Motor magazine

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Motor is an Australian motoring magazine published monthly by ACP Magazines. Motor magazine was originally Modern Motor, the former word connecting it with its first publishing company. However, colloquially it was called Motor, and it formally adopted this title in the late 1990s.

Motor, previously a rival, is a stablemate magazine to Wheels, but Motor focuses more on performance cars. The magazine is often the center of controversy, one example being the exclusion of the Ford Performance Vehicles (FPV) F6 Typhoon from PCOTY 2005 due to clutch problems. FPV had blamed Motor for flat shifting, when the problem lay in the clutch itself. The following year, Motor and FPV made up when the magazine named the F6 Typhoon the Australian Performance Car Of The Year.

[edit] Annual Competitions

Motor holds several annual competitions of which the winners are usually highly controversial.

[edit] Bang For Your Buck (BFYB)

The competition is broken up into price categories where performance oriented vehicles from each group (eg: < $20,000, $20,001 - $35,000, etc) competing against other cars in the same bracket. Points are awarded for several distinct areas including outright performance, price, and finally 'personal preference' of the judges.

The performance tests usually include a timed acceleration, top speed and track lap time (by an official race driver). The price points are determined as a percentage of the 'average' price for the price category.

Total bang points are divided by the buck point, and this gives an overall rating which is used to compare cars from all categories. The idea is to enable a $20,000 hot hatch to compare on equal ground with a $250,000 porsche.