Peter Valdes-Dapena is a senior writer for CNN Business where he covers automobiles, the industry that produces them and the changing ways in which people buy, own and use them.

Valdes-Dapena has written about the industry for CNN since 2001 and, in that time, covered the American auto industry’s collapse during the 2008 financial crisis and its resurgence. Now he’s covering the industry’s shift toward new technology such as electric propulsion, autonomous vehicles and ride-sharing services.

Valdes-Dapena was born near Philadelphia but grew up in South Florida where he earned an undergraduate degree in communication and a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Miami. He worked as a business journalist and as a science writer for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center before being able to indulge his own passion for automobiles as a car writer for CNN.