Here’s Why So Many Outlets End Up Posting News And Reviews At Three In The Damn Morning

I adore my life as someone who has somehow made a career out of writing about whatever’s rattling around my brain at any given moment. This career has taken me to places I never would have been on my own and put me behind the wheel of the vehicles I used to dream about as a teenager. But there is one thing about this field that frequently leaves me scratching my head, and it’s the times when embargoes drop. The embargo is an important part of how new car launches and automotive media work, but sometimes they don’t make any sense. Who, exactly, is up at 3 A.M. reading about a new grille on a pickup truck?

The embargo is a handy tool for both automakers and car media. Automotive product debuts are massive undertakings that can cost millions of dollars and involve precise timing. I’m not even talking about the development of the car, either, but just the event to launch it.

Remember when I covered the launch of the Toyota Tacoma and the Toyota Grand Highlander in 2023? Have you ever wondered how Toyota managed to get a whole fleet of trucks and crossovers from Texas to Hawai’i’s Big Island? As Toyota reps told me, they originally intended to ship the vehicles aboard a Roll-On/Roll-Off carrier, but the ship would not get the vehicles to the island in time. Instead, Toyota had to charter a small armada of Boeing 747 freighters and paid around $15,000 per vehicle to fly them across the ocean. Then there’s the hotel, where the 100-plus journalists at the event were staying in rooms that averaged above $1,000 per night. Once you tally up every little thing, the amount of money involved in just telling the world that there’s a new Toyota is almost unfathomable.

All of this was built around a goal to launch the new Tacoma at a certain time that week. Understandably, Toyota didn’t want a journalist ruining its big reveal early. It’s not just about the money, either. There are a lot of people who pour their hearts into these product launches, and they will stand proud when the big reveal happens. So, it makes sense to have journalists sign an embargo, promising that they won’t publish until a certain time.

This can benefit the journalist, too. Depending on when the embargo is, I don’t have to write about a vehicle the moment after I drive it. I’m not racing my industry colleagues to get something out immediately. Instead, we all get the same shot and the same bite at the apple at the same time. The embargo drop also usually coincides with the national or global launch of a vehicle, so eyes are going to be on it.

However, sometimes, these embargo times don’t make any sense.

Why We Sometimes Post Stories At Weird Times

If you’ve ever clicked onto The Autopian while sipping your morning coffee, you might have seen us publish some industry news or a first drive at a time that seemed totally nonsensical to you. A prime example of that is my post today about the 2027 Ford F-150. If you live in the Midwest, as I do, that post went up at 5 a.m., which was at the crack of dawn. If you live in Los Angeles, that post went up at 3 a.m. while you were either asleep, stuck on the late shift, or doom-scrolling social media.

This is pretty common. Automakers will have embargo lift times at some crazy times of day, be it in the middle of the night when people are sleeping or in the early hours of the morning.

Some of these embargo drop times make sense when you think about them. If a car is debuting in Munich, Germany, at 8 a.m., an embargo that lifts at 2 a.m. Eastern Time happens because of the time difference. Strange times for Japanese car launches also make sense, since Tokyo is a whole 14 hours ahead of where I’m sitting in Central Time right now.

Some strange embargo times are also the case just because that’s when a press briefing starts or when the global reveal video drops. Other times, an automaker wants to celebrate a specific holiday, the start of a racing event, or they’ll drop something at midnight, like how movies and video games used to be released. Some embargo times are set to give the media time to get home from a press trip and write something up.

Here are a handful of screenshots of embargoes we’ve honored. A 4 a.m. Eastern Time embargo is perfect to capture the “currently taking a red-eye flight” demographic:

Poor Alanis was burning some late-night oil on this one:

Why did Alpina even bother to do an embargo on this?:

Dodge brings me back to my childhood of waiting in line for Halo 3 at midnight with this one:

Even Jason writes embargoed stories:

You’ll see that many of them drop in the late morning in the United States, which is generally prime time for a car website. Yes, even the Wienermobile has been embargoed! But some embargo drop times come with little explanation.

