Like most men in their twenties I was a car guy.  I ate and drank the elixir of horsepower, torque, RPM's, wheel-base cockpit esthetics, and sheet metal.  I could recite long lists of carlines and their varying specifications.  I subscribed to and devoured all of the (four) the nation's most popular car magazines of the time: *Car & Driver, Motor Trend, Road & Track,* and the beauty queen of them all, *Automobile Magazine.*  But as time and overseas assignments took my attention elsewhere, one-by-one my subscriptions lapsed and my car fetish all but died.  But now in the autumn of my life I have rekindled my love of cars, especially expensive high performance cars from well known and well respected nameplates we all know: *Cadillac, BMW, Audi, Lexus, Lincoln*, and of course *Mercedes-Benz*.  So when it came time for my daughter annual fundraiser, I skipped the usual chocolate and wrapping paper and went straight for *Automobile Magazine*, a periodical is consider the premiere car rag.  But at the end of subscription period I let it lapse and moved instead to **Motor Trend Magazine** (www.motortrend.com) one of the premier car rags in the business.  Published by *Primedia* in twelve monthly issues (subscription cost $12.00; $3.99 newsstand), this is not the **Motor Trend** of my early adulthood; the magazine is piled full of glossy, colorful, pictures and serious well written articles, car comparisons, and long-term road tests. Where once** Motor Trend **loved *Detroit sheet metal *almost exclusively, the magazine* *now has a more International flavor within its glossy well written pages.  And I have to admit that it is hard to get thorough an entire issue within a month.     **Motor Trend **is no longer content to cover the just American sheet metal (it could be because American automobiles are sadly no longer as relevant as they used to be), but reaches far-a-field to bring readers the normal, the exotic, and the really expensive from locations across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  And the magazine does this in a format that is easy to follow, well laid out, and extremely inviting. Even some of the photographs in **Motor Trend **have a story to tell in the guise of in-depth exterior and mechanical analysis.  In the final analysis I am glad I have once again decided to subscribe **Motor Trend Magazine.**  Within its glossy pages I have found a home, a resting place from which I can gleam my needed automotive knowledge.  For me there is no other.   

TheBard

Aurora, IL