We almost never plan which car winds up being the x hundredth model entered into Autocade, and here’s proof.
The humble, boxy Mazda Demio (DY) was the 3,800th entry in Autocade. It makes a nice change from all the SUVs that have found their way on to the database in recent months, even if it isn’t the most inspiring vehicle.
The vehicles either side of the Demio weren’t terribly interesting, either: the Sol E20X (the Volkswagen badge-engineered JAC iEV7S) and the current Fit-based Honda Shuttle. But if you want to be complete (we want to, even if we’re far away from it), you have to include the everyday workhorses.
The latest model to appear on Autocade today: the Mazda CX-30.
Itâs March, which means Autocade has had another birthday. Eleven years ago, I started a car encyclopĂŠdia using Mediawiki software, and itâs since grown to 3,600 model entries. The story has been told elsewhere on this blog. What I hadnât realized till today was that Autocadeâs birthday and the World Wide Webâs take place within days of each other. The inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, still believes that it can be used as a force for good, which is what many of us hoped for when we began surfing in the 1990s. I still remember using Netscape 1·2 (actually, I even remember using 1·1 on computers that hadnât updated to the newer browser) and thinking that here was a global communicationsâ network that could bring us all together. Autocade, and, of course, Lucire, were both set up to do good, and be a useful information resource to the public. Neither sought to divide in the way Facebook has; Google, which had so much promise in the late 1990s, has become a bias-confirmation machine that also pits ideologies against each other.
The web, which turns 30 this week, still has the capacity to do great things, and I can only hope that those of us still prepared to serve the many rather than the few in a positive way begin getting recognized for our efforts again.
For so many years I have championed transparency and integrity. People tell us that these are qualities they want. Yet people also tell surveys that Google is their second-favourite brand in the world, despite its endless betrayals of our trust, only apologizing after each privacy gaffe is exposed by the fourth estate.
Like Sir Tim, I hope we make it our business to seek out those who unite rather than divide, and give them some of our attention. At the very least I hope we do this out of our own self-preservation, understanding that we have more to gain by allowing information to flow and people to connect. When we shut ourselves off to opposing viewpoints, we are poorer for it. As I wrote before, American conservatives and liberals have common enemies in Big Tech censorship and big corporations practising tax avoidance, yet social networks highlight the squabbles between one right-wing philosophy and another right-wing philosophy. We New Zealanders cannot be smug with our largest two parties both eager to plunge forward into TPPA, and our present government having us bicker over capital gainsâ tax while leaving the big multinationals, who profit off New Zealanders greatly, paying little or no tax.
A more understanding dialogue, which the web actually affords us, is the first step in identifying what we have in common, and once you strip away the arguments that mainstream media and others drive, our differences are far fewer than we think.
Social media should be social rather than antisocial, and itâs almost Orwellian that they have this Newspeak name, doing the opposite to what their appellation suggests. The cat is out of the bag as far as Big Tech is concerned, but there are opportunities for smaller players to be places where people can chat. Shame itâs not Gab, which has taken a US-conservative bent at the expense of everything else, though they at least should be applauded for taking a stance against censorship. And my fear is that we will take what we have already learned on social mediaâto divide and to pile on those who disagreeâinto any new service. As I mentioned, Mastodon is presently fine, for the most part, because educated people are chatting among themselves. The less educated we are, the more likely we will take firm sides and shut our minds off to alternatives.
The answer is education: to make sure that we use this wonderful invention that Sir Tim has given us for free for some collective good. Perhaps this should form part of our childrenâs education in the 2010s and 2020s. That global dialogue can only be a good thing because we learn and grow together. And that there are pitfalls behind the biggest brands kids are already exposed toâwe know Google has school suites but they really need to know how the big G operates, as it actively finds ways to undermine their privacy.
The better armed our kids are, the more quickly theyâll see through the fog. The young people I know arenât even on Facebook other than its Messenger service. It brings me hope; but ideally Iâd like to see them make a conscious effort to choose their own services. Practise what we preach about favouring brands with authenticity, even if so many of us fail to seek them out ourselves.
Over the weekend, I noticed Autocadeâs page-view stat had ticked over the 15,000,000 mark. In fact, it was at 15,045,000, and I estimate that it hit the milestone around February 6âfitting for it to have taken place as the (lunar) year began.
With how busy things have been, Autocade has been updated less, but the traffic stats are promising, especially as Stuart Cowley and I film more segments for the Autocade video channel. As the year has started in earnest, there will be more updates, and the Salon de GenĂšve next month usually pushes me to write more. Hopefully that will give our page-view rate a bit of a boost, considering it has slowed since September 2018, when I last posted about this topic.
