Autobiography: A Sentimental Road Trip with automotive journalist Ted Laturnus

If there is anyone who knows anything about cars, it's Ted Laturnus.

The automotive journalist drives at least 75 different cars a year (and almost as many motorcycles), reviewing the vehicles for publications such as The Globe and Mail.

He spoke to B.C. Almanac host Gloria Macarenko about his new book aptly titled: Autobiography: A Sentimental Road Trip.

Gloria Macarenko: What is it about our connections to our vehicles?

Ted Laturnus: Well, if you think about it, cars are extremely cool. Think of the things they do for you. They keep you warm, they keep you entertained, they take you to where you want to go, they give you privacy. They're kind of like a little clubhouse on wheels.

I think that's why I like them among other reasons, and I also think there's an aesthetic involved here. I think a lot of cars are just flat-out beautiful to look at and to be in them and drive them around, because each car has a different ambience about it.

How did you decide on which stories to include in this book?

Well, I looked back at the cars I've driven over the years. When I was doing Driver's Seat I drove a minimum of 50 cars a year for about 13 years.

I drove literally thousands of cars, but it's not the new ones that I remember. It's the old ones that I went through things with, maybe they even broke down by the side of the road, but there's always a memory that goes along with them, going right back to when I was a kid. So I thought, let's look back and talk about some of these cars and I ended up picking them all up, more or less.

What was your favourite car?

I've got a weakness for anything English, especially two-seater sport cars like Austin-Healeys. I've owned four Morgans over the years and there's something about those cars that really hits me where I live, so if I had to wrap it up it would be something English, with just a couple of seats in it.

You drove a taxi for some time.... How would you describe that experience?

When I was going to university I drove a taxi for a company called MacClures.

It was a 1974 Dodge Coronet and it was a piece of junk. If you didn't get down to the garage quickly you'd have to get the worst cars, and I always wound up with this car that no one else wanted. The seat wouldn't go back on it, the ventilation didn't work, it made all kinds of terrible noises, and I quite often would get stuck with it because I was a little man on a totem pole and I remember that car vividly and it was not pleasant, not pleasant at all.

We can be nostalgic and say "They don't make them like they used to"... but is there some truth in saying cars just aren't as interesting as they used to be?

My opinion is we're kind of on the tail end of — I hesitate to say it —  the golden age of cars. [These days] cars are very uniform, and you can park five side by side and you can't tell them apart. They're wonderful examples of efficiency and design and all that, but they don't have personality, mainly because there's so many of them, and I think the days of this car being distinctive, or that car being distinctive, are past.

We're going into a new era of automobiles and I think self-driving cars a part of that. Also electric cars are apart of that, because everything is changing, and the old gas-fueled bangers are a thing of the past, or will become a thing of the past. Life goes on. That's one of the reasons I wanted to do this, before we all forgot about them.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

To hear the full interview listen to the audio labelled: Automotive journalist Ted Ted Laturnus reflects on decades of test driving cars in new book