By the late ’70s, Car and Driver was probably the best of the U.S. car magazines: more acerbic and opinionated than Road & Track, more technically sophisticated than Road Test, and not nearly so fawning and obsequious as Motor Trend. In this 1977 ad in the trade journal Automotive News, editor/publisher David E. Davis Jr. tried to explain his vision for C/D to an audience of potential advertisers.
When this trade ad appeared in early 1977, Car and Driver was moving into what would become the magazine’s best period. Back in the mid-’60s, Davis had boosted the magazine’s profile significantly with some outrageous stunts (like the infamous 1964 GTO road test, the Ferrari-Pontiac 2+2 “comparison,” and the Opel Kadett hit job) and some shameless BMW idolatry. He also made a play for Playboy-like cultural currency by signing up comedian Dick Smothers and humorist Jean Shepherd as columnists. The results were often entertaining, but couldn’t always be taken seriously. For a while, actual road tests and car reviews became depressingly few and far between, often taking a back seat to “lifestyle” features and endless editorial ranting against unleaded gas, speed limits, safety, and smog control.
By 1977, things were turning around. There was again starting to be a decent number of actual cars in Car and Driver, and the quantity and quality of C/D reviews, driving impressions, and technical analysis increased smartly. From this point into the ’90s, almost any given issue of C/D was dense with interesting material, and the worst of its self-important smugness retreated to the editorial pages.
Davis wrote this ad NOT for C/D readers, but rather for auto industry professionals, trying to get them excited about the idea of advertising in Car and Driver. (Automotive News ran a lot of ads in this category, extolling the benefits of buying ad space in different magazines and major newspapers.) Here’s what Davis had to say about his magazine:
(The “Simmons Report” was the Simmons Market Research Bureau Study of Media and Markets, which was one of the major tools businesses used to figure out what kinds of people read different magazines and newspapers back in the days before everyone had spyware on their phones tracking their every move.)
Here’s the full text of the ad, so you don’t have to squint:
The Truth Well Told…
“Most people try to tell the truth; surely all of us are capable of it. Truth must be the only important commodity that has not sharply escalated in price in the last two decades. Whether or not it has become more scarce probably depends upon who you talk to. Since access to truth is universal, one must present it with a certain amount of style and wit if one is to attract an audience. Truth is truth, but some people tell it better than others. We will strive to be truthful about cars and their related activities, but we aspire to a better telling of those basic automotive truths.Nuts and Bolts…
“We are, after all, a car magazine. Hence the first half of our title. A pure literary effort might have been easier, but our love is for automobiles. Therefore, we drive them, experience them, dissect, examine and criticize them. But most of all we enjoy them, right down to the last lock washer and gudgeon pin. The result of all this we share with our readers—whom we sometimes entertain, sometimes outrage, but seldom bore.Nice People…
“Our readers are our friends, and yours. There are roughly two million of them: well-educated, affluent young people who love cars. Cars are their hobby, their sport, their passion. Cars are also their cause—a cause we enthusiastically support. They would agree with Henry Ford II and Walter Reuther, who called the automobile ‘the fifth freedom’. They are, at present, too good-humored and good-mannered to go to the barricade in defense of the automobile, and this has put them at a disadvantage with the bureaucratic zealots who would destroy it. This could change.The Good Life…
“The automobile is the vehicle—both symbolic and real—with which four generations of Americans travelled to a standard of living that is still the envy of the entire world. Even now, after eighty years, the automobile’s replacement is not yet in sight. The good life is entwined with the innovative and enlightened control of technology, with personal mobility (freedom) and with the average American’s unwillingness to take too seriously either himself or those who would impose upon him their own constricted view of an American Utopia.“So that’s what Car and Driver is all about: cars and drivers certainly, but also the truth well told, nuts and bolts, nice people and the good life. For our readers, that’s what everything is all about.”
CAR AND DRIVER: That’s what we call it, because that’s what its about.
At least half of this was hooey (and the crack about “going to the barricade in defense of the automobile” is an unwelcome reminder that if it had been up to guys like Davis or Motor Trend editor Eric Dahlquist, we still wouldn’t have unleaded gasoline or airbags). However, pomposity and pretension were always key ingredients of the “David E.” brand, and he was hardly about to tone it down when trying to “sell” C/D to advertisers.
