Wednesday, October 21, 2009

We still lack some good online sites focusing on classic cars!

Recently I was thinking on where to really find good information on classic cars online. So I started to summarize the different information sources. Here's what I found as categories and examples:

Online Pure Plays
http://www.pistonheads.com/
Focusing on sportscars they do a good job in organizing a community, a car ad market and good editorial content around typical british sportscars and some others.
http://www.heise.de/autos/
German speaking online car magazine focusing on mainly new and common cars.
http://www.classicdriver.com/uk/1000.asp
Mainly an online car market for classic and modern sportscar. Some editorial content (“Magazine”) such as car of the week and driving reports.
http://www.barchetta.cc
Content and specifically picture rich website focusing on international classic car events, but centering around Ferraris and Maseratis.

Car Club websites
Many around, some quite good, some quite boring. Here’s a good example with lots of information:
http://www.tvr-car-club.co.uk/

Brand/car type dedicated online resources
There are many specialized sites out there gathering and distributing information on one specific car or car brand. Here’s an excellent example focusing on the Lotus Eleven:
http://lotuseleven.org/
Here’s another showing all the known TVR Granturas:
http://people.zeelandnet.nl/serel/

Online discussion forums
Some of the online forums are extremely well maintained and really helpful when you run into issues with your classic car, i.e. the one focusing on Mercedes SL R107:
http://www.sternzeit-107.de

Online print magazine offsprings
http://www.classicandperformancecar.com/
Octane is a print magazine. The site gives some of the content of the magazine and of course a car sales market place. No link between offline and online subscription. Compared to other car magazine sites quite a bit of content. Nicely presented but not as good as the print magazine.
http://www.motor-klassik.de
One example of a print magazine with online channel. Quite a bit of content (mostly re-use from the print magazine).

Blogsphere
Many out there, sometimes quite difficult to find, when you don’t know where to start looking for it. Here’s an excellent example
http://wwwbollyblog.blogspot.com/
A blog focusing on Australian sportscars mainly. Lots of good photos and background information on Bollwells and other rare (Australian) cars. Well done, John!

SUMMARY
I probably have only scratched the surface with all of this. But I still feel I haven’t found a really well done online classic car site. I would be interested in other people’s insights!

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