Antenna · Vol. 01 · FW 26
Choose
Your
Autmotive
AI.
Chapter
01
Five seats · one room
(Kurt Busch, Cliff Avril, Xzibit, Sung Kang, Emelia Hartford)
We invited corners of car culture that don't usually meet. Five people who shouldn't have been in the same room. NASCAR, NFL, hip-hop, JDM, YouTube — all talking about automotive AI.
Each a custodian uniquely qualified by their community to talk about their relationship with cars. Not one of them was anti-AI. Most of them used it. All of them could see its value.
"Self-driving cars are not our future."
They were anti-automation. Of the wheel. Of identity. Of expression. The way someone kept their car, drove their car, modified their car — that was the identity. That was the part to preserve.
This started a nation-wide conversation about AI's role in automotive.
Chapter
02
LA Auto Show · Year One to Year Two
LA Auto Show, Year One: a 1,200-square-foot booth in the back hall of West Hall. Think the side entrance of the hotel lobby.
LA Auto Show, Year Two: a 38,760-square-foot build in the center hall. The LEDs weren't showing product. They were showing childhoods.
Terri Toennis, President of the LA Auto Show, lauded the Hall of SPARQ presence as truly special.
"They merged community passion, rare vehicles, and high technology into an immersive, unprecedented experience."
We built a Japanese underground scene for the father who'd never traveled there but had wanted to since he was sixteen. We built Toretto's market for those who always wondered about the tuna melt. We built the rooms where the love was formed, and asked people to come sit in them.
Post-show survey put us at the highest unaided brand recall in the whole show — ahead of legacy OEMs with ten times the headcount.
People walked in expecting a tech company and found the room where they were last a kid.
Plates · Concept
Initial / 頭文字
AE86 trio, Voltex tail
Mechanic / メカニック
Evo IX, BBS on asphalt
HKS Bay
R34 GT-R, paddock violet
Hako-Suka / 箱スカ
Hakosuka GT-R, timeline canvas
Kaidō / 街道★
Liberty Walk R32, sodium pool
FD / 雨
FD3S RX-7, Gunma plate
2JZ / 二代目
Brian's Supra, replica on display
Hector / 主役
Noel G, Hall of SPARQ
MCL33 / 家族
Alonso's farewell car, family portrait
Chapter
03
SEMA · Product of the Year
SEMA is the room that doesn't care what Silicon Valley thinks. Gear heads, builders, motorsport. The most skeptical automotive audience in America.
We didn't bring a product launch. We brought Brian's garage.
Cody Walker came as Paul's brother. Sean Lee came as Sean Lee. They met fans in front of the cars they grew up watching. Universal and the Petersen Museum saw it and decided JDM culture deserved its own exhibit. We didn't pay anyone to come. We built something they recognized as theirs.
In the Drift Pits, a SPARQ-liveried drift car ran live laps next to a Waymo. Two futures, in the same field of vision. One was being narrated. The other was on tires, sideways, in front of them.
We won SEMA Best Tools & Equipment Product 2026.
The room we were warned would reject us gave us its trophy.
Best Tools & Equipment Product, 2026
Awarded by SEMA in recognition of outstanding and innovative design for the automotive aftermarket.
Exhibition · Brian's Garage
SPARQ Presents
Graffiti on the back wall, build day
Brian's Garage
Skyline GT-R wall, Eclipse on the lift
Toretto's RX-7
Stacked above the Eclipse
Brian's MKIV
The orange Supra, parked in the booth
Cody Walker, signing the camera
A greeting, then his name across the lens
The Fan Photo
Chad Lindbergh, mid-selfie, mid-laugh
SPARQ F1
Iridescent livery, paddock lights
On the Podium
The trophy, handed off
The Acceptance
Center stage, SEMA Show
Chapter
04
The rule behind the rooms
Everything you've just seen was the surface of a system.
The rule was simple. Don't talk in capacity. Talk in culture.
Every brand in the category was personifying its product and over-promising the future. SPARQ was the person at the networking event who wasn't even working the room. The one confident enough to say let's bail and make our own fun.
That posture had to be visible in everything. Paid ads. Product walls. Photography. The voice on every surface a customer touched. Not aspirational. Not technical. The grammar of someone who had already arrived and didn't need to perform.
The category was selling the future of the car. Our system was remembering the freedom of cars. The drive-in, the open road, the keys to a Friday night — barely a generation old. Too new to surrender.
Most brand systems compress messaging into a box. The point of a creative system is that it knows when to break the box and still sound like itself.
Whether it was a parody of Doc Brown or a cheeky head-nod to what we all refused — that automotive AI equals autonomous driving — culture was the connective tissue.
REEL-SY-01
It isn't about approving decks, it's about commanding a set. It isn't magic, it's chemistry. It isn't aimless commentary, it's about taking a stand. Which is the only way to build a consumer's trust.
Chapter
05
The most skeptical rooms become the most loyal ones.
But only if you arrive as a host instead of a salesman.
Every category eventually faces its skeptical room.
Sign-off
Antenna · Vol. 01
Johnny
The host of the table
I've spent the last two decades doing the same work under different names — products, communities, audiences, and businesses. The job doesn't really change. You listen for what people actually want, which is rarely what they say they want, and you try to make something that meets them there.
People think a brand is a logo, a color palette, a tagline. Those things matter. They help set the table. But they're not why anyone stays.
The brands that last tend to mean something. They show up at a moment a person didn't know they were waiting for. They put a name on a feeling that was already in the room.
There's no formula for it. You can do everything right and still miss. Timing matters. Luck matters more than anyone admits. Taste matters. Mostly it's attention — to people, to culture, to the quiet things happening underneath the loud ones.
Everyone remembers a great meal. Years later they rarely recall the ingredients. They remember who was at the table. What was said. Most important of all, they remember how it felt to sit at the table.
That is what I do.
Yours,
Johnny.
Johnny · Founder, By Johnny · FW 26