But, perhaps despite himself, Davis had managed to make Car and Driver into a pretty good magazine, and I still miss what it used to be.
You can find quite a few vintage C/D reviews here on Curbside Classic by browsing through the “Vintage Reviews” menu below the main logo. (I’ll soon be getting a big batch of Car and Driver back issues from this period, so there will be more vintage C/D content coming in the new year!)
Looking forward to content based on the magazines. I used to keep a lot of old magazines… Specialty Interest Auto (which became Hemmings Classic Car and also their Sport & Import offshoot,) Auto Week, and Automobile with David E. Davis, Jean Jennings, and others. I am down to just a few copies with my favorite cars. The Davis article comparing the Subaru to the Model T comes to mind along with the Opel Kadett article. I do enjoy some of those P. J. O’Rourke articles as well.
I miss Automobile of the Davis and Jennings era, always an engaging and entertaining read from cover to cover. When Davis turned over the chief editorial reins to Jennings in 2000 and then the presidency in 2006, she kept the faith in its founding ethos admirably, but as of 2014 when its new corporate overlords ousted her along with 90% of the magazine’s staff, its rapid descent into also-ran irrelevance over the remainder of my final subscription term was stark and lamentable. I see Jennings passed away almost exactly a year ago; adios, amiga, and thanks for the many delightful rides.
We could also add Collectible Automobile to the list, the late auto historian Jeffrey Godshall used to do some good articles about some various Chrysler models.
Still, it’s weird today to see then Motor Trend, Car & Driver, Road & Track are now under the same umbrella of Hearst Communications. If we said then back in 1980 or 1985 then one day, Car & Driver and Motor Trend will be owned by the same group, people would have laughed at us.
It could be interesting to see if car magazines from the Southern Hemisphere like Wheels from Australia and Car from South Africa tried a more or less similar approach to Car & Driver at the same era.
The quality of writing in Car and Driver in those days was incredibly high. It’s still a well-written magazine, but it was incredible then. Personally I thought the photography was better after David E. left in the mid-Eighties.
Agreed. It might have been what was known as ‘gonzo’ journalism, but the caliber of writing and editing in Car and Driver during the DED era was superior to MT or R&T and more on par with literary magazines like Esquire and Vanity Fair.
The sad part is the manner in which David E. Davis would end his storied career and descend into irrelevence. After he left C&D, he founded ‘Automobile’. As the years went on, he became more and more aloof to the point of being a tad too elite and erudite for American tastes (he freely admitted that Automobile was targeted to be something akin to a domestic version of the glossy, bound European ‘Car’ magazine) which simply never found a following that matched his peak at C&D or the other two, big, domestic auto rags.
I believe DED’s relevance is better appreciated when you consider some of his earlier years when he aspired to race an MG TD and wound up flipped with the pavement grinding away his face. His wife was sickened by by his disfigurement and this marriage didn’t last. After overcoming some early obstacles and turning SCI into an enduring publication he must have felt deserving of his power. He set a high standard and the current C and D does seem a bit pale by comparison. That he was proud of his son’s involvement in Shakesperian theater reveals broad life interests and perhaps there is a window here to an era that has passed.
I will politely, but very strongly disagree that Car and Driver is still a well-written magazine. There isn’t a single editor there whom I feel is capable of writing coherent, entertaining, and informative prose…or permitted to.
It’s the thinnest emulation of the formative Davis years and the decent Bedard, Philips, and Swan. There’s no depth to the current material. No personality emerges onto the page whatsoever. Every article is the same hackneyed formula of blandly citing horsepower and 0-60 stats, making a big deal out of 3/10s of a second, vague malleable driving impressions, and fully ignoring critical information about the vehicle. The days of providing technical information on powertrains and suspension geometry and why they matter are long gone; there are no automotive insiders anymore, just people with unremarkable writing degrees. The attempts at humor are eye-rolling. The opinions are filtered and then decaffeinated. The logic is tortured, the outcomes predetermined, the cliches practically write themselves. I dare anyone to get through the 10Best articles that just landed and be either entertained or informed.
