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posts about #csabacsereresigns more → 
Csaba Csere, Car And Driver Editor-In-Chief, Resigns
Detroit, 1:59 AM
Sat Dec 12
24 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip your editors:
Editor-in-Chief:
Ray Wert | | AIM
Road Test Editor:
Wes Siler |
Weekend Editor:
Murilee Martin |
Associate Editor - Houston:
Associate Editor - Detroit:
Editor-at-Large:
Contributors:
John Krewson |
| posts about #csabacsereresigns more → |
Csaba Csere, Car And Driver Editor-In-Chief, Resigns |
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
12/16/08
R&T and C&D have been sharing writers and content for a long time now. Neither will scoop the other - they alternate their exclusives. C&D has prospered by becoming the Budweiser of US car mags, but the content's just gotten more watered down.
12/16/08
12/16/08
"Red sports car = little penis" is a time-honored truth. :p
12/16/08
I used to get Car and Driver. I also subscribed to Motor Trend, and my Road & Track collection goes back to 1952 (no, I'm not that old, I bought the pre-1974 issues used.) and I got fed up with seeing the same reviews of the same cars with usually the same pictures in each magazine.
Motor Trend was the one I found most appalling with their thinly veiled advocacy of whatever brand had bought the most advertising that month. The fact, brought to light by former staff editor Len Frank, that the Car of the Year was determined by the Advertising staff rather than the Editorial staff was the end of the line for me. I won't even bother picking up an issue to browse at the Newsstand while there to grab a copy of Cheri or Gent.
Car and Driver, epitomized by the brash, unapologetic Brock Yates, was good, but the NASCAR-targeted writing style and greater desire to be clever over being informative eventually began to bore me.
I always loved Road & Track. The focus on European cars, the history, the editors- Henry Manny, Peter Egan, Dennis Simanaitis . . . all great writers and car enthusiasts. I wasn't too happy when they changed the format a few years back to that wider style. The paper stock is too thin and it sags while you read it. Oh well, still great photography.
There are many, many more car mags out there, past and present. Road Test magazine was good, Of course Hot Rod and the other drag-mags are good in that genre, and so many great foreign magazines: CAR, Auto Motor Un Sport, Veloce Today. All great stuff.
These days I get R&T and AutoWeek, but that's pretty much it. Every few years I get Automobile for a while and enjoy it, but there's no passion there. With the Internet, everything in the magazines regarding new cars feels out of date. I still like the classic car magazines, and I'll always get Road & Track, but I think that era of the great American Car Magazine may be in the past. That's kind of a sad thought.
12/16/08
12/16/08
12/16/08
The thing I always liked about C/D over other car mags is that while they did lots of fantastical things like basically initiating the Cannonball Run, or more recently driving a Corvette across the dirt and snow roads of Alaska in winter, you never got the feeling that anything they were doing was anything you couldn't do with a little wherewithal. They're not spending the entire magazine gushing over the latest Lambo or some other exotic supercar nobody will ever get to drive. And they actually like reviewing cars that regular people might buy. And they wrote like regular people, not like some misguided attempt at high literature.
I feel like they've started getting away from that a bit recently, probably under pressure from the upper management, and combining forces with Road and Track isn't going to help matters. It's easy for me to see the forces at work that knocked Csere out. I probably would have left too.
12/16/08
I don't know how or why, but I do!
12/16/08
12/16/08
Ray: get ready to take the drinking game to 4.9 million households across America.
12/16/08
But now where will The Today Show go when they need someone to talk about cars?
Ray: get ready to take the drinking game to 4.9 million households across America.
12/16/08
12/16/08
One of the few writers anywhere who can make me really LOL.
12/16/08
Perhaps with Csaba's departure, C&D might have a shot at becoming great once again. In the meantime, Road and Track and Automobile are stocked in my bathroom.
12/16/08
So, lie back, relax, and tell us how you really feel.
It must be nice to have a bathroom stocked with Road & Track and Automobile, though. Myself, I can barely scrape by with toilet paper, and if the economy gets any worse, I'll be down to newspaper scraps.
12/16/08
But that's what C&D is good for, if it didn't hurt so much...
12/16/08
See!?
Reading C&D may hurt, but dammit, it builds character! It has also been known to build up grammar and punctuation skills.
12/16/08
12/16/08
Csaba Czar?
12/16/08
12/16/08
12/16/08
Stranger things have happened.
Does anyone remember the advent of the trike?
12/16/08
I would absolutely love to see a DVD-ROM set of every Car and Driver ever issued. Who's with me on this?
12/16/08
12/16/08
12/16/08
Dude, that's not fuckin' funny!
I just re-upped for three years, damnit, and I have every issue since 1980.
I'm very glad to see there are others who saw the decline in quality about the turn of the century, but they seem to have fixed most of it. The beater diesel article, the LeMons stuff, and things like that are what keep me coming back.
12/16/08
12/16/08
Csaba used to have far more personality in his work than the majority of auto-writers out there, at the time anyway. Car Magazine, over here, was great throughout the '80s, but the combination of Csaba, and such exotica as the Eldorado 4.1 to read about was manna from nirvana for a 10 yr old British car enthusiast.
Don't retire too much, Mr Csere.
12/16/08
12/16/08
It's funny, the 80s weren't all that great as far as cars, but the mags were super! Of course I was a kid too, so I hadn't become jaded yet and everything was just that little bit more interesting.
12/16/08
12/16/08
And the words used by the reviewer have stuck in my head since I was knee high. "....provides so little acceleration that..." etc.
When I was 10, and I discovered that in America, in 1990, you could buy a "high output, 5 liter V8 producing 205 hp" I nearly pissed myself laughing.
And this glorious irony was never lost on Mr Csere, he tried ever so hard not to crucify any Detroit product which didn't quite come up to scratch, but never quite managed...
And I loved him for that.
12/16/08
Those little 5.0 liter Mustangs weren't much out of the box, but they were specifically designed to react very well to hop-up tricks. For a little more than a grand, you can easily get 400hp out of the little buggers; when was the last time you could do that with a BMW six?
The 5.0 liters gained a huge following not because of how powerful they were from the factory, but from how much do-it-yourself fun and power could be had out of them for pretty cheap.
12/16/08
You can't be telling me that Ford capped the 3.8 V6 at 140hp because they expected people to tune them aftermarket?
12/16/08
No indeed.We usually try not to talk about past US six-cylinder engines, with the exception of the relatively recent "short-star", which was actually a great little engine.
But because of my zealous hot rod/muscle car background, I will always have a love for five engines: the Ford flathead, the Buick nailhead, the Chrysler 440, the Chevrolet small-block, and the Ford 5.0 liter.
And for those five engines, yes, they expected people to tune them aftermarket. And boy did they. Many European large engines have cited higher specific power ratings, but comparatively few have matched the performance, reliability, and flexibility of those five engines.
I'm not hounding on European large engines (especially the ones that have come out in the past 5 years), but I just don't think that they have the same level of simplicity, strength, and tuneability that their American counterparts do.
I admit that US small engines tend to suck balls, however.
12/16/08
American V8s, non-castrated properly tuned form, are at the heart of what I love about cars.