The bond we share - a love for the automobile

As I write this, it’s 5am and the entire team is slaving away to ensure that you get an absolutely perfect 10th anniversary issue in your hands. When I started this magazine a decade ago, it was much the same process – although I think closing the first issue took us about 48-hours straight. ‘We’ll get it streamlined,’ I thought. Well, it’s still a work in progress clearly! As they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day – and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t built in a decade either.

Nevertheless, in that time, here’s what we’ve been able to build – even if we’ve missed the mark on efficiency, hopefully we’ve created a platform that embodies our collective passion for these lovely machines that we get to sample on your behalf. If it weren’t for you folks, well, we’d probably be tinkering about with RC cars instead of the newest and most exotic machines at racetracks around the world. A decade ago, we had to come up with innovative ways in which to fill these pages. Now the hardest decisions are deciding what to leave out, because there’s simply so much happening in the Indian automotive universe – it’s something that we’re extremely fortunate to be a part of.

We can only hope to do what we do best – have an absolute blast while staying true to our ideals of honesty and integrity. In order to be as transparent as possible, we rate every new car and bike that’s been launched in the past year (well, all those that we can collect at the BIC for a couple of days anyway) in the most objective way we can. Honestly, though, show us speed and power and we’re likely to nudge objectivity off a cliff. At the end of the day, we do what we do because we have an undying love for these exquisite machines that are turned out by gifted engineers and designers from different backgrounds. We do attempt to critique, of course, but we’re bound by a common interest – a love for the automobile, no matter what shape and size. And it’s this bond that we hope to forge with you via the pages of this magazine.

This industry is changing like never before, as manufacturers attempt to meet tighter global regulations that hope to lead us to a more sustainable future. Well, necessity is the mother of invention. So, as the landscape changes so will the solutions.

Hopefully we won’t all be ferried around in driverless pods, and some of you will still consider the act of driving a pleasurable one...