Automotive journalist here.

Your question is intimately tied to the history of automotive magazines, and I’m not aware of a really good, academic history exploring that. I can tell you that the form itself dates back to the earliest days of motoring — Carl Benz filed his patent for the “vehicle powered by a gas engine” in 1886, and both the American publication The Horseless Age and the U.K.’s The AutoCar published their first issues in 1895.

But they were more industrial news for makers and sellers of cars than consumer opinion for many years. Prior to the development of the car review, automotive magazines experimented with being industry publications full of sales data and how-to repair guides, but the car review we know today was a post-world war II creation.

The father of the modern car review - a journalist’s opinion of the car based on their experience of driving it - was American Tom McCahill, and he’s widely credited within the industry as the first to publish 0-60 times.

He convinced Mechanix Illustrated to publish the first such article, where he reviewed his own personal 1946 Ford Coupe, which, he noted, got from a dead stop to 60 mph in about 23 seconds. He left us no notes on how he made this measurement. But he repeated the test in subsequent reviews.

Why did he pick 0-60 instead of, say, 0-50? Sad to say, no one seems to have recorded his answer.

I will note that it’s quite close to a 0-100 kph measurement, which would seem intuitively more logical. But I have no evidence that he even considered this. Models at the time were generally not sold on multiple continents, so it seems doubtful that it entered his mind.

Both his review format and his test caught on. By the middle 1950s, publications like Sports Cars Illustrated (today known as Car and Driver) and Motor Trend made it the heart of their content, and they all published 0-60 times.

It’s worth noting, however, that they didn’t all use a standard technique and haven’t stuck with the same technique all along. Innovations in drag racing particularly changed the numbers — beginning in the 1960s, drag strips used a light beam system to measure time — and in the U.S., enthusiast magazines rented time on these for testing. Because of the way they trigger, the machines allowed the car to roll about 1 foot before they began to measure. The technology has changed, but to keep their numbers consistent, many publications still test with “one foot of roll-out.”

This practice never caught on in Europe, where drag racing was never a significant phenomenon. Hence, American and European publications tend to use different methods that can produce different measurements. In a world where enthusiasts argue over every tenth of a second, that becomes a little humorous.

Hope that helps. I wish there were better sources to point you to, but to the best of my knowledge, the first good academic history of our field has yet to be attempted.

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