Quiroga fawns over an $80K Porsche crossover with a VW engine and that’s about all that needs to be said of editorial leadership. At least when Davis was infuriating people he was interesting.
Whether this is all due more to the declining talent pool or the atrocious attention spans of the current era is up for debate.
Motortrend is even worse.
I agree. And I think the reasons are multiple. One of them is simply the fact that once upon a time bright young people saw journalism and writing for a car magazines as an aspirational career. No more; they long ago headed to tech or finance for that. What really bright kid would chase a career at today’s auto magazines or websites? Can you imagine a true intellectual like LJK Setright being interested in a career writing about cars today? Not.
This also reflects the whole “journalism” industry; as it’s become highly fragmented it’s almost impossible to enjoy the kind of exposure and prestige that was once available by writing for one of three or so magazines that had the market for themselves. How many auto-themed websites are there today? Never mind the infinite auto-themed amateurs at FB, Instagram and other social media. It’s an atomized market.
And then there’s the simple fact that cars do not nearly hold the interest in the wider (and younger) population as they once did. Car magazines were lifestyle magazines, like Playboy, Town & Country, Esquire, and so many others. That’s all dissolved into our hyper-fragmented world dominated by influencers and celebrities. Nobody would spend all that time with a magazine today like we once did.
Once upon a time we were thirsty for words; we’d look forward to that monthly fat magazine and devour every article (and even the ads), no matter if many were banal. Now we’re drowning in words (and video). And our attention spans are shot. No wonder men don’t read books anymore, and university students don’t read their assigned books fully.
Here’s the painful reality: the online auto “industry” is now all about Google Discover; getting on that is the key to higher stats and revenue. And writers at websites are mostly paid based on how successful they are at that. Even CC does it; we could not survive if we didn’t. But the difference is that when it comes to history, we do it with generally a higher degree of accuracy, context and insight. Go to a site like Jalopnik and see how it’s changed; it too started out with bright young writers creating engaging content; now it’s just a Google Discover mill.
It’s going to get worse as AI increasingly informs what content will do best online, and increasingly writes or drafts the content. That’s already happening to a very considerable extent. Someday we’ll look back on the golden days of car magazines as a long-lost period of time that was a very different world. Well, most younger folks already do that. And it’s certainly not coming back.
Probably entirely correct, unfortunately. I’m only in my forties but I’ve now passed into a world I no longer understand.
You had to have been a GearHead back then to understand .
We simply didn’t know how much better our engines would run and cleaner too along with lasting far longer .
I have too many books to be saving magazines but I surely appreciate the articles reproduced here .
-Nate
It’s the controversial cranks and openly flawed writers that are often the most interesting. Davis could write an article you’d actually want to read even if half of it was snobbish BS set out for all to see.
Davis, Yates, Setright, Lindamood, they were characters and they wrote like it. And because of that an article about a car was often more about the storytelling and the journey. C&D did OK through the early-aughts in my view. More buttoned down, but they had editors with competent technical and race backgrounds like Bedard and Swan who could write decently and you could often trust their impressions of a vehicle. John Philips was enormously entertaining. I tried to find his 1980s Nissan Pathfinder review where he spills bourbon all over a cabin in the woods and freaks out the proprietor, but couldn’t. It’s the perfect example of an article about a car that is so much more than the car. And the type of article you never see anymore, because there isn’t a writer like that anymore.
Ezra Dyer, John Pearly Huffman, there’s some spark there, especially Dyer. But he works under what seems to be a stifling umbrella. Jack Baruth is probably the most interesting contemporary automotive writer–he’s brash and unafraid of upsetting people and immensely talented at assembling a sentence, but he’s too much for a lot of folks and isn’t in the business anymore.
Might you be referring to this, by Phillips?
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/columns/a15114493/john-phillips-nissan-pathfinders-remembered-column/
Only partially to the excellent points raised here, but I really hate how C/D’s current website grinds up old magazine content into something “modern” instead of simply providing straight-forward access to the original articles. The end result is writing that is mostly entirely devoid of context, and I find that jarring and disappointing. Kind of like taking Moby Dick and breaking it up into a million 6 word phrases that can be printed on fortune cookie fortunes. But that’s the web for you.
