In your opinion, which is the better local auto magazine?

[tidus1203]

In your opinion, which is the better automotive local magazine? I am only including here the print magazines, I know may mga online magazines pero for this thread sa local print magazines.

Para sakin Top Gear. Mas fun mga articles nila in general. Atsaka mas ok yung Top Gear gang para sakin.

[vindiesel]

top gear phil. mas maganda at angkop sa pinas ang mga articles.

[s_quilicot]

topgear xempre ..

[niky]

Actually, even though C!Magazine features premium cars, they also do lots of articles on local cars, if you bother to look. C! did one "super-article" covering the entire Chery line-up in one issue. They did a mega-test comparo of local CUVs at the end of the year... and they should be doing a compact car mega test, soon... probably when the Lancer gets launched officially. C! also has tons of local content on the local tuning scene, and features local races. TGP, though, strikes back by having features on local auto-clubs.

Head-to-Head:

Comparo articles: In terms of important local comparos, C! and TG are about even. C! often has more driving impressions and often features more cars in each comparo. TG features just two or three cars per comparo, but they do it every issue. I'd give C! the slight edge because the breadth of their comparos. TGP's are slightly formulaic.

Single Reviews: This is a truly mixed bag. With the sheer number of contributors on each side, the single reviews are about as good as the person who writes them. One minus for C! is that some issues last year were written mostly by Tito and Kevin. Nothing against them, but that kind of hurts C!'s ability to deliver varied content. On the other hand, some writers for TGP clearly aren't "car" people, and don't touch all the proper bases needed for a rounded review... although their better writers are more blunt when describing the downsides to a car... C! can be too polite, sometimes. This, I'd rate even.

Photography: C!... by a landslide. Though there are some great photographers on the TGP staff, some of the article photos aren't that good... some aren't good at all. But who'm I to complain? My photos suck.

Editorials: I consider using Clarkson as cheating. Besides... you can read his editorial online before it gets printed in TGP. And I'm still pissed off that they took James May's column out in favor of him. James's column is excellent reading. It's as funny as Clarkson's, and it's more intelligent, to boot. Still, TGP has more meaty editorial content than C!. James Deakin's Counterflow is sometimes great, sometimes good, sometimes okay... but TGP's editorials cover controversial issues more often... C!'s are a bit too introspective. TGP here, by a nose...

Foreign Content: Top Gear and C! have the same foreign/local mix. TGP uses some stuff from TG-UK to fill its pages. C! uses stuff from EVO and Autocar. In this aspect, C! is superior, because EVO and Autocar are much better magazines than TG-UK. Add the fact that C! also features regular F1 Racing content... although I think I'd rather see more of the mag dedicated to EVO-style local features, like before.

Local non-review Content: C! has interesting features on local tuners and tech gear, but TGP is superior here, with food trip articles, the regular "right car, wrong car (or whatever they call it)" section, and the "Used Car" feature. Minus points for those stupid "ballerz" articles... thank God they've stopped doing those... it's okay for FHM, maybe, but not for a car magazine, guys. Also FHM-type fare is the featured "hottie" every week... really out of place in a family magazine? Aside from those two... it's TGP by a mile.

----

In the end... I'm for C!... but that's because I'm biased... and I like the pretty pictures. Some of the problems of C! over the past year and in the time that they divided up their people to do so many different titles have been resolved, and C! is getting stronger. The last few issues have been a treat. TGP? It's a little too smorgasboard, for me. There are some writers there I truly enjoy (like Botchi) and others that simply do an okay job. With C!, you know that you can open one and enjoy it. TGP is like a box of chocolates... you never know what you're going to get.

[mazingerZ]

May I ask how do they compute the fuel consumption for each car or C! mag? Kasi parang covered na nila lahat ng kotseng available sa pinas and have FC figures for each car. Whereas TGP does not have FC figures, although their 2nd hand units have FC figures. Are the FC figures stated in C! real world?

[niky]

C!'s figures are often taken from their daily routes. Most of those are taken from runs in Alabang to Makati traffic (for city) by K.L. and on the NLEX by K.R. and the others for the highway consumption.

We can't even begin to match some of their highway numbers because we drive on the SLEX, which returns numbers some 20% or more (much more, actually) lower than the NLEX.

For used cars, I think TGP uses numbers coming from owners, or from the writers themselves, if they're the car owner.

The difficulty with making a table like C!'s is that fuel consumption will vary from person to person. When we test (for BBC, not C!), we try to average economy between three to four testers to get a fair figure, but economy figures are always merely sugestive, not absolute.