(Stroking long, white beard) Remember magazines? In the pre-internet era, when ink on paper ruled, magazines were essentially your only entrée to the gated worlds of everything from fancying cats to semi-pro sewing, from building model airplanes to fishing competitively. And of course, the full scope of cardom beyond whatever was rolling around your hometown was available at your favorite newsstand, if not arriving directly in your mailbox once a month.
As I’m sure was also true for many of you, Car and Driver and Road & Track were staples in the Vieira household. Those subscriptions were re-upped faithfully, and Motor Trend was added to the mix whenever a good subscription deal presented itself, or whenever individual issues caught Dad’s eye. As a model builder, I picked up Scale Modeler and Auto Modeler on the regular, and as soon as a 1974 Super Beetle became my daily transpo to school, Hot VW was frequently read over a bowl of cereal before heading to Seekonk High School.
As the internet grew and magazine sales slumped, I held onto good ol’ ink and paper longer than most, probably because I was in the magazine-making business by then as a staffer at RC Car Action – and also because in those pre-smartphone days, lugging a laptop into the bathroom was a real hassle.
Today, The Autopian is in my pocket wherever I go, as well as all those print titles that transitioned from paper to pixels. We get our car news, entertainment, and info as quickly as it can be reported, and there’s way more of it, as there’s no limit to virtual pages. I’m glad I got to experience both worlds, the disconnected one we all knew before 1996 or so, and the modern realm of unlimited information and instant access, for better or worse. But I do miss the thrill of finding a fresh glossy magazine curled in the mailbox.
Your turn: What Were / Are Your Favorite Car Magazines?
Top graphic images: Model Cars; Petersen’s Kit Car; Hot VW; Car and Driver; Road & Track
I was big on R&T and C&D, but I also had the upstart Automobile Magazine, which had a less clinical approach to their car evaluations. Jean Lindamood was so much fun to read!
I have been reading Car and Driver since the GTO vs GTO spoof issue (Found in the high school library). Missed a few monthly issues that didn’t make it to the Golf of Tonkin in 1969, but still look forward to new issues. Others that I’ve enjoyed are Road and Track, Autoweek, and Hot Rod. So many great staff members of these magazines. Yates, Davis, Jennings, Egan, Bedard, Phillips, McCluggage, etc.
I loved the quirky reviews in C&D!
Highlights: Testing a chain-based mine sweeper and the giant dump truck using the same metrics as their cars!
It was either Road and Track or Car and Driver (I believe the former) which had the-back-of-the-book Side Glances written by the great Peter Egan.
He and I were kindered souls.
Hot rod. Loved that magazine.
Does the jc Whitney catalog count?
I also picked up scale model and RC car/truck mags whenever I could, although it’s been so long that I do not remember the specifics.
JCW was always a must read when it arrived.
JC Whitney was like the 8th wonder of the world. I felt bad when they started cutting down on their inventory year after year.
For me, I used to read the Wheels section in the Toronto Star as well as the Canadian Carguide.
And I would regulary check out Road & Track and Car & Driver… and Automobile magazine too.
I used to love the wheels section on Saturday mornings, after It got cut I stopped reading newspaper’s .
Mannnnnnnnnn lemme tell you.
Growing up WAY out in the country, with two working parents that were too busy to play, back before internet, before I grew the confidence to meet friends in school, before my parents caved and allowed me to have video games, and with nothing other than toy cars and Thomas the tank engine re-runs to keep me entertained…….
Magazines FORMED me. They were(still are) my escape. And while my parents weren’t the most hands on folks, they never said no when I asked for a book or a magazine.
I think by the time I was in 4th grade I had subscriptions to 4wheel &off road, Four wheeler, Dirt wheels, Dirt Rider, Hot Rod, Motor Trend, Road &Track, and Car and Driver. I didn’t understand half the shit I was reading, but I loved any test of a new car or 4×4, all the reader submissions like readers rides, the “Whoops!” Articles, future cars, and just looking at the pictures.
I would cut out pictures and glue them to a poster board like a wrinkly collage, and as I grew, I started drawing and designing my own cars. It was a complete obsession, and I’m convinced that it helped my grades at school. They grew with me too, and I would get a new subscription anytime I found something new and neat, especially in my teens. (Anybody remember MPH? The juvenile humor of that magazine was fuel for a 14 year old’s soul)
I had so many and it’s hard to narrow it down, but I’d say the ones that had the most effect on me would have been 4wheel&Offroad, for the mud bogging, off roading, and west coast centered builds that seemed so exotic to a kid growing up in the rust belt, and definitely Car&Driver, with all of its showmanship, humor, and wit back in the early 2000s.
Four Wheeler, 4 wheeler and off road. On the free side of things I never missed the new edition of Indiana Auto & RV. I loved looking thru all the classified listings.
I used to read a few National ones mostly about American cars and stuff, but also a Swedish one called Bilsport,which was basically anything modified.
Oh,and I used to read an English magazine called «MaxPower» that was fucking awesome.
I asked for a C/D subsription as a teen in 1990. I also had ready access to R&T around this time. In college a few years later someone subsribed to a Porsche mag. Everything still seemed somewhat obtainable based on prices.
Just before the Reagan market crashed in the 1980s, there was a Big Bang of new magazines.The magazine stand on Hollywood and Cahuenga was abloom with new car porn ,art porn, political porn ,and, yes, porn- porn! My two auto-erotic faves were Car Design and Design Trends.
These were sad , cheap rags with black and white photos, printed on grim pulpy paper. But ,hooray!A whole magazine dedicated to how cars look ! No 0-to -60 tests! No race cars covered with ugly sponsor logos.No uppity journalists writing about fine wines,LeMans, and looking like the mean, hooker-beating drunks they probably were.
No!
The subject was automotive looks.Design. Style.Thats it! Thats all I care about.How a car looks and why. The rest is math and sports, and, to me, that means nap time.
I forgave the lousy writing. I forgave the crappy photos.I forgave the sub-par design of Car Design’s design. I gladly gave them my money.I wanted them to live, to thrive, to soar!
I bought two issues.Maybe three. And, poof! I never saw them again. Gone, crushed in the Crash ! But I still have the mags three decades later.
There is a glimmer of that here at The Autopian. When Jason,Adrian,or The Bishop write about the cultural influences on a car’s design, I am right back at that newsstand in Hollywood in the 80’s, agape at the wonder of it all: my god! ! Did they write this just for me!?
Car, Sport Compact Car and Road&Track for the Peter Egan articles and peak BMW fan-dom.
I miss European Car (the less-specific / more tasteful alternative to Hot VW), Automobile (RIP Jean and David), and Bimmer.
Probably more accurate to say European Car focused on water-cooled cars while Hot VW focused on air-cooled.
There was almost always at least one air-cooled VW or Porsche featured in European Car, but yeah, you are correct that Hot VWs was strictly air-cooled. I did pick up Hot VWs anytime there was a Gene Berg car featured, as they were tasteful modifications / upgrades.
(don’t get me started on VW Trends – back in the 80s it seemed like it was a swimsuit model magazine that occasionally featured Cal-look VWs)
My first subscription was to Hot Rod; however, my first car mags were the unsold copies of the British ones my mom brought home from the bookstore she managed. Car, Fast Lane, etc, plus a couple of trucking and truck racing ones. I kept several and still have them; one of my favorites is the 1986 Car Photography Special. I was four when I got it.
After that, it was R&T, then Motor Trend for a while, then it was dropped and I added CaD, then Automobile. The things were all dirt cheap and provided an amazing amount of entertainment.
I probably mentioned this here a few times, but for me was July 1996 edition of Hot VW. I learned a lot of my English from that magazine, and to this day wonder why every article was split in two parts across non consecutive pages, like a choose your own adventure book.
I remember my big, old, green English-Portuguese dictionary as a faithful companion to each of those articles.
I wish I saved both the magazine and the dictionary, but for the latter there’s still hope on Ebay, right?
Born 1972 – Hot Rod, no doubt about it. I still have a very worn copy of the first ever Hot Rod swimsuit edition from, uh, 1986ish, I think? Also sister publication Car Craft, and Popular Hot Rodding.