I’m glad that Aaron S. will be featuring more actually vintage C/D reviews in the coming year.
Ah, yes. That’s the one! An excerpt of the best of it, anyway.
“two liters of Old Grand-Dad that slipped out of my wet hands, hit the floor, and launched hydrant-quality freshets of bourbon and daggers of glass over the kitchen and stove, where the liquor sizzled into amber steam that smelled like burnt molasses. My Siberian husky, Sooka, backed into a corner and began panting; the stove had become a kind of Appalachian volcano…Mrs. Bookman, the proprietor…found me on hands and knees, nearly naked, sweating and cursing as I toiled in a pool of liquor and glass next to a stove so hot that it had achieved near transparency…she caught me at a moment when I had no cordial chit-chat prepared. All I could summon was, “This goddamn bourbon—it’s everywhere.” Her lips never moved. I don’t think she tried to fashion a word. I can’t say she backed into the darkness, because I never saw her feet move. She just evaporated into the night”
C&D will need entirely new staff, an entirely different non-megacorporate owner, and a nearly new audience who can write a complete grammatically-correct sentence without the assistance of AI before it will ever be able to publish anything remotely as good as that.
Nailed it. I was an R&T loyalist subscriber for way too long, but after what I think of as the Ron Wakefield Era, C&D caught more of my attention and I bought both for years. Vastly entertaining, technically sharp (sometimes brutal) and somehow just much more relevant to the times.
That was me, as well. As a teenager and wannabe engineer I loved Wakefield, with a side helping of Henry Manney, but grew to appreciate CD as I grew older. Though I never cared for Davis, let alone Yates. I think there are a handful of good automotive YouTubers but oh, the bad ones. And number of viewers seems to have no correlation to quality.
Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I think the vast majority of “serious” YouTubers on virtually all subjects just have no idea how to do television. On the other hand, incompetently shot, clumsily narrated DIY repair videos have saved me countless hours, so it’s a wash.
This could be a political ad:
The Good Life…
“The automobile is the vehicle—both symbolic and real—with which four generations of Americans travelled to a standard of living that is still the envy of the entire world. Even now, after eighty years, the automobile’s replacement is not yet in sight. The good life is entwined with the innovative and enlightened control of technology, with personal mobility (freedom) and with the average American’s unwillingness to take too seriously either himself or those who would impose upon him their own constricted view of an American Utopia.“
Car magazine glossy and bound? All UK car magazines were glossy and bound by the 70s. What marked Car out was that it didn’t cover up the faults. It’s seminal Good Bad and the Ugly guide to cars torpedoed the cozy consensus that had bedevilled the very gentlemanly approach of Motor and Autocar. And led to ad boycotts. Car always considered C/D it’s spiritual brother by not sugar coating the strengths and weaknesses of US cars.
As to “The Truth Well Told” C/D certainly stretched that at times, including blatant distortions and willful hatchet jobs, like the infamous Opel Kadett assassination.
And as to “The Good Life” that has become problematic due to the increasing income/wealth distribution and our changing feelings about exotic cars and such. Once upon a time, exotics were mostly driven by folks who appreciated the skills required (and were often amateur racing/rally drivers). Today they’ve become the toys of the super-rich to show off. What can one do with a McLaren F1 or Ferrari on the street other than crash it in a Youtube video? I once lusted after exotics; no more. We’ve become too socially fragmented and identified with our cars.
I was 4 years old when this ad was published, so I don’t have first-hand recollections of the era, but I certainly remember what my father thought.
Dad, who was a car enthusiast, passionately hated Car and Driver. I never quite figured out why. He subscribed to R&T (his favorite… he saved every issue), and Motor Trend (but he threw them out once read). But never C&D. In fact, he forbade me from spending my own money on Car and Driver magazines… like it was some kind of taboo.
But his aversion wasn’t related to David E., because in 1986, when Davis started Automobile magazine, Dad immediately subscribed. I still don’t understand what his aversion was… maybe a throwback to his opinions back in the 1960s. Anyway, in recent years, I’ve acquired quite a few vintage C&D issues from this era, and I generally enjoy reading them.
