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A wealth of 80s Autocar Roadtests!


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Oh yeah, you might have to sign up to be able to enlarge the pics to readable levels. It's free though.

Epic lad! There's a Piazza test in there as well!Why can't Autocar be as good these days? Nowadays their articles are along the lines of 'we paid just £355 for a pair of tyres for our Focus, we got peace of mind at a dealer'.Their car testing policy is essentially:'Is it a Golf? If it's not, it's shit and we wouldn't buy one.'Messrs Cropley and Sutcliffe still raise the odd chortle though.CAR is another magazine that went to pot, with fickle layout changes and pointless reformatting.Sadly most of the UK perodicals are similarly afflicted. Compare any magazine that's still going now with its equivalent in the mid to late 80's and tell me the standard of writing hasn't gone down.
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As Hirst may have indicated elsewhere, all testers seem to complain/talk about these days is the 'quality of the interior plastics'.Autocar and Car are both terrible - Autocar is barely better than Auto Express now, whereas ten years ago there was a noticeable difference. Car is a ****ing travesty compared to what it was in the 1980s and 1990s.Evo and Classic & Sportscar are the only two I buy now, C&S on subscription and Evo as an impulse buy. Even PPC seems to have gone off the boil a bit, although it is still much better than Practical Classics. I am still undecided about the new Retro Cars. Classic Cars is rubbish compared to C&S, its the 'Emap effect' - although it is now Bauer Media, who prior to purchasing Emap published 'TV Quick' and 'Chat'.All the marque specific stuff is toilet paper in the main - Classic Ford was OK until about 4 years ago, then just turned into an 'old skool' jazz mag.

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CAR is another magazine that went to pot, with fickle layout changes and pointless reformatting.Sadly most of the UK perodicals are similarly afflicted. Compare any magazine that's still going now with its equivalent in the mid to late 80's and tell me the standard of writing hasn't gone down.

Absolutely agree with you about CAR. I was on the verge of cancelling my CAR subscription cos I just dont care what the latest incarnation of Porsche 911 is or how it compares to the last incarnation, however they have just undergone another revamp, and this time its an improvement! :shock: Good, Bad, Ugly has returned and they have given up the infuriating habit of printing 1/3 of an article on one page and the other 2/3rds on the next page along with the 1st 1/3 of the next article GRRRRR!Its still not what it once was, but worth another look.I'm now going to log on the the autocar tests, and may be gone for some time :D
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I've got about 20 years worth of CAR magazines here, but I cancelled my subscription in 2006 I think. Every time I got it the format and editor had changed, I gave up when it went small, square and expensive.I loved the 911 road tests (I love 911s and have had two of 'em), loved all the supercar stuff, but got a bit bored with the 'Golf is best' attitude. At the time I was running a car hire company with a load of then just released Mk5 Golfs which were frankly abysmal - unreliable, badly built, slow (these were mainly SDis and 1.6 FSi jobs) and only slightly less sloppy than the Mk4. Yet car were rating them as 'better than the Focus' which is utter bollocks unless having a squidgy soft-touch dash is more important than a car that actually drives well.Their harping on about the brilliance of the BMW 3 series is a bit tedious as well. They're good cars, but not that much better than the majority of the competition.I now just read Classic and Sportscar and occasionally, for a giggle, 'Practical Classics' - that always amuses me.Autoshite should have a magazine.

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I totally agree, CAR was excellent, especially in the late 80's. Then they used to review a car brillliantly on the basis of engineering merit, value and driving quality.Now it's solely down to "image" of the car as viewed by the writer considering appeal to the target audience. Pathetic.Autocar are sponsored by Ford. How many back-handers and advertising deals are going down there? One glance at their best cars in each category spells it out. No-one comes close no matter what. New Ford = 5 stars... OK don't bore us with the test. Even if there are no favours involved (yeah, right) they should recognise that every Ford from the test fleet is fettled into a superb state way above the normal shitbox you or I could buy. I remember the Mk2 Mondeo was rejected from car of the year because one of the journalists spotted "ECOTY" scribed in to the shockers. What a surprise.The mag I do subscribe to is EVO, which captures a bit of the old CAR spirit sponsoring things like the Panda 100 and being less image driven. I also grab a copy of that rag classic car weekly to flick though the ads.