The trouble these days is that a lot of entries are about same-again SUVs: at the time of writing, of the last 20 newest entries, there are the Volkswagen Tayron, the Yusheng S330 and S350, the Chinese Ford Territory (based on the Yusheng S330, so it seemed logical to do these at the same time), Lexus UX, Acura RDX (TC1), Volkswagen Tharu, and the Brazilian and European incarnations of the Volkswagen T-Roc (they are different cars; and the Chinese one hasnât been added, either). Once upon a time, such vehicles would have been relegated to an appendix in publications such as Auto Katalog, but now itâs regular motor cars that are becoming the niche products.
The electric revolution has also been interesting, but also frustrating, to cover. Autocade is fun when youâre examining lineages; at this point in history, none of these electric models actually replace a petrol or diesel one completely. Itâs also been tough getting technical data on some electric cars, the kWh rating, for instance, which weâve been using as the equivalent for cubic centimetres in the entries. Hence the updates have slowed, because itâs harder to paint a complete picture about some of these cars.
With China responsible for so many new releases, translation can be slow, especially for someone whose grasp of written Chinese is roughly that of a childâs, though at least I bridge two cultures well enough to weed out some of the obvious errors (e.g. people reporting that the Senova D80 was based on a Mercedes-Benz, which could not possibly be true).
Following my tradition on this blog, here is how Autocadeâs viewingâs going.
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for tenth million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for eleventh million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for twelfth million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for thirteenth million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for fourteenth million)
February 2019: 15,000,000 (five months for fifteenth million)
In September, Autocade had 3,755 model entries; itâs now up to 3,781ânot a huge jump, possibly accounting for the traffic rate decrease as well.
Hereâs hoping for a bit more as the year progresses. Iâd like to add in an entry for the new Mazda Axela, for instance, but sometimes you have to wait till the company itself publishes public data on its website, just for that extra accuracy. Weâll wait and see.
Above: Behind the scenes of the Ć koda Karoq road test for Autocade.
I hadnât kept track of Autocadeâs statistics for a while, and was pleasantly surprised to see it had crossed 14,000,000 page views (in fact, itâs on 14,140,072 at the time of writing). Using some basic mathematics, and assuming it hit 13,000,000 on May 20, itâs likely that the site reached the new million in late September.
The site hadnât been updated much over the last few months, with the last update of any note happening in early September. A few more models were added today.
Since Iâve kept track of the traffic, hereâs how thatâs progressed:
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for tenth million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for eleventh million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for twelfth million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for thirteenth million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for fourteenth million)
In May, the site was on 3,665 models; now itâs on 3,755.
As the increase in models has been pretty small, thereâs been a real growth in traffic, and itâs the third four-month million-view growth period since the siteâs inception.
Weâre definitely putting in more crossovers and SUVs lately, and thatâs almost a shame given how similar each one is.
With my good friend Stuart Cowley, weâre extending Autocade into video segments, and hereâs our first attempt. Itâs not perfect, and we have spotted a few faults, but we hope to improve on things with the second one.
If you’re interested, you can subscribe to the Autocade YouTube channel here. Of course, given my concerns about Google, the video also appears at Lucireâs Dailymotion channel. Once we get a few more under our belt and refine the formula, we’ll do a proper release.
And, as I close this post, just over 10 minutes since the start, we’re on 14,140,271.
Some time during May, Autocade exceeded 13 million page views. I canât tell you the exact day, since it wasnât a milestone that weâre socialized into noticing: I just happened across it one evening last week. Itâs currently on 3,665 model entries, the latest being the Porsche 944. Admittedly, we haven’t added the premium brands as quickly as some mainstream ones.
Since Iâve kept a log of this since the siteâs inception (for reasons unknown to me now!), hereâs how the traffic has progressed:
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for tenth million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for eleventh million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for twelfth million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for thirteenth million)
In other words, it has had more visitors in the last four months than in the same period prior to that. If the June 2017âJanuary 2018 period was anomalous, then we could say that Autocade is getting progressively more traffic.
Above:Autocade can be hard workâand sometimes you have to put up less exciting vehicles, like the 2001â7 Chrysler Town & Country, for it to be a useful resource.
March 8, 2018 marks 10 years of Autocade.
Iâve told the story before on this blog and elsewhere, about how the site came to beâannoyed by the inaccuracies and fictions of Wikipedia (who said the masses would be smart enough to get rid of the mistakes?), I took a leaf out of the late Michael Sedgwickâs book and created a wiki that had brief summaries of each model, the same way Sedgwick had structured his guides. I received an emailed threat from a well known British publisher (Iâm looking at you, Haymarket, and as predicted in my reply, your thoughts proved to be totally baseless) when we started, and 12Âœ million page views later, weâre on 3,628 models (I think we finished the first day on 12), with our page on the Ford Fiesta Mk VII leading the count (other than the home page). Autocade began as a wiki but with so many bots trying to sign up, I closed off those registrations. There have really been about six contributors to the site, all told: myself and Keith Adams for the entries, Peter Jobes and Nigel Dunn for the tech, and two members of the public who offered copy; one fed it in directly back in the day when we were still allowing wiki modifications. I thank everyone for their contributions.