I greatly appreciated Davis’s writing style, once I started reading him in Automobile. As Paul alludes to above, I found his storytelling to be far more engaging than either the very technical R&T articles of the time, or the dumbed-down MT slop. When I moved out on my own in the 1990s, I subscribed only to Road & Track, because by that time, I felt that Automobile’s writing had wandered a bit far from cars, and became too lifestyle-oriented. Sometime in the 2000s, I dropped the R&T subscription as well.
It was a thrilling monthly trip to the mailbox when my mom got me a subscription in the early 1980s. There were some memorable articles. Technically I preferred the 4 wheel drive magazines with real technical information, The seriousness of them was revolving though and a subscription was risky as changes in direction meant you could start with a very useful publication and it could go to fluff withing the year. Four Wheeler, Pickup Van and 4WD in the early years and Off Road when Moses Ludel wrote there were ones I liked.
My uncle bought me a two year Car and Driver subscription for my 14th birthday in September 1969. What a great magazine… then. And (though it was a bit before my time) I think Brock Yates’ article ‘The Grosse Pointe Myopians’ in the April ’68 C&D was one of the most insightful articles on any industry anywhere, especially given Detroit’s dismal trajectory since.
I could go on forever about my fascination with C/D from the mid-1970s until Davis went off to start Automobile. I still have my entire Automobile collection starting with issue number 1 and running for over a half-dozen years. Anyhow, most of my key points have been made by others here. Clearly we are of the same tribe.
I’ll just add that it was through regular reading of C/D that I came to an adult appreciation for authors whose writing I could very much admire, even though I suspected (or knew) that the person behind it was someone I would strongly dislike if I actually had met them off the printed page. P. J. O’Rourke was another one of those authors. And while I suspected that Jean Jennings was someone I’d gladly have a beer with, her seeming affinity for Davis always puzzled me (and from what I’ve read, it puzzled her as well). These writers and their work were part of my coming of age and helped develop my understanding of how to hold two opposing thoughts at once.
Thank you for publishing this.
If you want to know the absolute truth about DED, read the obituary written by Jack Baruth, which you can easily find on the web.
It is hilarious, and accurate.
End of story.
It is quite good. But knowing Jack as I do, I know he’d love to go down that same road himself, if he could. Success and fame is a powerful drug, and few can resist its resulting temptations.
I’m reasonably certain that David E. Davis’ departure from C&D (for good) coincided with the magazine’s transfer from Ziff-Davis to Peterson Publishing. You know, the same guys who publish the auto industry shill Motor Trend.
That, in a nutshell, says it all.
No, IIRC he had a meeting with Rupert Murdoch who strongly encouraged and supported him. He knew that the only way to make serious money was to be an owner.
Peter Egan was perhaps my favorite, along with many others mentioned. Not mentioned at all was the eccentric SportsCar Graphic, home of some excellent and extremely quirky writers like Warren Keith, Ted West, and Kyle __? (that guy with the cigarette hanging out of his mouth). Never forgot their very last issue: large words “Our Final Triumph!” displayed on the cover, with the writers standing around a well-rotted TR-3 sitting forlornely in the middle of an overgrown field, all rather typical of their flippant tongue-in-cheek style. Also gracing SCG’s pages were contributors like Peter Revson, Mark Donahue, Bob Bondurant, Karl Ludvigsen, Bernhard Cahier, LJKS, real-life participants in the very dynamic auto scene of the 1960s. SCG was unceremoniously folded into MT, and the fun all but disappeared.
May I help with your memory here? I was a big fan of Warren Weith and he was that guy with the cigarette hanging from his mouth. Another thing that’s killing the magazine industry is ‘subscription services’ that rob profit from content providers, adding an unnessesary layer to our desire for independent journalism. Don’t ever give them your credit card number. they are sneaky!
It’s easy also to confuse Sports Car Graphic with Sports Cars Illustrated which DED took over.
Also, Peter Egan was employed by Road & Track and Cycle World.
It’s sad- all car magazines today are product brochures that never say anything truly negative about ‘the product’. The reviews are all the same, with a fill-in-the-blank format.
