For the record: how Autocar made its mark

Since its launch, Autocar has documented key world events through the prism of the automotive industry. Kris Culmer revisits 126 years of publication

- Kris Culmer

‘I really wish I weren’t living through a major historical event right now.’ It was meant as dark humour, but this post that appeared on my Twitter timeline in the murky depths of March 2020 made me realise that the Covid-19 pandemic would genuinely be a period forever remembered and analysed. More significantly, it meant that the daily reporting of all of us at Autocar would be looked upon as part of a historical record.

In truth, although pandemics, world wars, oil crises, key car launches, engineering innovations, company failings, worker strikes and legislative upheaval (no bigger example of which can be found than that occurring as you read these words) expectedly come to be seen as major markers, everything on which we report and every letter from a reader that we publish is an indelible and valuable source of fact and contemporary perspective.

Imagine you’re Henry Sturmey in 1897, two years after founding The Autocar, riding atop your sparkling new Daimler, exposed to the elements and having but 4bhp under your right foot and a tiller with which to steer. It’s quite fantastic, indescribably more refined, more powerful, comfier, faster and more obedient than the horse that you and every one of your ancestors had relied upon for primary transport.

“We are very pleased with it,” you write in the magazine’s first ever long-term test report. “All who have yet ridden in it express themselves highly pleased with its comfort. No one need hesitate about purchasing a car under the belief that they are anything but practical articles.”