A few years ago, I began running into people online who used Autocade but didnât know I was behind it; it was very pleasing to see that it had become helpful to others. It also pleased me tremendously to see it referenced in Wikipedia, not always 100 per cent correctly, but as Autocade is the more accurate site on cars, this is the right way round.
When a New Zealand magazine reviewed us, the editor noted that there were omissions, including his own car, a Mitsubishi Galant. Back then we were probably on 1,000 models, maybe fewer. All the Galants are now up, but Autocade remains a work in progress. The pace of adding pages has declined as life gets busierâeach one takes, on average, 20 minutes to research and write. You wouldnât think so from the brevity, but I want it to be accurate. Iâm not perfect, which is why the pages get changed and updated: the stats say weâre running on 3·1 edits per page.
But it looks like weâre covering enough for Autocade to be a reasonably useful resource for the internet public, especially some of the more obscure side notes in motoring history. China has proved a challenge because of the need to translate a lot of texts, and donât think that my ethnicity is a great help. The US, believe it or not, has been difficult, because of the need to calculate cubic capacities accurately in metric (I opted to get it right to the cubic centimetre, not litres). However, it is an exciting time to be charting the course of automotive history, and because there are still so many gaps from the past that need to be filled, I have the chance to compare old and new and see how things have moved on even in my four-and-a-half decades on Earth.
Since Sedgwick had done guides up to 1970, and paper references have been excellent taking us through the modern motor carâs history, I arbitrarily decided that Autocade would focus on 1970 and on. There are some exceptions, especially when model lines go back before 1970 and it would be a disservice to omit the earlier marks. But I wanted it to coincide roughly with my lifetime, so I could at least provide some commentary about how the vehicle was perceived at the time of launch. And the â70s were a fascinating time to be watching the motor industry: those nations that were confident through most of the 20th century with the largest players (the US and UK) found themselves struggling, wondering how the Japanese, making scooters and motorcycles just decades before, were beating them with better quality and reliability. That decadeâs Japanese cars are fascinating to study, and in Japan itself there is plenty of nostalgia for them now; you can see their evolution into more internationally styled product, rather than pastiches of othersâ, come the 1980s and on. The rise of Korea, Spain, China, India, Turkey, México and other countries as car-exporting nations has also been fascinating to watch. When Autocade started, Australia still had a domestic mass-produced car industry, Chrysler was still owned by Americans, and GM still had a portfolio of brands that included Pontiac and Saturn.
I even used to go to one of the image galleries and, as many cars are listed by year, let the mouse scroll down the page. You can see periods grouped by certain colours, a sign of how cars both follow and establish fashion. There are stylistic trends: the garishness of smog-era US cars and the more logical efficiency of European ones at the same time; smoother designs of the 1980s and 1990s; a creeping fussiness and a concentration on showing the brandâs identity in the 2000s and 2010s. As some of the most noticeable consumer goods on the planet, cars make up a big part of the marketing profession.
The site is large enough that I wouldnât mind seeing an academic look at industry using the data gathered there; and I always thought it could be a useful book as well, bearing in mind that the images would need to be replaced with much higher-resolution fare.
For now, Iâm going to keep on plodding as we commence Autocadeâs second decade. The Salon de Genève has brought forth some exciting débutantes, but then I should get more of the Chrysler Town & Country vans up âŠ
Iâm fascinated by the 1970Âœ Ford Falcon for a number of reasons. The first is the obvious one: rarity. This car was built for only half a model year, from January to August 1970. If you think it looks like a contemporary Torino, youâre right: itâs basically a very stripped-down Torino. Yet you could spec it with any of the engines from the Torino, including the 429 inÂł V8 (and some did). Which brings me to the second reason: why would anyone really bother with it, if you could get a Torino for a bit more? (That answers why this car only lasted half a model year.) And that leads me to the third reason: what was going through Fordâs mind at the time? Thatâs where it gets interesting.
At this time, Ford was undergoing managerial changes, with Henry Ford II firing Bunkie Knudsen (who had been lured away from GM). That happened in September 1969, by which time the decision to go ahead with the Falcon had already been made. This is, in other words, a Knudsen initiative.
Federal regulations made the 1966â70 Falcon obsolete because it had a dash-mounted starterâthe rule was that they had to be in the column. However, itâs curious that Ford made this call to put the Falcon nameplate on a mid-sizer, considering it had made its name as an âeconomyâ car (by US standards). If you read the brochure, youâll find that this was all about size. Ford bragged that the car was 2 ft longer. Yet for this half-model year, it was still marketed as an âeconomyâ car.
