Why I love...MOTORING HISTORY

You might have noticed that this magazine's ‘Lost in the archive’ page is usually written by me - voluntarily so. The reason is simple: I’m utterly fascinated by history.

- BY KRIS CULMER

The intrigue of times past has had me in a chokehold since, well, ever since I can remember. When Autocar decided to digitise its then 125-year archive in 2020, I naturally flung myself into the project. It was more trouble than we ever imagined, but now we have an invaluable and unique resource for academics and enthusiasts alike: the entire history of the car, documented as it happened, week by week. Not just facts but perspectives, opinions, societal context - things that are simply impossible to reconstruct, due to involuntary hindsight. Stories that haven’t yet crossed onto the internet. Best of all, text recognition allows us to track the development of stories across the years with a simple word search, rather than having to painstakingly comb annual indexes, where those even exist.