MY ESSENTIAL WEEKLY READING MATTER (Autocar)

Name: Richada

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Product:	Autocar
Date:	23/10/05 (235 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Ever more colourful. Constantly up-dated. Automotive news.

Disadvantages: Expensive. Too pro-German (marques). Not for non car enthusiasts.

As a self confessed car nut I read just about all the motoring press from time to time, but the only magazine I actually subscribe to is Autocar.

To any of you who enjoy this weekly motoring magazine, but are complaining about the expense, do yourself a huge favour, save a bundle by subscribing, for years I had it delivered from the newsagent and wasted literally hundreds of pounds.

The cover price weekly is £2.20, on subscription you can save 15% or more and currently they will send you a very good Aston Martin model worth £20 as a thank you.

Indeed my subscription has been recently renewed for the coming year, I was not offered the Aston (a £20 1:18th scale Burago model) but was automatically allowed a 30% discount on the cover price - in my case money for nothing, as I would continue to purchase this magazine each week anyway. In a sense I suppose you could call this my one and only weekly extravagence in life!

My collection - a complete set - goes back to mid 1972, the year I was packed off to boarding school at the tender age of 10. Week after week my father sent the (then) Autocar, it kept me sane for all those boring hours imprisoned on the Isle of Wight, but that's a story for another day!

Autocar has not only traced the huge strides in the motor industry over the years, but its artistic style, photography and even editorial content have much to say about our ever changing fashions and society.

Now well into the 21st century this magazine remains modern and fresh and has kept well abreast of the times. It is certainly a definitive reference material, friends and colleagues who know little, or care little about the cars they drive, always come and ask me for the read of a relevant Autocar road test when they are considering buying a new, or even second hand car. The Autocar road test is still second to none, covering usually a test approaching 1000 miles including performance and handling testing at the UK's premier test track - Millbrook in Bedfordshire.

For those of you interested in such bald statistics in these reviews, looking at this weeks Autocar, the total number of pages is 138, 54 of which are the "Marketplace" - previously referred to as "Classified", section at the back. As with all such magazines there are many (23) pages of advertising within the main section of the magazine.

Autocar have now at least sorted this so that the editorials and articles, road tests etc are unbroken by advertising. In my opinion there is nothing worse than being in the middle of an article and having to flick page after page of advertisments in order to finish reading it.

The database at the back of the magazine is very useful as it not only provides list price information on every car on the market (less comprehensive than the "What Car" data fest though) but also a good range of performance and fuel consumption figures derived from their road tests. You will however find a few gaps, once a newly launched car becomes a little "less new" it never tends to get tested, I have for years waited in vein for a road test of the Volvo S60 D5 for instance.

I have also found that the slightly more ordinary cars that sell in huge numbers are increasingly neglected to find room for road tests of every exotic sports or luxury car that is launched. As a car enthusiast who likes to keep his feet on the ground I find this ever more frustrating due to the fact that the cars that my friends and colleagues are actually asking me to find road tests about are simply not being tested by the magazine. Making the magazine ever more elitist ("Car" magazine already fantastically successfully fills that particular market slot anyway) does not strike me as a sensible way to increase readership numbers.

My, and other regular readers from comments made in the excellent (and often criticising) letters page, main moan about this magazine, tends to be that anything carrying a German badge is by default better than anything else on the market, you'll have to live with that though - I have for over 30 years now and well remember road tests raving about BMW 2002's and the first Golf GTi.

My interest centres on road cars, generally practical ones at that. If you are a Formula 1 or WRC (World Rally) fan probably Autosport (Autocar's sister publication) would be of more interest. Having said that, there are brief, but very well written sports pages, but Autocar is more about keeping up to date with technology and developments regarding, if not the cars we actually drive, then at least cars we are likely to see on the road.

The whole magazine is written by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, which is great if cars are your thing. I can understand less interested parties being completely dazed however by all the understeer, oversteer, torque steer talk.

I sometimes yearn for the old days too where there were regular articles on subjects such as European touring, good and scenic driving routes in this country and best of all, a great weekly one the "Used Car test". They do run cars as staff runabouts for 20,000 miles and report on them long-term. But the idea of test driving a car from a used car lot to see what a car the vast majority of us have to spend our own (as opposed to our employer's) cash on is like when a sales rep has thrashed it about the country, would be very revealing in the real world.

The latest re-design, whilst very much bringing my favourite magazine into the current century with even more colour and fancy graphics introduced to the data section, has made the whole rather messy and difficult to follow. It has also put the sport pages back amongst the general car stuff, which as far as I am concerned was a definite retrograde step - its natural place was at the back of magazine before the data section.

Before winding up this review, I would put one important pointer in here. It is a lesson that I have learned over the last ten years or so, since gaining the opportunity of driving hundreds of different cars rather than just reading about them. Enjoy Autocar as a good read yes, however if you are in the market to buy a new car however, there is absolutely NO substitute for taking the best test drive you can. No car magazine however authoratitive it sats out to be can tell you what is the best car for YOU. In all likelyhood a car is the second most expensive purchase that you will make in a lifetime - unlike a property it will not appreciate in value either, therefore a magazine such as Autocar must only guide you rather than making a decision on your behalf.

In my own experience from attending many various test days, followed up by road tests from local dealers on roads that we use every day, some of the cars that Autocar have never tested (that Volvo S60 D5 for one, the 2.0 litre Subaru Legacy for another) are vastly superior all round purchases to the cars that they are constantly testing and telling us that we should be driving.

Having said all of that though, importantly, for me anyway, this is a magazine which you never flick through, say "oh there's nothing in it this week" and put it down un-read.

Expensive, yes maybe, but excellent value for money all the same.

Summary: Not perfect, but the original, oldest and best car magazine published.