hate that word. Lately the motoring world is making a major shift toward electric and I've immersed myself in understanding this new power source. I've become well versed in all sorts of fantastical acronyms like kWh, CCS, V2G, AC, DC, PHEV, BEV and MHEV. It's a thick alphabet soup out there and I'm spending a lot of time finding ways for the general public to decode it. Yes, petrolheads too. Electrohead? That one's mine. I just coined it.