Even the performance mags are losing ground- Hot Rod is now a quarterly for crying out loud. I guess the days of dialing in a Carter AFB by flashlight with a grubby magazine on the fender are over.
More’s the pity.
I used to buy Car and Driver off and on in the 90s, my favorite copy, which I still have somewhere, was the December 1999 issue which featured a year early tribute to the auto industry, it was both informative and hilarious.
C&D was my favorite mag back in the 70s and 80s – all the contributors were skilled and entertaining. Yates and Phillips always guaranteed a good belly laugh. And the way they used to tease Don Schroeder was hilarious.
I didn’t start to read Car & Driver regularly until 1979, when I joined the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which had subscriptions to all the buff books plus industry publications like Automotive News. It quickly became my favorite among the “Big Three,” even though I found Davis and Yates insufferable for their reactionary views on emissions, fuel economy, and especially vehicle and highway safety.
However, they were quite talented and I pretty much gobbled up every issue. I especially liked the comparision tests, where C&D was unafraid to rank the cars in order of preference, which Motor Trend would hardly ever do.
I too lament automotive prose of days gone by. My first subscription was to Motor Trend – which quickly turned me on to superior writing found in C&D. I subscribed to C&D from 1993 to 2005. I wasn’t a keen fan of the editorial shift that took place at the beginning of the decade, when younger writers like Quiroga, Webster and Robinson became more prominent. So I let my subscription lapse, as I felt my money was best spent elsewhere.
Years later I was offered a job working with the University of Georgia. On my spare time I discovered that the science library had all these vintage issues of C&D, R&T, and MT on microfilm. So I started scanning articles as time permitted, saving scans as .PDF’s. I now have over 7,000 articles in digital format.
What I discovered through this wayward hobby was how much better the prose was before I began reading car magazines. The editorial staff at C&D during the eighties was magnificent. I’m a big fan of the lesser known writers, my favorites being Rich Ceppos and Jean Jennings, honorable mention going to Tony Swan – who did fine work for MT before joining C&D.
I don’t know what changed along the way, though it appears a big factor is writers not having the autonomy to craft an article in their own particular style. If I were to peruse a C&D issue c.1984, I could tell who was responsible for penning an article even without attribution. I don’t think I could do the same today. Everything reads as if it were generated by AI – and probably is.
Aside from my parents, there are only a few people who have had a direct mentoring influence on my entire life, and DED was one of them, although he wouldn’t have remembered it 10 minutes later.
Not to get too personal, but I’m a stubborn person with a temperament that I’ll describe as somewhat dreamy and divorced from reality, and I’m not terribly money-driven or focused on goals. When I was 19, I was absolutely in the weeds about what I should do as a career; on a whim, I emailed (a new thing back then) DED at Automobile Magazine about what I should do to become an automotive journalist. Surprisingly, he emailed back with an opinion, and between that email and a few conversations with a particularly charismatic older female lawyer/adjunct professor who taught one of my classes, I made a decision that I more-or-less stuck with. It didn’t turn out the way I expected, and I was my own worst enemy some of the time, but had DED said literally anything else that day, my life would have almost certainly been completely different, and probably not in a good way. That’s how desperate I was for some direction.
Little did I know at the time that his vision of things was probably rooted in the past and might not have been the best advice for the 1990s and beyond, but it doesn’t matter that much. I asked for his advice, something I rarely do (the stubborn thing), and he gave it. So here’s to DED, a giant in his field who was willing to spend a minute or two answering a kid’s email.
In light of everything said here, DED,Jr. might want to be best remembered by his own words: “I am not an automotive expert, nor a pundit, nor an analyst, I am a car nut…” (from the overleaf of Thus Spake David E.) That might go a long way in explaining why he impacted so many readers.
I was a regular reader of C&D and R&T in the late ’70s,early to mid ’80s.
I imagined C&D more “West Coast” (via Ann Arbor,MI) and laid back.
R&T was more “establishment / East Coast”
I enjoyed ’em both. They were a better read than the local Modern Motor and Wheels. And they had road tests of cars that actually interested me. American cars.