Often, I find that the American RV industry will drop an embargo at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. Eastern Time. These always confuse me. The average American RV buyer is not up at that time, and the Indiana RV industry often isn’t advertising their rigs to people in Japan or Europe. So, outside of the managerial decisions that are above my pay grade, there’s little practical reason to launch an RV at 3 in the morning.

RV startup companies are even weirder with their embargoes. I won’t name the exact company, but one RV startup decided to have its new product launch embargo drop two days before the same reveal happened at a press event. Technically, what it meant was that media who did not go to the event, myself included, got to publish their content two days before the people who actually went to the event. Sure, I didn’t make a bunch of YouTube Shorts and videos like the influencers who went to the event did, but I was reeling in traffic before they published a single video.

Then there are the American automakers who are debuting a car for the American market, but have an embargo drop at a time when nobody is awake or is otherwise occupied doing something else. If an outlet is lucky, they get the embargo with enough time to have written the article ahead of time. But sometimes, embargoes hit less than 24 hours after you even get the information. Also, in our specific case, our post scheduler has been broken for some time and forgets to post what we tell it to. Someone has to be awake to make sure the posting robot actually does its job.

It’s not just us who have noticed this. Last year, Doug DeMuro complained about the embargo time on the 2025 Ford Mustang GTD:

Here’s what he stated:

“The embargo for this video is at 6am Eastern, which is 3am Pacific,” Doug DeMuro said during a recent podcast. “If you’re an automaker and you’re watching this, and I know you are … I know you are. Do not make your embargoes 6am Eastern ever. It is a bad idea. You’re trying to get your stuff launched across the broadest swath of North American consumer. I have studied this my entire YouTube career … 13 years.”

“And the answer is you want to go live at noon Eastern, which is 9 Pacific. It hits everybody. It allows the East Coast people to see it at lunchtime and carries your story throughout the afternoon. It allows the West Coast people to get it right in the morning. That is the time you want to go live always, 100 percent. When you launch at 3am Pacific, it makes no sense, it’s insane. The West Coast doesn’t get the stuff. The stuff’s already out when you wake up, the story is lost by the middle of the say. It is bad.”

He’s not wrong, either. I track post data, and there are maybe dozens of people reading articles at 3 in the morning.

Messing With Embargoes Is Bad For Everyone

Now, some of you might wonder why auto media even bothers? Why don’t we just post our story about the vehicle whenever we want? There was a time when one outlet in particular did not honor embargoes. If an automaker sent them embargoed information, they’d write about it right then and there, blowing the embargo. [Ed note: This was Jalopnik, and this was me. Basically, early in the blog days, people were constantly breaking embargoes, and it was extremely annoying. Even worse, people would send us embargoed information before we ever agreed to an embargo, meaning that they were taking away our right to do our jobs as journalists. Rather than deal with all the nonsense, I just decided it would be easier to not play the game for product info. We still did embargoes for press trips. Obviously, no one understands nuance, and this policy became more annoying than helpful, and it was slowly abandoned. – MH] Naturally, the people involved in product launches get their hearts broken when this happens, and sometimes, the publication gets punished by getting blacklisted from events and press loaners.

Alternatively, you could just decide to miss an embargo. This is bad for a different reason. Now, your competitors have leapfrogged you on coverage and have likely scooped up most of the clicks already. It also looks bad to the automaker because now it looks like you don’t actually care enough to honor the embargo. So, most outlets aim to hit the embargo the minute it drops, even if it means writing a post at 1 in the morning and knowing that nobody is going to read the story until hours after it publishes.

So, technically, I know you don’t want to read about a pickup truck at 3 a.m.; the data I have says that you’re probably sleeping at that time. I know I want to be sleeping at that time. But if an automaker really wants third shift workers to know about their newest gray color or slightly restyled grille, automotive publications will set that as their go time. Now, pardon me while I go chug a Red Bull.

Top graphic images: Warner Bros.; Ford