GoKawiil“David, you need to call eBay and give them a heads up. You’re supposed to leave soon!” my wife told me every night as I walked into the house, demoralized, covered in grease, mumbling about how doomed my WWII Jeep project is. “There’s no point,” I responded. “There is no backup plan; this Jeep is never going to be ready in time, and yet it has to be because failure is literally not an option.”
I had only two weeks before I was supposed to go on a 900 mile road trip from LA to Utah, where I was to tackle some of the toughest off-road trails in America.
And my eBay WWII Jeep project looked like this:
Watch our feature-length video about this incredible project here on YouTube:
How I Got Myself Into This Predicament
It was November of 2025, and I was in Las Vegas attending my first-ever Formula One race. eBay Motors had kindly invited me, and I accepted because I’d enjoyed meeting the eBay team at a recent media event, I was curious about F1, and The Autopian was looking for another brand partner.
The media industry is incredibly challenging, with publications no longer able to support themselves with ads alone. For us here at The Autopian, this has led us to a three-pillar revenue model:
Membership Ads Partnerships with brands we love
All three pillars are critical to the health of our company, and the last one is really challenging. Building a partnership means delivering excellent content for a brand that you legitimately love and that loves you back to the point where they choose you over (or alongside) the thousands of influencers and YouTubers and other publications out there. The brand partner has to believe that you can deliver excellence, and though The Autopian creates great content every day, we had only had one long-term brand partner in our first four years.
Ebay Motors, to me, seemed like a perfect match for our community. Our readers are constantly buying parts online, and I use eBay basically 24/7 to find rare components for my fleet of old vehicles. My purchase history reads like an automotive Bill of Materials; here’s a tiny snapshot:
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