Autocar’s My Week In Cars podcast is going from strength to strength. Steve Cropley looks back at how it all began – and where it might lead
Matt Prior and I worked together for 17 years before we ever spent as long as half an hour simply chatting. That’s how it goes with reporters. Most days you head off in a particular direction to find the source of a story while colleagues on different missions set different courses. Occasionally you’re together in cars, but even that’s rare. If two car journalists are involved in a project, there are usually two cars as well.
However, conversational life changed for Prior and me a little over a year ago. We started recording a weekly half-hour podcast, called My Week In Cars, and over the past year it has become established as a regular element among Autocar’s collection of multimedia offerings: printed magazine, website, video channel, other social outlets – and now pod.
As we all know, one medium helps promote others. It’s an effect that has helped expand MWIC’s total of weekly downloads from 1600-odd in the beginning to around 5400 as this is written, 62 weeks later. Total downloads are homing in on 270,000, and we have hopes that the trajectory will continue. We’re currently number eight (down two) in the top 10 of UK motoring podcasts.
Neither Prior nor I invented this idea. That was down to Rachael Prasher who, with a managing director’s eye for maximising Autocar’s existing assets, noted an obvious thing we’d missed: that we both wrote weekly magazine columns talking broadly about what we’d been doing over the previous few days. Why not turn them into a podcast while keeping the print columns?
My first arch-Luddite reaction (“it’ll never work”) was far from helpful. But Prior, who is much more open-minded and well practised at voicing videos for our YouTube channel, thought it worth a go, so we made a podcast in the studio that Autocar’s publisher had just kitted out for such things. The reaction was better than expected and good enough to make us persist.
The audience grew steadily. People seemed to enjoy our ramblings, unscripted and only loosely governed by what we’d written a few days earlier, with various readers’ letters chucked in to raise interesting questions, lift the tone and spice things up.
Listeners even overlooked my frequent memory haze (somebody’s name often repl
