Where Autocar and Classic & Sports Car archive old road tests

Two magazines, two complete back catalogues

If you want to read the original printed road test of a classic, not a modern writer's memory of it, two names answer the question. Autocar and Classic & Sports Car have both turned their entire back catalogues into searchable digital archives, built by a platform called Exact Editions, open to anyone who pays for access.

Autocar's archive holds 6,749 issues, archived from 2 November 1895, the week the magazine itself first appeared, and the title still calls itself the world's oldest car magazine. Access on the web, iOS and Android apps costs £33.99 a quarter or £129.99 a year.

Classic & Sports Car's own archive is smaller but covers its whole life too, 539 issues since its first edition in April 1982. It costs £12.99 a quarter or £45.99 a year, and went live online in February 2025, built by the same Exact Editions platform that runs Autocar's.

Why restorers and judges want the original text

A period road test recorded what a factory actually claimed about a car when it was new. Printed horsepower, the claimed 0 to 60 time, the colour and trim options offered, the launch price, all set down in the week the car went on sale, before any later change to the car or to the story about it.

Restorers use that original text to check whether a car in front of them now still matches what left the factory. Concours judges and auction houses lean on the same back numbers to cross check a seller's claims about a car's history, since nobody can edit a 1965 magazine page after the fact. That is the real value of an archive on this beat, not nostalgia, but a fixed, dated record to check a car against.

What this means for an Indian owner

Autocar is licensed in sixteen countries, including India, so the Autocar India that reaches Indian newsstands is a separate edition. The digitised archive going back to 1895 is the original British parent magazine's own back file, and an Indian owner searching it for how a British car was reported on when new is paying a British platform, in British pounds, for British back issues.

Cars that were never sold in Britain do not show up in either archive. A Hindustan Motors Ambassador or a Premier Padmini was never road tested by Autocar or Classic & Sports Car, so owners of those cars in India still rely on old Indian club newsletters, forum threads and cuttings from Indian magazines instead, since no equivalent complete digital back file exists for Indian motoring print yet.

In the United States, the instinct runs differently. Hemmings Motor News was founded in 1954 by Ernest Hemmings in Quincy, Illinois, as a classified ad sheet for owners of old cars, and it still works mainly as a marketplace rather than a searchable text archive. American collectors cross check a car's ownership and price history through decades of its classified pages rather than a keyword search of old road tests.

For an Indian owner chasing proof of what a classic looked like, cost or measured when new, the two British digital archives are currently the closest thing to a verified paper trail that exists outside a factory's own records, provided the car was ever sold in Britain in the first place.

Sources

• Autocar Digital Archive subscription page
• Classic & Sports Car Digital Archive subscription page
• Classic & Sports Car launches digital archive, InPublishing
• Explore the Classic & Sports Car Digital Archive, Exact Editions Blog
• Autocar (magazine), Wikipedia
• Hemmings Motor News, Wikipedia