Nathan Duff was a staff photographer for Australian Classic Car Magazine who had always been as fascinated by the people behind the cars as by the cars themselves. In 2018, he founded Retromotive — a quarterly coffee-table publication that would strip away everything that made traditional car magazines feel like trade catalogues and replace it with what actually matters: the stories of the people who own, love, and cherish extraordinary machines.
The result is a magazine printed on thick art paper — 250 GSM matte for the cover, 157 GSM gloss inside — that runs to 136 pages per issue and contains no industry news, no new-car reviews, no events coverage, and no allegiance to brand, badge, or tribe. What it does contain are lavishly photographed features on rare classic cars and the intimate journeys of the people who found them, restored them, and refused to let them go. A Le Mans-winning ISO Bizzarrini owned by the founding chairman of the Petersen Automotive Museum. A conversation with Mario Andretti about his career. A bare-naked Lamborghini Miura on the cover. Bob Lutz talking about his extraordinary life at the top of the global auto industry.
Originally available only to an Australian audience, Retromotive expanded internationally after a surge of demand from the United States, Europe, and Britain. In 2021, it debuted in six hundred Barnes & Noble stores across America. One reviewer compared it to a softbound edition of Automobile Quarterly and noted that you do not have to be a car person to enjoy it — the magazine is designed to evoke the feelings and emotions a beautiful machine can stir in almost anyone. It is, in the end, not really about cars at all. It is about the people who cannot stop thinking about them.
Explore Retromotive at <a href="https://www.retromotive.co/" target="\_blank">retromotive.co