Autocar - First for car news and reviews

There are advantages to being old. If you’re a pensioner, you can turf healthy young whipper-snappers out of their seats on public transport. You can get away with stuff more easily: momentary lapses of memory or concentration, dubious personal hygiene and the like. And you get paid £87.30 a week for sitting on your wrinkly posterior, drinking tea and complaining about the weather.
If you’re a car magazine, the advantages of surviving to a ripe old age are even greater – and there’s none olde...Read the full article

Well done - I used to enormously enjoy those annual re-prints of the year's road tests, a fantastic archive now. I was going to suggest you started mining that resource, and now you are. This is a great step forward, into the past, which of course puts todays's amazing new cars into context.

Anyhow it is all part of Autocar's pedigree and needs to be shared. Hooray.

Ebay has quite a few of those road test yearbooks from the 1950s and 1960s (I know because I've bought loads of them!). To me the tests of ordinary cars are just as interesting as the tests of E-Types and other famous cars from history. Sometimes more interesting.

The shame is that there were no yearbooks before about 1950, so those tests are pretty much lost unless you can afford to buy huge numbers of weekly magazines.

I think Autocar could make a killing by gathering tests from the 1930s and 1940s and publishing them in one volume.

But they'd have to do it properly and reprint them in full, not do edited versions with modernised text. It's the archaic language and expectations that are interesting.

 

 Great stuff.   Brings back memories of sitting in the library as a spotty teenager reading through the roadtest year books ( early 70's ).    Things that stick in my mind included :-

Testing a tuned Europa ( was it a GKN Europa  or something ? ), 

The Zakspeed escort ( 0-60 in 2.5 seconds ! ),

The competition to design a body for the 27litre 6 wheel Merlin engined road car . . 

 

Those were the days . . .    Not really road tests, but can you find some of these please ?     

 

Is it both Autocar & Motor  that you have archives from ?    

 

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