Still the Daddy of car magazines (Car)

Name: Mizio

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Product:	Car
Date:	19/07/02 (360 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great Reviews, Fanastic Photos, Buyer's Guide

Disadvantages: Many ads, Pricey

"Car" is a monthly UK magazine of about 225 pages that writes about curent production cars through reviews, upcoming products scoops, industry news and various columns. The magazine has a good number of car testers who have their own writing style and are generally well articulated and quite funny. One slight negative is that testers, given their great driving experience, seem only too inclined to write positively about performance cars, such as Ferrari, Porsche, etc and not so thorough when reviewing more down-to-earth cars. In particular, the "Newcomers" section, describing the latest model, has a good number of reviews but all rather short, definitely not enough for someone keen to learn more about a certain car prior to an acquisition.
One really good feature of the magazine is its "previews"; they seem to be able to get their hands on a lot of industry news regarding upcoming cars including photos, sketches and early test-drives to make the magazine really useful for car buyers who are looking to buy a new car in the next year or two.
The quality of the paper and the photos is very high and there is plenty of eye candy for car ethusiasts though the magazine generally avoids photos larger than half page (which usually just imply scarcity of things to write in a mag), particularly worth a mention are the photos done for their monthly road-trip special, an artcile generally written by one reporter on the road (August 2002 issue has a really interesting article on a US coast-to-coast in a Smart!).
The monthly columns are rather useless, except perhaps for the one written by a US-based writer.

Finally, a really neat buyer's guide is included at the back, with short and snappy reviews of all the cars currently sold in the UK with an added price list which I found to be usually a few months out of date.

On the negative side I can only say that the magazine has plenty of adverts, often irritatingly repea
ted over several issues, and it is quite expensive at £3.50 per issue. However, if you subscribe for a year, you get two issues free (£7 saving) and a gadget (currently an Aston Martin keyring).

The reason why I buy this magazine is that it offers readers great reviews (though skewed towards the more racey cars) and is well packaged. In essence, this is not a car magazine for readers looking to find detailed information on cars they may be intrested in buying but one that gives readers plenty of general news on the car industry and latest models.

Summary: