Here’s How Car Magazines Have Changed During the Past 75 Years

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Here’s How Car Magazines Have Changed During the Past 75 Years

“When I first discovered car magazines, in the early 1960s as a young teenager, they were the Wikipedia of everything automotive,” recalls Keith Martin, founder and publisher of Sports Car Market. “We all waited for each monthly issue, always chock-full of unique stories and insights about new cars, racing, clever gadgets, road trips, and classic cars.” 

You might be surprised to learn monthly magazines for car enthusiasts didn’t exist in America in the 1930s. Throttle started up in 1940 and only lasted a year before the U.S. joined World War II. Road & Track and Speed Age bowed in 1947, focusing on sports cars and racing, respectively. Hot Rod published its first issue in January 1948, defying newspapers of the era that railed against “car-crazed kids racing on the roads.” And Motor Trend (two words, as our name was styled back then) first appeared in September 1949. At first, MT featured 30 pages and cost 25 cents per issue, about the same as a pack of cigarettes or a gallon of high-test fuel. 

MT co-publisher Robert E. “Pete” Petersen once told me that following Hot Rod’s success, race car builder Frank Kurtis urged him to publish a general-interest monthly about production cars. Fittingly, the handsome new Kurtis Sport Car was on MT’s first cover, and Petersen himself was the photographer who captured it. The advertisers were mostly carryovers from Hot Rod, and classified ads had yet to appear. Although there were no domestic car ads or road tests yet, the back cover featured a sporty Jaguar XK120 from International Motors on California’s Sunset Boulevard. 

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Venerable British magazines like The Autocar and Motorsport pioneered road tests long before World War II. Here in the U.S., Mechanix Illustrated’s eminently quotable road warrior, Tom McCahill, entertained readers with a combination of hard facts and memorable quips such as, “That buggy doesn’t have enough suds to pull a wet piece of gum out of a baby’s mouth.” 

Traditional car magazines took a varied approach to road testing. Some of them spared readers the barbed play-killing wit of theater critics. For many years, for example, Road & Track’s bland road tests didn’t even name an author. But the editors of Car and Driver told you what they really thought. In one article, a ridiculed Opel Kadett L station wagon was photographed at the entrance to a junkyard. A Ferrari 275 GTS was shot at the Fulton Fish Market, contrasting one of the most expensive cars of its era with a group of working stiffs who couldn’t afford to buy it. A tiny Amphicar was photographed floating alongside an ocean liner. 

American car enthusiasts in the ’40s and ’50s soon had a lot of print choices: Motorsport, Auto Sport Review, Sports Cars Illustrated (which became Car and Driver in 1961), Car Life, Motor Life (which merged with Motor Trend), along with many more titles. They all, then as now, fought for a dwindling number of ad pages. Major industry awards, initiated by Motor Trend’s Car of the Year honor, were soon imitated by the other monthlies and their annual trophies, though none was ever more prestigious than Motor Trend’s award. 

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Competition Press, which morphed into AutoWeek, published a weekly magazine, an anomaly that allowed it to keep up with racing events, and was overseen for years by the caustic Leon Mandel. In 1986, after building up Car and Driver and fueled by a seven-figure dollar amount courtesy of Rupert Murdoch, David E. Davis Jr. founded Automobile, which decades later became a sister publication to MotorTrend. DED Jr. dressed in Savile Row suits and affected a bushy moustache to disguise injuries suffered in a racing crash. Automobile followed the British model with lively columnists and travel features. Both Car and Driver and Automobile published sharply critical reviews, often hilarious features, and knowledgeable racing coverage.  

Not to be outdone, MT offered readers Robert Gottlieb, an authority on classic cars, and presented international voices such as the famously idiosyncratic Brit L.J.K. Setright and talented French photojournalist Bernard Cahier. Petersen Publishing also brought out Sports Car Graphic, which covered racing in some depth, and thanks to its zany editor, T.C. Browne, it was amusing and often irreverent. SCG lasted for a brief decade before folding in 1971.  

For many years, the monthly magazines were the enthusiasts’ best sources to keep up with international racing results even though the “news” was several months stale. Daily newspapers, especially The New York Times, covered the major races with brief reports, but if you wanted real details, you had to wait three months for the full story.