Being a muscle car fan all my life, Musclecar Review, and later, in the 00s, Hemmings Muscle Machines, where I saw these features on two of my favorite unheard-of cars:
A one-of-none 1964 Studebaker Lark ordered new with a supercharged R3 engine, good for running the quarter mile in the TWELVES, in 19-goddamn-64, for crying out loud, with a restoration story that’s half Roadkill, half Indiana Jones.
https://www.hemmings.com/stories/south-bend-stealth-1964-studebaker-super-lark-r3/
A factory-glitch 1968 Ford LTD Brougham sedan that accidentally came off the line with a 428, a 4-speed Toploader, 4.11 rearend, cop tires, cop brakes, and cop suspension – with bench seat, vinyl top, air conditioning, electric antenna, and an 8-track tape deck
https://www.hemmings.com/stories/limited-rarity-1968-ford-ltd-brougham/
And of course, as suggested by my profile photo, High Performance Pontiac. One of the best pieces of advice about a project car I’ve ever heard came from one of their monthly “reader rides dragstrip shootout” features. A guy was describing how he’d bought his featured 1968 Firebird after it had already had a light resto (paraphrasing): “This car taught me how much easier it is if you start off with a car that’s already done.”
Based on my bookshelf.. lots of Honda Tuning and Super Street.
I mostly liked to look at the pictures and memorize the data tables at the back of Road and Track. I knew the 0-60 times of most 1980’s vehicles by heart ????????
My parents got me the annual “cars on the market this year” issue of the local car magazine. I had so many prices memorised. One Rolls was 1,472,000 of the currency. One 2CV was 38,000. 40 times more expensive!
I didn’t dig through all the comments but I don’t see automobile mentioned which makes me sad. That was always my favorite one! I loved the mantra of “no boring cars”, and their photography was always next level too. It was the most enthusiast coded and prettiest to my eyes and I loved it for that!
I had a subscription for at least 10-15 years, only stopping it when I started reading Jalopnik back in the days when it was good. Then by the time the magazine was delivered, I had already read about all the cars they would be featuring in the magazine which made it hard to care enough to read the magazine since I’d already seen it all.
Automobile was basically the National Geographic of car magazines.
I still receive car magazines in print — Road & Track, Hagerty Drivers Club, Classic Motorsports, and (PCA) Panorama. I subscribe to them for the same reason I subscribe to Autopian, plus I’m generally not a “take the phone or tablet to the toilet” guy 🙂
I was an Autoweek subscriber back when it was in large format on newsprint, on and off all the way to the cessation of print. I also miss Hemings Sports & Exotic Car, and the occasional English or German magazine found at the magazine section of the bookstore back when that was a thing.
Vinyl made a bit of comeback, and I hear CDs are next; can print be far behind?
I loved them all as kids and into early adulthood, but my absolute favorite was Cartoons. It was all cartoons, except about cars. Plus there were sections on how to draw cars, but mine never turned out like the ones in the magazine.
I started subscribing to Autoweek in 1987 and kept going until after it was Auto (every other ) week. For long time I got FourWheeler, Petersons 4 wheel and off road, and JP. I do miss the day long gone of getting AutoWeek in my dorm mailbox every week.
JP was great. Here and gone too fast.
WOW! No Street Rodder? No Rod and Custom? Street Rodder was like a catalog with stories.
Vb9594
11 hours ago
Awaiting for approval
I just have to add that I have a giant box of car magazines in my office from when I was a kid…late 80’s and 90’s era C&D’s, Autoweeks, Road & Tracks, Motor Trend, Automobile, etc. I subscribed to all of them.
I look wistfully at the box but haven’t allowed myself to start rummaging in it because I know that once I start, it will be weeks before I come up for air!
CAR Magazine in the 80’s and 90’s, with content from L.J.K. Setright, Russell Bulgin, Gavin Green and matched with fantastic photography and a great AD, is peak auto journalism for me.
Car and Driver, especially the issue with the “MotoRooter” spoof insert. “MotoRooter” tested the Chevy Caprice versus the Trabant for Car of the Year. The Caprice won every category but one. Which one? Advertising pages.So the Trabant won.