I imagine as the US headed into the 1970s, there was no sign of the fuel crisis on the horizon, so there was nothing wrong about size. Why not spoil the average Falcon buyer, used to a smaller car, with something much larger? Hadnât upsizing already happened on every other model line out thereâby this point the Mustang was about to grow into a monstrosity with massive C-pillars and terrible rear visibility?
Ford (and the other Big Four makers) had been known to blow one model line up, then start another little one, and the Maverick had already been launched for 1970, and was now doing the compact work. By that logic, Falcon could grow more, even though other solutions might have been to either replace the Falcon with the Maverick or simply shift the Falcon nameplate to the Maverickâbut both would have involved âdownsizingâ, and in 1970 that was not in the US car industryâs vocab. The panic hadnât set in yet.
Fourthly, this is a beautiful shape. Unnecessarily big (till you consider it had to accommodate the 429), but a beautiful shape. The 1970s hadnât really started in earnest, so we hadnât seen some of the really garish shapes that were to come. This has that 1960s classicism coupled with 1970s uncertainty. Thereâs still some optimism with jet-age inspiration, but the lack of practicality foreshadowed the style-first, single-digit mpg âroad-hugging weightâ cars that were round the corner, cars which no one truly needed but Detroit, in its optimism (or blindness), believed Americans did. Thereâs still something very honest about the last US Falcon. After this, only the Australians and Argentinians kept things alive, but those are other stories.
Itâs a little disappointing to note that Autocade has taken slightly longer to reach 12 million page views: it ticked over to its new milestone earlier today. I really had hoped that weâd get there before 2017 was out, but it was not to be.
Part of it might have been the slower rate of models being put upâlifeâs been busy, and a site that earns a fairly small amount of money compared to our other businesses doesnât warrant as much time. But 100 models have gone up since June 2017, when Autocade reached its 11 million milestone, with the 3,600th model the Nissan Rasheen (and no, I didnât plan this oneâitâs quite an oddball vehicle).
So hereâs the running tally as Iâve been keeping on this blog, for really no reason other than pedantry.
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for tenth million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for eleventh million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for twelfth million)
Itâs a shame that the four-month time-frame needed to reach 11 million could be an anomaly rather than part of a trend.
I also wonder whether the odd PHP errorâwe have had quite a few since we began hosting at AWSâhas impacted on search-engine rankings. However, server management has become far, far more complex over the last couple of decades, and the controls I see at AWS mean nothing to me as someone outside the computing industry. The help pages may as well be in Serbian. The notion that software gets easier to use and the expectation that this level of computing would become democratized have not come to pass, certainly not over the last 10 years. It seems the industry wants to sew things up for itself, and the last thing needed are amateurs like me getting into the nuts and bolts. Iâm not Facebook or Google: I canât afford heaps of employees to look after this stuff. (Or, in Googleâs case, maybe a couple here and there.)
Incidentally, I may begin removing the sharing links under each headline soon. Iâm concerned about the standard Facebook ‘like’ button tracking readers, and there are Po.st links under âShare this pageâ to the top left of this page (if browsing via desktop) if you want to show Facebook friends something from here. Po.st does have its own cookies (linked to a company called Radium One), but itâs far easier to opt out of those through their site. I’m unconvinced that anyone can opt out of Facebook’s data collection.
Well done, Wikipedia, you got something right. It only took you 12 years. Nick, who appears to be a senior editor at the site, fixed up the complete fabrication that a user called ApolloBoy entered about the âFord CE14 platformâ in 2005, after I wrote a pretty scathing piece on Drivetribe about Wikipediaâs inadequacies, in part based on an earlier blog post I wrote here.
I am grateful to Nick who I expect saw my story.
However, errors still abound, and as I pointed out in Drivetribe, another user called Pmeisel, who appears to have been an automotive industry professional, said back in February 2005 there was a real confusion between development codes and platforms on Wikipedia.
While Nick has largely fixed the problemâhe has noted that it was the European Ford Escort of 1990 and its derivatives that CE14 should refer to, and not much earlier American carsâthere remains the lesser one that there is still no such thing as a âFord CE14 platformâ, just as there is no such thing as a âFord C170 platformâ, and so on.
Ford did not use these codes to refer to platforms, they used them to refer to specific models.
Letâs see if the Wikiality of this page will at least begin to disappear from the ânet, 12 years after ApolloBoy made up some crap and allowed it to propagate to the extent that some people regard it as fact.
I have enquired into Wikipedia from time to time, enough to know it is full of mistakes. But the errors do seem to happen far more often in the Anglophone one. Perhaps those of us who speak English are more willing to commit fictions to publication. Goodness knows we have seen an example in print, too. Does this culture lend us to being far less precise with a poorer concern for the truthâand does that in turn lead to the ease with which âfake newsâ winds up in our media?
