I am neither a home car mechanic nor a hot driver, to the contrary. However, like most kids of my generation, I took a strong liking to cars almost as soon as I could walk, learned the names of makes and models, and made a fetish of designs of sheet metal and interiors, and was generally fascinated for most of my young life. In high school, a slightly older male cousin had his parents give me Car and Driver for Christmas. It was, and still may be, a sophisticates car mag, a lot about professional drivers and high performance machines, no muscle cars or hot rods or drag machines. Over the past few years, I've subscribed to the magazine Automobile, which distinguished itself with serious reporting and writing far superior to what other car mags offered. For a while, several of the other car magazines turned toward writers who seemed to be advertising copywriters with little factual grasp of the automobiles themselves. Like too many print magazines, Automobile went out of business, and I was offered online Motor Trend to fulfill the subscription. I prefer my car mags in print, so I pilfered a subscription card from a Motor Trend at a bookstore and sent off for two years for $18, but only after reviewing a recent issue in a waiting room and finding it well written and reported and balanced in coverage between dream cars and real consumer cars in all dimensions. Are you a car magazine junkie, and if so which ones and why?
