A short history
What happened to CarDomain?
It was sold, twice, and then the car profiles stopped being reachable. If you built a page there, this is what became of it — and how to get your photographs back.
Can I get my CarDomain page back?
Often, yes. The Internet Archive crawled CarDomain for years, and a great many profiles survive there even though the live site doesn’t.
Find your old page
Type the username you used on CarDomain, and we’ll check what the Internet Archive kept. Still have the old address? Paste that instead — either works.
This works for a lot of dead sites, not just this one. It’s worth trying web.archive.org directly for any car forum or gallery you used to post to.
What happened to it
CarDomain Network was founded in Seattle in 1998 by Alex Algard and Simon Han. It began as SoundDomain.com, a forum for people showing off car stereo installations, and the vehicle profiles that made it famous came later. By the end of 2004 it had 1.5 million registered users, 70 employees and $13.3 million in revenue.
In November 2008 it cut sixteen jobs — about half its staff — with the chief executive citing the economy and “very pessimistic industry projections of advertising budgets.” It acquired StreetFire, an automotive video community, in April 2009. In 2012 it was sold to Source Interlink Media, which was later renamed TEN: The Enthusiast Network and then Motor Trend Group.
Enthusiast forums have been asking where the profiles went ever since. The Internet Archive’s last capture of the home page with a page on it is dated 9 May 2022; every capture since — the most recent in August 2026 — is a redirect with no content behind it. The site returns nothing today.
Sources: Wikipedia, GeekWire (2012), Xconomy (2008), and the Internet Archive’s capture index for the dates above.
Why did CarDomain shut down?
CarDomain didn’t fail because people stopped caring about their cars. It was squeezed by an advertising collapse in 2008, and then by Facebook and Instagram, which gave everyone a simpler place to post — and it ended up owned by a media company that had other priorities.
None of that was the users’ doing, and none of them got a vote. Fifteen years of photographs, build threads and write-ups became inaccessible because a business changed hands. That is the ordinary way these things end.
Where to put it now
There are a few places, and the right one depends on what you actually want. All of these are free to join.
- Motortopia — the closest thing to what CarDomain was. Vehicle profiles, photo albums and journals, plus event listings, run by the publisher behind Street Trucks and Diesel World. Choose it if you want readers and a show calendar.
- Summit Racing My Garage — a parts retailer’s community, launched in 2024. You list the build by engine, drivetrain and suspension, and it scores you on how much you’ve added. Choose it if your car is a project and you’re buying the parts anyway.
- Rideology — smaller, built around meets and clubs, and it gives each car a QR code to display on the windshield. Choose it if you’re at cars and coffee most weekends.
- Your marque’s forum or club registry. For a car old enough or rare enough, this is often the best answer and nobody will tell you so, because there’s no company behind it. The people there already know what your car should have left the factory with.
Garage Chronicle is a place to keep a car’s story and its history — the sort of thing a CarDomain profile held, with more attention to the record and less to the profile. The difference from the list above is what the page is for: not what you bolted on and not how many people saw it, but what happened to the car and who has looked after it. That’s the part that stays true after you sell it.
It would be dishonest to promise this site will outlive us; nobody can promise that, and CarDomain is the reason. What we can do is make sure you’re never locked in: download everything you’ve written whenever you like, as one file that opens in any browser. Photographs, story, timeline, dates. If this site ever went the same way, you would still have your car’s record on your own machine.
What one looks like here
Written by the people who own them — which is the only part of this that matters, and the part no description of a website can demonstrate.
’661966 Chevrolet Impala SS
I was fifteen when I bought my first car, a 1965 Impala.
’731973 Porsche 911 Targa
“Our beloved 1973 Porsche 911 Targa. Can you believe I hand painted this Porsche myself?! N…”
’212021 Ford Bronco
“The first thing I ever really learned to drive was an old Jeep Willys. It had no top, and …”
The rest of the registry is worth a look before you decide anything. If you want a page of your own, it’s free and takes a few minutes.
No affiliation with CarDomain, Motor Trend Group or the Internet Archive. If something here is wrong, or you know more about what happened to the profiles, tell us and we’ll correct it.