Motor (magazine)

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Motor, officially titled MOTOR is an Australian motoring magazine published monthly by ACP Magazines. Motor magazine was originally Car Australia before morphing into Modern Motor.^{[citation needed]} The former word connecting it with its first publishing company Modern Magazines (Holdings) Limited.^[1] However, colloquially it was called Motor, and it formally adopted this title in the late 1990s.

[edit] Controversies

Motor, previously a rival, is a stablemate magazine to Wheels, but Motor focuses more on performance cars rather than mainstream models. The magazine is often the center of controversy, one example being the exclusion of the FPV F6 Typhoon from "Performace Car of the Year" (PCOTY) 2005 due to clutch failures. FPV had blamed Motor for flat shifting (shifting gears without lifting off the accelerator pedal), when in fact the problem was later revealed to be a small but critical design fault in the clutch itself.^[2] The F6 Typhoon was subsequently named Motor's "Australian Performance Car Of The Year" in 2006. Also, various HSV models had been cited for power steering failures which led to the company fitting power steering fluid coolers to their range.

On October 5, 2007, Motor magazine mistakenly published images and details of the 2007 VE model HSV Maloo. Specifications and photographs of the vehicle were inadvertently released up to seven days before the car's official release date, timed to coincide with the 2007 Australian International Motor Show. Despite MOTOR arranging to withhold copies of the November magazine from newsstands for two days after its regular publication date, thousands of subscribers received their mailed copies 'on time', thereby breaking a pre-arranged embargo agreement.