It’s sad to read the news that Motor-Presse Stuttgart will not publish the Auto Katalog annual this year. That means last year’s, the 57th, could have been the ultimate edition.
   There are complaints on Amazon.de, and I was all ready to buy a copy myself—typically I would have an order put in through Magnetix in Wellington (and wait the extra months).
   Auto Katalog is part of my childhood, too. While my father had various Grundig books through work, which were my introduction to the German language, it was the 1978–9 number of Auto Katalog that got me absorbing more Deutsch. To this day I have a vocabulary of German motoring jargon that is nearly impossible to get into conversation. And to name-drop, I owe it to Karl Urban’s Dad for my first and second copies—he gave them away to me after a new issue came in the post.
   My Auto Katalog collection has a gap between 1980–1 and 1986–7, which would have marked the first year I saw it on sale in New Zealand. They were pricey—over NZ$20—but for a car enthusiast, well worth it. The sad thing is that they declined in quality in the 1990s, and by the 2010s there were noticeable omissions and errors. (MG, for instance, finally showed up in an appendix last year, though the marque had returned to mass production in China many years before.)
   Nevertheless, as an extra reference for Autocade, they were invaluable, and I always found their structure more suited to research than the French Toutes les voitures du monde from L’Automobile, which I would pick up in France or in French Polynesia. (I’ve now ordered the 2014–15 edition online, as it’s not available locally.)
   There was great support for Auto Katalog, and I can’t imagine Motor-Presse not making money off it, but the announcement in August—which I only read in the wake of noticing that the 2014–15 issue had not gone on sale abroad—indicates that such information is more readily available online.
   Well, it’s not—not really. There may be national sites, and there are a few international ones (Carfolio and Automobile Catalog) but none pack the information quite as nicely into a single, easily referenced volume as Auto Katalog. That’s where we’re happy to pay a few euros. And, like Autocade, there are omissions: if these other sites are like mine, then they have one chief contributor and a few very occasional helpers. All three sites are trying to create a history of cars, too, not just new models, so we can never fully keep up with the current model year while we fill in the blanks of the past.
   A few years ago, a Polish company put together several volumes of what are regarded to be the best international car references this side of the 21st century, but even that did not last long. The research and presentation were meticulous, according to friends who bought it, but the language left something to be desired. It was never available here, to my knowledge, and by the time I found out about them, they had dated.
   We had also discussed doing a printed version of Autocade, but my feeling remains that there are just too many gaps in the publication, although proudly we do have information on some very obscure cars on the market today that even Auto Katalog had missed.
   If Auto Katalog does not return, then it’s likely its spiritual successor will be found in China. Here is the most competitive car market on earth, with the greatest number of models on sale: it would make sense for a future publication to use China as the starting-point, and have other countries’ models filled in. China would also have the publishing and printing resources to compile such an annual, with the chief problem being what the Poles found, despite a multilingual population and even a lot of expats in China, making such a publication less accessible and readable. (That is a challenge to prove me wrong.)—Jack Yan, Publisher