Autocar’s Digital Archive Is Like Spotify For Car Mag Geeks

It’s easy to forget how easy music lovers have got it these days. Satellite radio gave us access to dozens more stations, but the real game changer was Apple’s iPod, followed by streaming. Now you can call up anything from the latest K-Pop tune to a Bach cello suite at the push of a virtual button.

Companies like Spotify have crammed millions of songs, or at least access to them, into something the size of a pack of playing cards. Fifteen years ago things weren’t so simple. I remember setting off for the two-day drive from the UK to Malaga in the south of Spain in a Porsche 911 GT3 for a rendezvous with the then-new BMW M3 with two bags: one full of clothes, the other crammed with enough CDs to keep me sane (European radio is awful).

And now it looks like a similar miniaturization process is about to take place with my sprawling collection of old car magazines. British weekly magazine Autocar has just launched a subscription service that allows members to access almost every issue it has ever produced for £7.99 ($11) per month, or £74.99 ($103) annually, with a concession for subscribers to the current print product.

We’re talking a forest’s worth of car literature. The world’s oldest surviving car mag, Autocar was first published in 1895 when there were just six cars on Britain’s roads, meaning Archive Digital, the company doing the scanning and uploading, had to digitize 6,180 issues and over 1.2 million pages.

Not many people are going to find themselves wading through the really early years unless they’re doing a serious historical project. I’ve actually flicked through the physical bound volumes before, and the 1890s stuff makes a telephone directory feel lively. In fact, when it comes down to it, most of the 126 years is cactus-dry compared to the kind of stuff the likes of Car & Driver were putting out in the 1960s and 1970s, and I say that having written some of it.

But as a record, it’s hard to beat. As Autocar‘s current editor, Mark Tisshaw, says, the history of Autocar is pretty much the history of the car. And if, like me, you want to hear what reviewers thought of cars when they were new, and how fast they really went, rather than read someone’s perspective of say, a Lamborghini Miura today, based on experience of driving a car that’s now too valuable to really beat on, let alone send down a drag strip, this is great news.

The Power Of iPad

The process of converting paper to pixels in this case is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it uses Archive Digital’s proprietary app working via a regular Apple iPad Pro rather than a conventional (and hugely expensive) scanner. In the past a human would have to manually check and adjust each image, but here, the clever software automatically corrects things like color, and even the curvature of the page.

Which is one of the beauties of this system. Most scanning projects are destructive, and nobody really wants to be the person who trashes probably the only surviving copy of a 120-year old bound volume just to get a flat image. No Autocar issues were harmed in the making of this digital archive which occupied the lives of four people and their two assistants for seven straight months.

Smart Search

But the really clever thing is the search function. Instead of simply creating a jpg image of each page (which I naively tried to do with my own collection before realizing how ridiculous it was, giving up and reluctantly sending years of copies to the recycling center), the software actually reads the words, discarding the useless ones and compiling an index from the rest. Want to find an article about the global premiere of the Ford Sierra Cosworth and don’t want to spend days flicking through endless magazines looking for a Cossie-shaped needle in a digital paper stack? No problem.

Other titles from the same publishing house, including What Car?, Classic & Sports Car, and Autocar’s one-time rival Motor, which was absorbed by Autocar in 1988, are in the works. Clearly the only sensible thing to do would be to offer a choice of single-title subscriptions or a multi-title package for a bigger fee. But it appears that each magazine operates as its own business and wants to keep the money separate.

That seems short-sighted, because as interesting and comprehensive as Autocar’s archive is, I’d prefer to read a multitude of voices. In fact, what I’d really love to see is some kind of Spotify or Apple Music-type service that collated the back catalogues of a huge number of different car magazines, all accessible for one monthly or yearly payment.

That kind of thing already exists in print through Brooklands Books. The company has been around for over 60 years and got started when the founder couldn’t buy a service manual for his old Morgan, but discovered an out of print one and bought the rights to re-publish it.

These days Brooklands re-publishes original services manuals and other books, too, but the best stuff is in the road test books. Each volume is focused on one particular car, or genus of car, and contains a collection of period road tests, track tests, comparison tests and reviews from the likes of Autocar, Car, Car & Driver, Road & Track, and long departed mags like Car Life, Road Test, and Fast Lane.

I know it’s geeky, but I absolutely love these books. I’ve bought dozens with my own money, and saved even more from a skip when Car Magazine’s publisher stupidly decided to get rid of its reference library to make way for a few extra desks. The nerd in me enjoyed reading them when I was a teenager and for the past 20 years of used them regularly as an information resource when writing stories. But they take up a fair chunk of office space, and my collection is nowhere near complete. Plus, some of the older copies are now long out of print.

I reached out to Brooklands Books to see if they had any plans to digitize their back catalogue, but haven’t had a reply. I’m still hopeful. If I can fit everything on my phone, I’m in line to recover an entire room of my house.

Autocar‘s online resource is at TheMotoringArchive.com.