Where to go for Car News?

Well, obviously, the first point-of-call must be Metro's Car Blog. However, since this excellent site is just my personal musings on random news stories and events that have caught my eye, and since anything appearing here has already been mused by me within my head, other sources of car news are available.

The very best online resource, the 4-Car Website as reported by me in December was unfortunately closed down. This prompted me at the time to investigate a few other options.

I briefly flirted with the Daily Torygraph Car Site. That is where James May has a weekly column but most of the other articles were just painfully right-wing propaganda meaning that the flirtation could not last long at all.

I also got into the daily habit of checking out the websites of Piston Heads news, Auto Express news and Autocar news.

Piston Heads is slightly laddish with Forums populated by similar people who used to log into the 4-Car Forum when it was at its peak. Auto Express is a bit tabloidy but feels more professional although they do have a habit of, for example, taking mock-ups and implying they are production versions.

I've deliberately not included a link to Autocar because when I clicked on a headline there this morning, I was told I'd have to log in or register. Even if it's free (which I suspect it will be) - I can't be doing with logging in every day and I don't see why I should give them personal data anyway. Fortunately, links to old Autocar stories like in my London Taxi article seem to be unaffected. They will be getting at least one less hit a day now - it'll be interesting to see if this affects them at all.

From time to time, I also check out The Fifth Gear Website. They do have a regularly updated news section, hidden in the bottem left-hand corner of the home page - but generally not a lot in there - more than the Top Gear site do though.

The good news from the Fifth Gear site today, although, I'd already spotted it in The Radio Times, is that Fifth Gear TV is back next Thursday. To quote their site, "The 17th series of the show will see your favourite hosts Tiff Needell, Vicki Butler-Henderson, Jason Plato and Jonny Smith return to your screens". This means that Tim Shaw and Tom Ford can't have been our favourite hosts - they have both been dropped.

I won't miss Tim Shaw - like Tim Lovejoy before him, I believe that car shows should only be presented by motoring journalists or racing drivers not people who might be described as "petrol heads" to justify their presence. Or people called Tim. OK, when Top Gear began it was presented by Noel Edmonds and Angela Rippon and I think that worked but I'm too young to be sure and it did evolve beautifully into what it and Fifth Gear are today.

I will miss Tom Ford, however. I've always found him very entertaining and his interactions with Jonny Smith made a good double-act - like the Plato-Needell one. Maybe his work on Top Gear Magazine caused conflicts of interest or maybe budget-cutting meant that the two studio-based presenters were deemed surplus.

This brings me on to the matter of printed matter. The only car magazine I subscribe to is Top Gear - lots of useful, interesting and entertaining stuff in true Reithian BBC tradition. In my teens, I bought the first 100 editions of Auto Express - the first ones were 40p each - not a too bad weekly expense for a child. Then, they started gradually putting up the price in 10p jumps. Each time they did this, they would include lots of car data pages in the back to make it look like you were getting a lot more for your money. Even at the time, I could see this as a sneaky trick so I stopped buying it at about 70p.

I guess my main source of car news is going to be a collection of online resources - I'd like to see a motoring sub-section on the BBC News Technology Site or even the Top Gear site - I'm sure they used to do something like this. Can we have it back, please?