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I'm not trying to defend the modern rags, but I think the market has changed. More people buy cars for marketing rubbish and dashboard textures than do for engineering reasons these days, I'm sure. The vast majority would probably rather drive a crap car that has image than a good one that doesn't - otherwise all Mercedes-Benz owners would buy Kias instead. Ok, that's extreme, but Joe Public still sees Skodas as crap, Volkswagens as solid and reliable and Japanese cars as dull - even though these days, there's sod all difference between any of them!Sorry if I'm ranting but I've been driving a brand new Citroen C5 a lot recently and I'm quite annoying that actually, it does feel quite German.

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I love how even-handed the road tests were, even the Dacia Duster gets quite a favourable review. They must have considered that someone out there would be after an economical 4x4 with a low purchase price, and a Duster would meet their requirements quite well. I don't think modern road tests are much like that anymore. The Duster would be derided for its cheap plastics, and you'd be told to buy a Freelander or something.

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I love how even-handed the road tests were, even the Dacia Duster gets quite a favourable review. They must have considered that someone out there would be after an economical 4x4 with a low purchase price, and a Duster would meet their requirements quite well. I don't think modern road tests are much like that anymore. The Duster would be derided for its cheap plastics, and you'd be told to buy a Freelander or something.

Yeah I concur! They seem to take the attitude that all the cars are good for a specific person, rather than "don't buy this one or you're an idiot". The Charmant one went along the lines of it being a traditional rear-drive car, a bit dated and unrefined, but good performance and economy, summed up at the end as being ideal for someone who wanted a new car similar in nature to a Cortina/Ital, but now can't get one. And I'm sure there were people out there who still wanted cars like that in the mid 80s.
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I've got a stack of CAR from the eighties and early 90's; absolutely brill. That Autocar test archive looks like a good hours-waster - have they got the infamous road test annual that got James May fired on there?

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I've got a stack of CAR from the eighties and early 90's; absolutely brill. That Autocar test archive looks like a good hours-waster - have they got the infamous road test annual that got James May fired on there?

This one?

 

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My uncle used to have CAR on subscription, and bring a stack of them them up for me when he came to visit. Strangely the bit I loved the most was 'The Good, The Bad and the Ugly' section, I think it was just my level of humour when I was 8-10ish.

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Might have been here before, but check this out: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7869726@N02/sets/ Dozens and dozens of 80s Autocar roadtests, neatly filed into little sets! Brilliant. There's even a very fair review of the Charmant 1300 LC. Many hours of reading to be had here, I love Autocar roadtests.

Ah! You have found my scans then!I've got hundreds more of them in the garage which i need to scan but after moving my pc downstairs i stopped doing then.I've got piles of what car and Motor magazines as well as the Autocar mags all from 1983-1988, nearly every weeks worth!
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Such as "Lada Niva" - Pro's - Good in fields. Cons - So's a Tractor :lol:

The one that stuck in my mind was "Nissan Sunny - The Nissan for the 90s. (80-year-olds will love it too)" :lol:
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Volvo 240. For: Everlasting. Against: Everlasting. Sum-up: Great tow car :lol: Interestingly bias in Autocar for Ford products these days has been mentioned (and I saw Steve Cropley emerge from a new Fiesta at Warwick services on the M40 last month, have a stretch then get back in and drive off!), but looking back at the mid-70s issues of CAR if it wasn't a Citroen GS, Peugeot 504, Renault 16 or something Italian they hated it with a passion - so some things never change :wink:Still, entertaining as Cropley and Sutcliffe (and I'd add Goodwin to that list) can be, they don't compare with the majesty of a George Bishop column!

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Agreed with pretty much all the above about Autocar today. I have been a subscriber for the last four years or so and I'm getting to the point where I'm not sure its worth bothering with anymore.Partly that I don't seem to get around to reading it, partly that when I do there isn't that much of interest. The main reason I still get it is really down to Goodwin / Sutcliffe / Ruppert's articles which I do enjoy.CAR used to be great. I have a couple of mid '90's copies which I occasionally re-read as they are good but everything since has been rubbish. Practical Classics is sometimes good, sometimes not although I do tend to buy it, I like Retro Cars but do feel it's in danger of falling into a big 'scene' trap and becoming shit and to up its own backside but will persist in the hope it doesn't.Why can't we have a Jalopy for the 21st Century?

