Cartorque Vol 22: ‘car media is changing’

There was a time, not all that long ago when car media felt like a roaring V12. Loud, unapologetic, slightly unhinged, and absolutely everywhere. You couldn’t move for it. Sunday evenings meant settling in for Top Gear, magazines piled up like unopened speeding fines, and even the most mundane hatchback launch was treated with the sort of drama usually reserved for royal weddings or minor wars.

Now? It’s more like a hybrid system that’s forgotten to charge itself. Quiet. Efficient, perhaps. But lacking that glorious sense of occasion.

The end of The Grand Tour last year felt less like the conclusion of a programme and more like someone turning off the lights in a very large, very noisy room. Say what you like about it and many did, loudly, it represented the last bastion of big-budget, personality-driven car television. It was excessive, ridiculous, occasionally brilliant, and crucially, it felt important. Not in the “solving global crises” sense, but in the way a good steak feels important after weeks of salad.

And with that gone, what’s left on television? A handful of earnest documentaries, the occasional reboot attempt, and shows that seem terrified of offending anyone or saying anything remotely interesting. The modern formula appears to be: take a car, drive it politely, mention its efficiency, and conclude that it’s “quite good.” Riveting stuff if you’ve recently suffered a head injury.

Car magazines, meanwhile, still exist. You can find them lurking in airport WHSmiths, sandwiched between crossword books and Toblerone. But they’ve lost their swagger. Once upon a time, these publications were gatekeepers. They shaped opinion, started arguments, and occasionally caused mild diplomatic incidents. Now, they feel… careful. Sanitised. As though every sentence has been passed through three layers of legal approval and a focus group in Milton Keynes.

It’s not that the passion has gone. It’s just been… redistributed.

Because while traditional media has been quietly wheeled into the corner and covered with a dust sheet, something else has been happening. YouTube, social media, podcasts, they’ve taken the baton and sprinted off in a completely different direction. And unlike the old guard, they’re not asking for permission.

Today’s car media landscape is a chaotic free-for-all. You’ve got 20 year olds reviewing supercars with the confidence of seasoned test drivers, blokes in sheds building outrageous machines from scrap, and creators who understand that sometimes, what people actually want is not a lap time or a spec sheet but a story. Or a laugh. Or, heaven forbid, an opinion.

And opinions, crucially, are back.

The problem with old-school car media wasn’t just that it was declining, it was that it had started to take itself far too seriously. Everything became about numbers. Power figures, emissions, 0–60 times, Nürburgring laps. Important, yes. But also about as emotionally engaging as a spreadsheet.

The new wave doesn’t care nearly as much about that. It’s messy, inconsistent, and occasionally completely wrong, but it’s alive. It understands that cars are not just machines. They’re extensions of personality, rolling expressions of bad decisions, ambition, nostalgia, and occasionally midlife crises.

Of course, it’s not all good news. The sheer volume of content means quality varies wildly. For every genuinely insightful creator, there are ten others shouting into a camera about “INSANE POV DRIVES” while doing 28 mph in a leased hot hatch. The barrier to entry has collapsed, which is both a blessing and a curse.

And then there’s the elephant in the room: the cars themselves.

As the industry marches toward electrification, autonomy, and an ever-increasing reliance on software, the very thing that made car media compelling, the visceral, mechanical connection is changing. You can’t wax lyrical about the howl of an engine if there isn’t one. You can’t romanticise a gearbox that doesn’t exist. It’s a bit like trying to write poetry about a microwave.

So where does that leave us?

Car media isn’t dying. It’s evolving, awkwardly, noisily, and without a clear sense of direction. Television has lost its dominance, magazines are fading into nostalgia, and digital platforms have become the new battleground. The personalities haven’t disappeared; they’ve just moved. The stories are still there; they’re just being told differently.

What’s missing, perhaps, is cohesion. That sense that everyone was watching, reading, and arguing about the same thing at the same time. The shared experience. Today, it’s fragmented. Personalised. Algorithm driven.

But maybe that’s the trade-off.

We’ve lost the monolithic giants, the era-defining shows, the magazine covers that could start a pub argument. In return, we’ve gained diversity, immediacy, and a level of accessibility that would’ve been unimaginable twenty years ago.

Still, you can’t help but feel that something important has been left behind. Not just the shows or the magazines, but the sense of theatre. The idea that cars, and the way we talk about them, should be exciting, irreverent, and occasionally a bit stupid.

Because at its best, car media was never really about cars.

It was about the noise they made. See what I did there?

Writer

Adam Woodruff