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.
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.
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.
“When Ford won at Le Mans in 1966,” recalled Sports Car Market’s Martin, “our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, had three paragraphs about it. On the other hand, Motor Trend, Car and Driver, and Road & Track had glorious multiple-page spreads, although not until several months later. The wait was worth it, as there was no other way to see a picture of the brake discs of a GT40 glowing cherry red at the end of the Mulsanne Straight.” Meanwhile, Competition Press and then AutoWeek leveraged its more frequent publishing schedule to keep readers up to date in a much timelier fashion.
The bigger motorsports die was cast when ABC’s Wide World of Sports began covering major events like Le Mans and the Indianapolis 500. But if you were into the details, you still waited to read what Rob Walker said firsthand in R&T about the Formula 1 races. He was there with his own racing team; he knew everyone. They told him all the insider stuff, and he relayed it to us the way he would talk to a circle of friends. That was great while it lasted.
Magazines contributed to automotive commerce, too. For years, Road & Track, AutoWeek, Hot Rod, and Motor Trend offered classified ads—but unless you used the Sunday New York Times, selling an interesting sports or classic car was often a five-month process. There were no major old-car auctions until the early 1970s when a prescient Kirk F. White retained rural Pennsylvania horse-auction caller J. Omar Landis to entertain bids on old Rolls-Royces and Ferrari GTOs. If you didn’t attend the three huge Harrah Collection Auctions in Reno in the early 1980s, you didn’t know the prices. Sports Car Market, which began as Automotive Investor, didn’t arrive until the early 1990s.
Older car enthusiasts clung to print magazines despite modern changes in media, and for decades those magazines were the best way to stay ahead of the curve on all things automotive. All the big automakers cooperated, making new models available to writers and photographers months before the stories were published. These embargoes sometimes meant several rival titles featured the same car on their covers in the same month—even in the same color!
Print circulations waxed and waned, boosted by subscriptions at giveaway prices. Some saw the decline coming with the explosion of the internet in the second half of the 1990s, and numbers confirmed the inevitable once the 2000s were well underway. Enhanced TV sports coverage and the digital age marked the beginning of the end, with the internet taking most of the blame. Why wait to read a road test when you could see the car or motorcycle in action on video, with smoke and sound, just as soon as it was available? The change, finally in full swing, was sudden if not unexpected.
A new generation of enthusiasts was evolving, and it wasn’t composed of readers, at least not always in the traditional book sense. They texted, often in shorthand. They wanted bits of information and snappy copy, and they weren’t paper hoarders. Even worse, they didn’t read magazines. They didn’t want to wait a month to read something new.
Predictably, big general-interest magazines like Life and Newsweek were among the first to fold. Time reinvented itself, but most periodicals have had to develop a digital product, not always successfully. It was a sad day for print devotees in 2020 when our previous owner, The Enthusiast Network, folded 19 of its 22 magazines, leaving only MotorTrend, Hot Rod, and Four Wheeler. As MotorTrend Group president Alex Wellen said, “Tens of millions of fans visit MotorTrend’s digital properties every month, with the vast majority of our consumption on mobile, and three out of every four of our visitors favor digital content over print.”
As a result, the print version of Automobile vanished, but upheaval has impacted every publishing company across virtually every subject matter. Road & Track, owned by Hearst Magazines, moved from California to Michigan to New York. It has settled into a bimonthly print schedule with themed issues. MotorTrend and Hot Rod, too, have gone to quarterly print publication. At least in America, publications can still have a print presence, but they must have a strong and compelling digital product, as well. If we know one thing about car enthusiasts, it’s that they, as Martin said, “will always be searching for more and deeper information. The role of magazines is to offer this info in a manner and format they simply can’t get in any other way.”
If you’re reading this, we suspect you know exactly what he means.
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