80 years of the Autocar road test

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 older than us. That’s why, as well as bringing you all the very latest road tests and first drives before anyone else, we can serve up a growing selection of road tests direct from our archive to your computer screens.

We’ve just looked up classic tests on the likes of the Aston Martin DB7 Vantage, the Jaguar E-type V12, the BMW 2002Tii, and the Ferrari Testarossa. In fact, the full list of them now available on Autocar.co.uk is below: there are 118 at the moment, and we’re uploading news ones every week, so keep an eye on this list as it grows.

Now, where are those rose-tinted spectacles?