About Autocar Indonesia

Autocar Indonesia

Autocar Indonesia was the Indonesian edition of Autocar, the British motoring magazine founded in 1895 and described as the world's oldest car magazine. Published in Jakarta in Indonesian and English by the MRA Group, it brought the parent title's road-test tradition to Indonesian readers until its final print edition in October 2017. The magazine was known for its reviews, comparisons and road tests of new cars sold in Indonesia, and for the Autocar Reader's Choice Awards, the annual reader-voted honours that became a fixture of the Indonesian automotive calendar. It also published digital editions through the SCOOP newsstand application. In a market crowded with motoring titles, Autocar Indonesia traded on a name that had been testing cars since before Indonesia had a car industry.

The World's Oldest Car Magazine

Autocar was launched in Britain on 2 November 1895 as The Autocar, "in the interests of the mechanically propelled road carriage", at a time when there were believed to be only six or seven cars in the United Kingdom. It is the oldest surviving car magazine in the world. The magazine claims to have invented the road test, in 1928, when it analysed the Austin 7 Gordon England Sunshine Saloon. In 1988 it absorbed its long-time rival The Motor, founded in 1903, briefly calling itself Autocar & Motor before reverting to Autocar. Published weekly in Britain by Haymarket, it has been licensed to publishers around the world, and is published in sixteen countries outside the United Kingdom, including China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia and Vietnam. A celebrated episode in its history involves James May, later of Top Gear, who was dismissed from the magazine in 1992 after arranging the initial letters of a road-test annual supplement into a hidden complaint about the tedium of compiling it.

Licensing to Indonesia and the MRA Portfolio

The Indonesian edition belonged to the print portfolio of the MRA Group, Mugi Rekso Abadi, the Jakarta lifestyle conglomerate formed in 1993 by Soetikno Soedarjo, Adiguna Sutowo and Dian M. Soedardjo. MRA built its magazine business on international licences, beginning with Cosmopolitan Indonesia in 1997, and its defunct-magazine listing records Autocar Indonesia's final print edition in October 2017. The edition gave the group a motoring flagship alongside its fashion, men's lifestyle and women's titles, in a group that also held automotive interests among its six divisions. Published from Jakarta for the Indonesian market, the magazine covered the cars actually sold in Indonesia, tested by its own team, while carrying the authority of the British parent and its international network.

Editorial Formula: Road Tests and Reviews

The magazine's own description of its digital edition states its formula: Autocar gave readers the facts, opinions and insight to make informed car-buying decisions, and every issue was packed with reviews of the latest cars, comparisons and road tests conducted by an expert team of car writers. It presented itself as trusted for reliable and objective product reviews, with comprehensive and thorough evaluations of every product tested as the foundation of the magazine. In Indonesia that meant group tests and verdicts across the segments that dominated the local market, from city cars and low-cost green cars to family MPVs, crossovers, SUVs and sedans, together with coverage of aftermarket products such as tyres, wheels, lubricants, batteries and audio equipment, the categories its readers' awards also surveyed.

The Autocar Reader's Choice Awards

The magazine's best-known institution was the Autocar Reader's Choice Awards, abbreviated ARCA, in which readers voted for their favourite cars and automotive products. By its eleventh edition in 2017 the awards were an established industry event: that year's survey ran for three months, from June to August 2017, and drew 4,117 respondents, voting on paper questionnaires and online. Winners were announced category by category; the interior-materials maker MBtech, for example, recorded repeated wins as readers' favourite interior synthetic leather. In 2015 Honda Prospect Motor collected nine awards at ARCA, including seven class favourites from the Brio Satya, Jazz, City, CR-V, Odyssey and CR-Z, a Best New Comer special award for the HR-V, and Automotive Man of the Year for its president director, Tomoki Uchida. Such results were reported across Indonesian automotive media, making the awards a recognised measure of consumer, rather than jury, preference.

ARCA Moves Online

The ninth ARCA, in 2015, was presented by the magazine as a historic breakthrough: voting moved entirely from the printed questionnaire in the magazine to a digital ballot at autocarindonesia.com, promoted through the magazine's Twitter account and Facebook page, with the ballot open from February to May 2015. The response, the magazine reported, was strong, with readers voting from across Indonesia. The 2015 ballot covered 258 cars in 39 categories, with voters choosing one favourite in each, plus favourite aftermarket products including wheels, tyres, interior coatings, head units, batteries and lubricants. The magazine explained that the results served manufacturers as material for evaluating their products and gave consumers a picture of quality based on users' own experience. The episode shows Autocar Indonesia adapting its reader relationship to the phone years before its print edition ended.

Digital Editions

Beyond its website, the magazine sold digital editions through the SCOOP application, powered by Apps Foundry, which brought Autocar Indonesia to iPad and iPhone with bookmarking, subscriptions and reading features integrated with Apple's Newsstand. The digital edition reproduced the print product for a readership that was beginning to consume magazines on tablets. Together with the online ARCA ballot and the magazine's social media presence, the application marked the title's transition from a purely print licence to a multi-platform brand, the path that Indonesian motoring media as a whole was taking in the middle of the 2010s.

Journalists and Influence

Autocar Indonesia also functioned as a training ground for Indonesian motoring journalism. Fitra Eri, later one of the country's most popular automotive YouTubers and reviewers, began his career as an automotive journalist at Autocar Indonesia before moving into digital media and founding his own channel. The pattern, of print road-testers carrying a magazine's testing culture into video and social platforms, repeated across the industry. Within the magazine's lifetime, the authority it represented, measured verdicts, comparison tests and reader awards, set a standard that Indonesia's online motoring media inherited.

Final Print Edition in 2017

Autocar Indonesia's final print edition appeared in October 2017, in the same season that closed several other MRA licensed titles, including CosmoGirl Indonesia, FHM Indonesia, Esquire Indonesia and Maxim Indonesia, as the group's print portfolio contracted. The eleventh ARCA, completed only weeks earlier with more than four thousand respondents, was among its last major projects in print. The British parent magazine continues in the United Kingdom and in other licensed markets, but the Indonesian edition has not been revived in print since 2017.

Legacy

Autocar Indonesia carried the name of the world's oldest car magazine into the Indonesian market and gave it local substance: Indonesian road tests, Indonesian comparisons and an Indonesian readers' award that manufacturers publicly coveted. Its ARCA ceremonies chart the tastes of Indonesian car buyers across the 2010s, from the rise of the low-cost green car to the dominance of crossovers and SUVs, and its alumni carried its testing discipline into the digital media that replaced it. The edition's print run ended in October 2017, but its model of the expert, reader-connected motoring magazine remains the template for Indonesian automotive publishing.