When I first started my current role in the automotive industry last year, I met with a bunch of publishers to understand more about the industry and how the media were covering it. Towards the top of the list was Future Publishing with titles like Fast Bikes, Fast Car and Redline and well known car mod events such as TRAX, JapFest and FordFair.

Fast forward 12 months and Future has just launched Issue One of iCar described as ‘The Definitive Guide to More Efficient Motoring’ and with a tagline of Efficient, Intelligent, Fun.

Now, there are posts on this blog that make it clear I like ‘fast’ and I like ‘fun’ however, having attended a few of these car mod events in the last year, I have to be brutally honest and say that the words ‘Efficient’ and ‘Intelligent’ would be pretty low down the list of adjectives I’d associate with them. Therefore, reading the manifesto of the iCar editorial team is like taking a breath of fresh (exhaust fume free) air…

iCar is:

#Excited about cars made better through great technology

#About much more than just hybrids and electric cars

# Independent and not afraid to tell the truth

iCar is not:

# Staffed by sandal-wearing environmentalists

# Obsessed by irrelevant supercars

# Found driving hatchbacks around race tracks!

This is good. I like it a lot and I think they are potentially hitting a very sweet spot where technologies are converging at the right time and in the right place.

So, highlights from this first issue for me were…

• From Dust to Rust– an in-depth study conducted with experts from Imperial College that tracks carbon emissions associated with traditional and new generations of car design. This demonstrates, first and foremost, just how complex the whole issue of carbon emissions is, particularly when you try to capture the carbon footprint of the whole production, usage and disposal lifecycle. From the many diagrams and explanations in the article, there appeared to be a strong indication that whereas the new generations of cars and their alternative energy propulsion have high environmental impact in production, this decreases significantly in usage. Whereas traditional vehicle types may have less impact during production, this increases steadily during usage.This is an important message to communicate at the outset of this new publication and emerging narrative, because when you take into account the warnings about CO2 emissions and the devastating impact they are having on the wider environment it’s clear that we need to be thinking about ways to reduce longer term impacts now rather than continuing to take a ‘wait and see’ approach.

• Robert Llewellyn interview and his Nissan Leaf review – Firstly, Robert Llewellyn is a bit of a personal hero of mine as I’ve always loved his performances as Kryten on Red Dwarf and subsequently his work on shows like Scrapheap Challenge and How Do They Do It? so his personal account of how he changed from being a self confessed ‘petrolhead’ to being a serious advocate of electric cars was enlightening but also illustrated the challenge in shifting ideas, attitudes and behaviours.

• Reviews of latest in-car apps and interfaces – My current employer, Armour Automotive, is at the forefront of in-car technology integration so it is interesting to see how these areas of development are evolving to keep pace with massive and rapid innovation in personal device technologies. One article covered the latest product from a key competitor, Parrot, who appears to be returning to its core business and innovating with in-car Android based applications with its Asteroid head unit . However, as this recent CNET review shows, there is a real challenge for even the long-standing experts in in-car technologies to provide something better or more compelling than what’s on your device already.

As some of my other blog posts have covered, we are entering a very exciting period of automotive innovation and experimentation as well as increasing convergence of digital technologies and so I very much welcome new publications like iCar that support and promote this cause.