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I'm quite pleased with myself for not buying magazines any more, I get C+SC on subscription and its a joy to read, but really I can take it or leave in nowadays with mags. I must have a big head cos i think 'yeah theres no point buying a mag, I know it all already', they always have the same stuff in em, specially the old car mags. I sometimes used to rib Ms_Bo##ox for her 'grow your own vegetables' magazines, i think 'what possible new information can they tell you each month?' but in reality its only the same with old cars. I used to diss em, but really theres nowt wrong with car mags, no-ones forcing you to buy em.As for the 'decline' of CAR, i'm not sure it has been in decline. I wonder if its more a question of its readership having different interests now compared to 15-20 years ago. We berate the mags for being german-car-obsessed and getting off on interior plastics, but maybe thats because interior plastics genuinely differentiate cars nowadays and less people want just a cheap practical set of wheels. If you believe the UK has been artificially over-prosperous for the last 10 or 15 years, which it probably has, then its not surprising that its been splashing out on 'premuim' cars. I remember a few years ago, CAR questioning where Ford fits in the modern car market when many of its former staple products - sierras, granadas etc have just disappeared altogethr to be raplaced by A4's and A6's, 320's and 525's. 'Whats the point of ford?' they asked. Good question. Thats the shape the car market has taken, and the car mags are only gonna reflect that. Maybe as a new, lower level of prosperity takes hold in the UK, car tastes will change accordingly and genuine efficiency improvements, lighter cars and deleting of pointless shite accessories might become the fashion. More 'honest' cars. WHo knows.

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I don't bother with any car magazines. Every new car preview is written like an advert and will, without exception, contain the phrases"the new model represents a step upmarket""will be bigger and heavier than the older model""the dashboard features high quality soft touch plastics""contains a new range of diesel engines shared with x"and then everything gets 5 stars

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They are a great read, I brought them all of ebay last year for £20 to sell on ebay as i had 100's before i sold from when i was younger and made good money.

Trouble is i enjoy looking at them to much so haven't got round to doing it yet, So doing the next best them and uploading them to flickr.

 

Here's my collection...

 

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And here a few more i have left from when i was younger, 100's of old Top Gear, brochures and Classic cars mags in here!

 

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Thanks for all your comments by the way, It's help motivate me into restarting to scan them again. :)

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Excellent work trigger, I know what a faff scanning can be so it's much appreciated.

Cheers, It did get a bit boring tbh but i enjoy the comments i get so it helps!.I like the stats you get with Flickr which are now live, I've had someone on a Reliant SS1 post pictures of the test I've scanned afternoon, Funny to see the view count go up!.
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Good work, I've checked them out before. I spent three hours in work doing overtime and read loads. I left about 9pm. :)On the subject of favouritism, I heard years ago Jeremy Clarkson has a thing for Fords. He was flatly refused a Lotus Carlton in the 90's, but Ford stumped up a Cosworth. I understand now why he absolutely hates Vauxhall. It's a shame Top Gear (the TV program) is so biased, it's as if it's meant to be obvious.

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Good work, I've checked them out before. I spent three hours in work doing overtime and read loads. I left about 9pm. :)On the subject of favouritism, I heard years ago Jeremy Clarkson has a thing for Fords. He was flatly refused a Lotus Carlton in the 90's, but Ford stumped up a Cosworth. I understand now why he absolutely hates Vauxhall. It's a shame Top Gear (the TV program) is so biased, it's as if it's meant to be obvious.

--------- Vectra owners, look away now -------------I think he absolutely hates Vauxhalls for the same reason I do. They're dull and the FWD ones don't handle. Vauxhall also manage the unique feat amongst Western European cars of having insanely vague but at the same time cumbersome steering.IMHO The Mk1 Vectra is the most hateful car on the road. I cannot abide them. Nothing about them makes me think "Well, that's a nice touch" with the possible exception of the air-conditioned [1] glovebox on some. They ride badly, handle badly, the seats are awful, the steering is crap, the gearshift is sloppy, the transmission shunt is abysmal, the centre armrest is a fucking travesty and the stereos always sound crap in 'em. Even the cupholders are crap. The mirrors would fit in Barbies handbag, the back seats are immensely uncomfortable, the front ashtray is hopeless as it opens to near horizontal (when they actually open...) the seat fabric on semi-decent spec ones appears designed to attract fluff, the carpets are shoddy, the overhead storage bit in the facelift Mk1 just showers whatever is in it over you if you give it some beans and the door pockets are just the perfect wrong size for everything. I hate 'em.Actually, the RDS clock... yeah, I'll give 'em that.
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My friend has a Vectra Mk1 (or is it Mk2?), it isn't appallingly bad, but not a car that appeals to me. It just has little charm about it. The Ecotec engines seem to eat sensors - I think he spent about £200 replacing them! It is very economical for a large 2.0 car though, it manages over 40mpg easily, according to the luxury MPG readout

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