Just Auto
Just Auto, published at just-auto.com, is a London-based online news and research service for the global automotive industry, established in 1999 and now part of the data and analytics group GlobalData. For a quarter of a century it has supplied manufacturers, suppliers and investors with daily news, analysis and market intelligence on the business of vehicles — concentrating on the manufacturing side of the industry, its supply chains, corporate strategies and model programmes, rather than on car retailing or consumer reviews. Its reporting is produced by journalists and analysts and powered by GlobalData's research platforms, including the Automotive Intelligence Center, whose forecasts and market data run through the site's coverage. Alongside its sister titles for the drinks, food and apparel industries, it belongs to the family of sector sites created by the British publisher Aroq.
Origins in 1999
Just Auto was established in 1999, in the first wave of online-only trade publishing, by Aroq, a British business information company that built a stable of similarly named vertical titles — just-drinks, just-food and just-style among them. The model was distinctive for its time: instead of adapting a print magazine to the web, these sites were digital from the start, mixing free daily journalism with paid research sold to executives. Just Auto's focus was the upstream industry: vehicle manufacturers (OEMs), the component suppliers who feed their factories, and the strategies, technologies and forecasts that connect them. Under managing editor David Leggett, a long-serving automotive journalist, the site developed a recognisable voice — commercially literate, sceptical of corporate hype, and attentive to the numbers behind the announcements.
Scale of the daily operation
At its relaunch under Aroq, just-auto was publishing around fifty news articles, analysis features and insights every working day, delivered to more than 90,000 business executives a month. That cadence reflects the breadth of its brief: a single day's coverage can span a manufacturer's quarterly results, a supplier's new plant, a future model programme, a component market forecast and an executive interview. The site organises this flow into news, analysis, features and data insights, supported by newsletters including a daily round-up and periodic digests that sift the week's most significant datasets. A free digital magazine, Just Auto Magazine, packages longer material for reading on any device.
Becoming part of GlobalData
Just Auto's publisher Aroq became a GlobalData company, and the site now operates as a GlobalData-owned brand. That ownership changed what sits behind the journalism. GlobalData describes access to more than a billion data points spanning companies, deals, projects, forecasts and trends, and Just Auto is one of a network of more than forty proprietary B2B websites with a combined readership the group puts at 55 million industry professionals a year. Articles on the site are frequently credited to GlobalData's research platform: market analyses that first appear in the Automotive Intelligence Center are published on Just Auto with the group's forecasts, giving readers the reasoning behind the numbers rather than the numbers alone. GlobalData's acquisition of LMC Automotive, a well-known vehicle forecasting house, further strengthened the data behind the site's market outlooks.
What Just Auto covers
The coverage follows the industry's value chain. Corporate reporting tracks manufacturer and supplier results, mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures, and the investment logic behind them. Product coverage follows current and future car model programmes — which platforms, powertrains and factories are committed, and when. Technology themes include electrification and batteries, connected vehicles, autonomous driving, software and in-car digital services, with data insights drawn from patent activity, company tracking and thematic research identifying which firms lead in fields from IoT to thin-film batteries. Market coverage is resolutely global: European registration analyses, North American production outlooks, and the fast-moving Chinese, Indian, Japanese and Korean markets all feature, commonly built on GlobalData's light-vehicle sales and production forecasts.
Forecasts as journalism
A defining feature of Just Auto is the integration of forecasting into news. When tariffs change, subsidies are extended or a major market weakens, the site reports not only the event but its modelled consequences: GlobalData's production and sales outlooks, revised market by market, with analysts explaining the assumptions underneath. Coverage of the global light vehicle market, for example, walks readers through regional revisions — North American output supported by trade agreements and cost absorption, European production pressured by competition and a stuttering electrification transition, China's outlook hinging on purchase incentives. This is a different register from ordinary trade reporting: the forecast is itself the story, and the site's archive of outlooks allows readers to test how expectations evolved as events unfolded.
Research platforms and products
Behind the public site sits a research business inherited from the Aroq era and expanded under GlobalData. Earlier platforms included QUBE, CONSULT and PLDB, offering insight into OEM and supplier strategies, manufacturing developments, management briefings, supplier technologies, component market trends and forecasts, and future model programmes. The component research tradition continues in reports that each examine a specific area of vehicle supply — from connectivity to tyres — and in thematic tracking of sectors such as electric cars and trucks. For subscribers, the proposition is depth on demand: the daily site signals what matters, and the paid research answers the detailed questions a strategist or supplier executive actually faces.
Audience and sister titles
Just Auto's audience is the professional industry: executives at manufacturers and suppliers, investors and consultants following the sector, and the service companies around them. Aroq's subscriber base was noted for including a large share of the world's most admired global companies, leading financial institutions and major universities, and GlobalData markets the network's first-party data and targeting to advertisers seeking exactly this concentration of decision-makers. Within the original Aroq family, just-auto sat alongside just-food, just-drinks and just-style — titles sharing the same editorial formula across different manufacturing industries — while under GlobalData it joins a much larger stable of sector sites operating to a common data-driven model.
Editorial character
Long-time readers associate Just Auto with analysis that reads the industry commercially rather than reverentially. Its commentary weighs company announcements against market data: whether an electric vehicle programme can make money, what a production forecast implies for suppliers, how a trade measure reshapes sourcing. The 'week in data' format exemplifies the house style — a curated tour of the datasets that mattered, from national sales records to a manufacturer's difficult electric margins. Analysts are named and quoted in its pages, and GlobalData commentary published on the site routinely carries a clear point of view on market direction, distinguishing it from neutral wire-style reporting.
Why it matters to the wider media
Although Just Auto writes for specialists, its material travels. Its stories are syndicated and republished across the web, credited as originally created and published by Just Auto, and its GlobalData-sourced analyses — on electric vehicle market shares, national registration patterns and production outlooks — are cited by general news outlets that lack automotive analysts of their own. In that sense the site functions partly as a newswire for the industry's analytical layer: a place where forecasts and market readings are first published in accessible form before being picked up elsewhere.
A quarter-century on
From its 1999 founding as an online experiment to its present position inside one of the world's larger data and analytics groups, Just Auto's trajectory mirrors the trade press itself: print economics replaced by digital reach, and journalism increasingly fused with proprietary data. What has remained constant is the brief — the global automotive industry's strategies, supply chains, technologies and markets, reported daily for the people who run it. In a sector being reshaped by electrification, software and new geographic centres of power, that brief ensures the site remains part of the industry's working information system.
