I just paid my Car & Driver subscription. I hadn't intended on doing it. With all the coverage available online, by the time C&D arrives, it's all old news. Sure there are road tests, editorials and lots of glossy pictures, but with today's frenetic pace it all seems a bit antiquated.
I remember a different era. Growing up in rural Oregon, lots of times I felt like I was on my own planet. Getting a monthly copy of a auto magazine was a real treat. I'd run down to the mailbox and wait excitedly for the daily arrival of contact from the outside world. Inside my issues of Motor Trend and Car & Driver would be fantastic, dream cars. When the Renault / AMC Alliance appeared on Car and Driver's Ten Best list for 1983 and was the 1983 Motor Trend Car of the Year, I believed it must have been a great car! These editors could do no wrong by me. My heros were guys like Tony Swan: guys who wrote about cars for a living. I walked by Tony at the Detroit Auto Show. He was leaving COBO Hall and I kinda felt like chasing him down and telling him how much he had fueled my interest in cars. I didn't want to freak him out, so I didn't do it. Now I kind of regret that.
So here I am this Saturday morning, sitting in front of a renewal notice. C&D is asking for a measly $5 and I have to think about it. A ten year old me would have never believed it! "Five bucks? Are you kidding? Take it!!!" So, just for that 10 year old that still inside of me, I went to C&D website and paid up. I'll probably only skim through those 12 issues, but if one of those copies catches the eye of my two-year-old son and starts a passion inside of him, then five dollars seems a small price to pay.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Car and Driver: Worth $5?
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4 comments:
I felt the same way as a kid in Rhode Island. Years later living in LA I still get those goosebumps when I drive by the Peterson Building. I still subscribe to MotorTrend but now it is quick bathroom reading as most o the news is old by the time it arrives. I'll renew it cuz' every month or about a moment I remember that feeling I had when I was a kid
Granted I lived in town in Oregon growing up. (not Portland or Eugene, but the Willamette Valley nevertheless)I don't recall any feelings of isolation, or that I thought we were the last ones to receive any info.; just frustration that everyone thought all we had in Oregon were dirt roads. Imagine how people in Bend or Prineville or Burns felt back then! Do you suppose it is just the difference of the amount of info. available today that makes the past seem lile that?
Hey thanks for the comments. Yeah, things certainly have changed. With the speed and ease of communication today, isolationism (at least in its old form) are a thing of the past for those folks with an Internet connection. I do wonder what is going to happen to all the classic car magazines out there: AutoWeek, Motor Trend, Automobile, Car & Driver and Road & Track. I just can’t believe that all of those print issues can survive even with reduced subscription prices. We saw what happened when they tried to launch a new, hip auto magazine called MPH: http://www.mph-online.com/ There is already some consolidation of blogs with Cars.com acquiring sites like Motherproof and Pickuptruck.com We’ll see if the trend continues with more mergers and acquisitions.
A year's worth of C & D is still worth way more than $5, IMHO. I buy car mags because the better ones (C & D, Top Gear, and Car in particular) provide consistency of coverage, depth of info, humor, and quality of writing -- all of these four things, in a single place. Few, if any, online source provides more than one of these qualities. Perhaps that's why, like you, I still do get excited when it's time to buy or expect the latest issues at the turn of each month.
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