If you somehow didn’t know already, David Freiburger and Mike Finnegan’s show Roadkill is canceled. MotorTrend Productions is wrapping up, taking the wrench-and-drive series with it as well as a handful of others. As someone who grew up on Roadkill, I’m bummed—just like you probably are since you clicked on this blog. But I think it’ll cheer you up to hear Freiburger reminisce about the show for 30 minutes in his garage.
This YouTube upload isn’t like the others we’ve seen lately, where famous car personalities tell all about why they left such-and-such channel. This is simply Freiburger, a 33-year industry vet who edited our favorite car mags prior to hosting Roadkill with Finnegan, telling his favorite stories and explaining what comes next. It’s a palette cleanser in that way, especially once you remember just how many episodes are tucked away in the happiest, most nostalgic part of your brain.
See, Freiburger started at Hot Rod in 1991. He was deep in the print media world for decades before Roadkill came about in 2012. That’s part of what made him such an awesome on-screen personality—he’s been a professional storyteller for most of his life. And, as he recounts early in the video, Freiburger was the only kid in his high school to take both drama and automotive shop classes. I’d say it worked out pretty well for him.
Throughout the sit-down session, Freiburger reflects on Roadkill‘s history from its inception until now. He said it was Angus MacKenzie, the MotorTrend editor-in-chief emeritus, who pushed for them to get on video. And you have to remember that at the time, YouTube was way different. Freiburger recalls saying that “people don’t watch anything for more than two minutes on YouTube,” but being honest, their show is a big reason why that changed, at least for gearheads.
Freiburger also acknowledges the parts of Roadkill‘s history that weren’t so great, like when MotorTrend pulled the show off YouTube and put it behind a paywall. A lot of people thought that was his fault, but it wasn’t. In fact, he even fought to keep Roadkill on YouTube and vowed to create more content on Roadkill Garage for the streaming service. Alas, that didn’t happen.
Amazingly, throughout the show’s entire 13-year run, Freiburger says he and Finnegan had complete creative control. Corporate suits never told them what the show could or couldn’t be. Freiburger exclaimed, “It was never scripted, ever.” Speaking as someone who works in media, that’s rare. It’s also why Roadkill remained awesome for so long, whether they were wrenching on “Stubby Bob” or the wheeling-popping Jeep called “The Dragoneer,” the last project Freiburger wrenched on for Roadkill that started because he liked the name.
YouTube is what’s next for Freiburger, Finnegan, and much of the rest of the Roadkill crew. In a way, that’s exciting for him as he clarified in the video that he and Finnegan were always employees—they never owned the show. Now, it’s whatever they want to do to entertain us regular folk. And as Finnegan said in a comment below Freiburger’s clip, “This is not the end. This is see ya later. We got this, dude.”
I could never tell the tale as well as Freiburger, so I’m turning it over to his video. You’ll surely hear lots of names and stories that you already knew, as well as quite a few you surely didn’t. What really surprised me was that Freiburger actually left the Hot Rod family in 2007 and 2008 to start an automotive streaming service called Car Junkie TV. That didn’t pan out as it was too far ahead of its time, but Hot Rod hired him back without question. Not long after, Roadkill premiered.
I’d say this was all meant to be.
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