Which car magazine is best for the enthusiast? What about the others? Those are the topics for this week. My opinion aside, others rank Car and Driver the best because it has the largest circulation by far. Others under discussion are Automobile, Motor Trend, and Road & Track. These days there is a magazine for every special interest you can think of, so there are many other car magazines out there that cater to a specific enthusiast topic. For example, I think there are at least three magazines devoted just to BMWs.
Is Car and Driver the best? I suppose you can define "best" in a lot of different ways, but for my values, it is. While the reviews of cars aren't as critical as some British and German magazines, they are more critical than any of the other magazines I just mentioned. Another big plus for me is that they review more cars than any of the other magazines.
One very revealing thing was the current issue's discussion of the magazine's 50th anniversary. The discussion was almost entirely about what they wrote about and how they wrote it. The articles were almost all words with very few features. This may alienate many young people who just look at pictures, but I pick up a magazine to read it. I read all my magazines from cover to cover every month. Car and Driver is the most informative of the magazines I read each month.
This was not the case in the past. I started reading the magazine in the 1970s and found that the magazine tried too hard to be as trendy as they could. They now point out that the cars of the 70s and 80s were terrible, so that was just about the only thing they could write about. It didn't seem that way to me at the time, but today it seems like a logical argument.
Car and Driver was published in New York City for a long time before they moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Even today, they don't have an explanation for why they chose that place. New York was the center of culture -- at least they thought so -- even if it was the most unfriendly city for a car in the United States. The good writers were in New York City, so that is where they published the magazine. I'd argue that point in the 60s and 70s, just like I would today.
Under the leadership of Csaba Csere, Car and Driver continues to set the standard of excellence for car magazines in the U.S. These days the articles are very well written, interesting, and evaluate cars fairly. They have been criticized having a BMW and Honda bias because those products appear in their annual 10 best issue all the time. Well, maybe those manufacturers do make good cars.
One possible measure of the value of their critical comments on road tests is that Car and Driver has had General Motors withdraw advertising from their magazine more times than any of the other magazines. That does say something.
Except for very brief forays, Car and Driver is not a magazine attuned to the Southern California enthusiast unfortunately. They do a lot of testing here if you look at photos, but seem to try to never mention that this is where the trends start and the enthusiasts are.
Motor Trend was the magazine for Detroit manufacturers for many years. Also for many years, they didn't do instrumented road tests. But, Motor Trend has always been published in Los Angeles. This magazine also used have the largest circulation of all the magazines, but Car and Driver passed them about five years ago. Motor Trend has gotten much more international in the last ten years and now has many interesting articles on all car topics.
Unfortunately the writing in Motor Trend is not nearly as good as Car and Driver even if it does tend to represent the California enthusiast better. Motor Trend is now owned by the same company as Automobile, so maybe some of the writing will rub off on Motor Trend.
Also I'd point out that the art director of Motor Trend should be fired. The latest "look" is really terrible. It is difficult to read. Blocks of this and that intrude on the flow of reading the text. I suppose it is supposed to look "modern" but that is no excuse for hard to read.
Another interesting thing that Motor Trend seems to be trying is new ways to measure car data. This seems to be evident in evaluation of ride, handling and interior sound. I do think that all the car magazines owe us enthusiasts an explanation of just what those numbers they measure really mean to us. The "we've always done it that way (because Road & Track started it)" doesn't really mean anything to me.
The leader of Motor Trend, Angus MacKenzie, is new and is from Australia. I will give him a little more time to settle in at the magazine and see where he will lead it.
Of all the magazines I will discuss, Motor Trend has unabashedly been a "California magazine" for a long time. They seem a bit less so today, but the attitude is still there.
The youngest magazine is Automobile. It was started in 1987 by ex-Car and Driver editor, David E. Davis in a fit of disagreement with the then owners of Car and Driver. When it began, however, it seemed to want to be the magazine for car enthusiasts who weren't really enthusiasts, but wanted everyone else to think they were. You know, most of the people who own BMWs today.
The magazine does a great job writing about the people in the automobile industry -- better than any other magazine, but when they write about cars, it is a different story. The problem starts when they get to high-end cars. Almost always, the attitude of the writers seems to be that they get to drive these great expensive cars, and us poor slob readers will never get to do it. It also applies to where they drive the cars. "We get to fly all over the world to drive these cars, to places you will never get to. Aren't we so much better than you are!" That kind of attitude really is a negative to me.
Like Car and Driver magazine in general, the leader of Automobile, Jean Lindamood Jennings has joined the real world. Some years ago I had the distinct displeasure of meeting Ms. Jennings at two events. At those times, she displayed the most boorish attitude possible with unbelievably bad manners. Yes, this was a time when entertainers seemed be trying to make bad manners an art form, but in the business world of automobiles, it seemed intolerable to me.
Last, and unfortunately least, is Road & Track. This used to be my favorite magazine, but in the last 10 years or so it had faded from interest. The issue here is both content and writing. They don't test many cars and the ones they do test always have only favorable comments. I once asked about this and was told that they only test the good cars. Does that mean that we can infer that the cars they don't test aren't good?
At least Road & Track is a Southern California magazine, but it doesn't seem to reflect the same sense of Southern California that Motor Trend does. Maybe the urge to be trendy does reflect the fact that they publish from Newport Beach. What else could explain the fact that the magazine is now published in a huge format. Have you tried to read the magazine in a coach airplane seat? Give me the smaller-format Car and Driver that is easier to read anyway. Speaking of easier to read, Road & Track doesn't seem to understand that their readership is getting older and we have trouble reading text that is printed over pictures. The lack of contrast makes it difficult. But it is artistic to print that way, so who cars when you can't read it?
Perhaps there is a message there. The stuff you are reading in Road & Track isn't that great these days anyway. Other than Peter Egan on the staff, they have nobody that writes as well as Automobile, for example. Why? They hire engineers, not writers. That used to be an asset in the era of the John Bond magazine when it was created in 1947. Yes, Road & Track is the oldest magazine of the bunch. But other magazines have proven that you can have engineering knowledge along with good writing. Look at two recent past issues of the magazine: one featured all the new Cadillacs and another several iterations of the new Mustang. Both seemed to be just direct quotes from the manufacturers' press releases.
The current leader of Road & Track, Thos Bryant, seems to have lost his way. What is the magazine supposed to do best? Why should I read it before the other magazines? To me, there is no clear answer to these questions -- and that is a serious problem for us readers. One very telling item about Road & Track's relevance to the current car enthusiast was the recent introduction of the new BMW 3-series. I doubt that many people would argue that it is the most popular enthusiast car in the United States. Of the four car magazines, all but Road & Track had the car on the cover and a feature article to back the cover picture up. Road & Track, however, had a small one-page "intro" car feature along with several other similar features.
We talk about the fact that media ownership has been consolidated over the past few years and that only a few companies own all the media outlets. That is really true with car magazines. Hachette owns both Car and Driver and Road & Track. Primedia owns both Automobile and Motor Trend. I feel that it isn't good in general for the country, and it isn't good for car magazines either. At least so far the magazines operate mostly independently of each other.
