Eight long years.  That’s how long this website has been running in one form or another.  I still remember clearly how the entire magazine started way back in 1998—as nothing more than a sem-break hobby.  At that time, I was still in college—in the most tedious course in the world—legal management.  We dealt with the usual corporate stuff: accounting, finance, obligations and contracts.  Partly, it felt frustrating that I couldn’t do something artistic.  Combined with a passion for motoring (I just got my driver’s license then)—well you get the drift on what my brother and I decided to do one afternoon.

For those who have been following us, we put up our maiden issue on November 10, 1998—featuring the Honda S2000 and a test drive of the Honda Accord VTi-L.  Sure enough, the visitor count was nearly negligible and our name different: motion magazine.  But that didn’t stop us.  We continued writing, photographing (we used a point-and-shoot film camera then), scanning and uploading our stuff.  We never got any official recognition then, relying mostly on driving our families and friends cars.  Occasionally, we’d intrepidly walk to a dealership and ask for a test drive.  In January 1999, we shot our first test drive in digital format using a 640x480 Sony Mavica camera.  The same test drive—the Ford Lynx Ghia—was actually a Philippine-first, though we didn’t know at the time. We shifted our name to motioncars.com when we acquired the URL for it (we originally wanted motion.com, but the name was already taken).  Our first big break occurred in December 2000, six months after we switched to a weekly format—when the Philippine Star ran a story on online automotive magazines.  Writer Brian Afuang (now the motoring editor of The Manila Times) noted our very “critical reviews” and “international flavor” of the website’s design.

It was a steady climb from there with our first press event being the launch/drive of the 2001 Honda Civic.  At first, our site was received with skepticism—being a relatively new medium and low circulation format at the time.  However, we received some encouraging support from several manufacturers.  Soon, we launched the.car.chart—a no-holds barred new car guide we patterned from British magazines.  Later that year, we started our long-term working relationship with Vernon Sarne first as contributors on Rev Magazine.  When he moved to Manila Times, I continued my partnership with him, while Jason moved to Manila Bulletin.  Both of us went back to magazine when he took over the editorship of Top Gear Philippines.

Thanks to our loyal readers—mostly enthusiasts and industry leaders (like the ones reading this very column right now), we’ve incorporated changes to make the site better, cleaner and certainly better from where we started.  The most obvious change is to the.car.chart, where it now includes car models sold in the Philippines from 1990 to the present—this makes it the ultimate resource for anyone who’s buying a car new or old.  Then we’ve added one new section: Showroom (spotlighting on one new car each week), while integrating the Glances (travel) into the Features section.  The last not-so-obvious change was the movement of our past articles into a search engine friendly format.  By moving them to permanent locations, sites such as Google will find it easier to index (no more “page not found”).

With over 23,000 unique visitors a month (not including the forum)—motioncars.com is now the country’s most read automotive car magazine.  And things certainly look brighter.  We a big help from our readers, the automotive industry and other people who’ve supported us throughout this years, expect only the best.

< back to main >