Best Motoring distinguished itself through non-traditional automotive challenges that went beyond straightforward road tests. Its most distinctive format was the touge battle, in which two cars competed to outrun each other on a twisty mountain pass — a format that mirrored the underground street racing culture that had developed on Japanese mountain roads and gave the series an authenticity that conventional magazine tests could not match.
The series also featured high-speed trials at circuits including Tsukuba, Suzuka, and Sendai, along with comparisons of factory-specification cars from Japanese and international manufacturers. Best Motoring covered primarily non-tuned, factory-standard vehicles, while its sibling publication Hot Version focused on tuned cars and appeared on a bi-monthly schedule.
The regular presenters and drivers on Best Motoring were drawn from the premier ranks of Japanese professional motorsport, including competitors from the Japan GT Championship (later Super GT), the D1 Grand Prix drift series, and Formula Nippon. Among the most prominent regular contributors were Keiichi Tsuchiya — known as the "Drift King" — along with Motoharu Kurosawa, Manabu Orido, Nobuteru Taniguchi, Juichi Wakisaka, Akihiko Nakaya, and Naoki Hattori. Their professional credentials gave the series a competitive legitimacy that distinguished it from presenter-led lifestyle programming.
Best Motoring launched its first edition in 1987 and ran as a monthly series through to its final regular issue in June 2011. The series was produced by Kodansha and 2&4 Motoring throughout its run. A quarterly spin-off titled Racing History debuted in 2005, dedicated to the historical documentation of Japanese motorsport.
Following cancellation, an attempted revival under the name Best Motor TV launched in December 2011, though the revived series produced only two to three new instalments per year rather than maintaining a monthly schedule. From 2016, Best Motoring moved to YouTube, where it has continued to release new content.
In April 2000, Taro Koki, Masa Kuji, and Katsu Takahashi co-founded Zigzag Asia and acquired international distribution rights for Best Motoring, creating the Best Motoring International (BMI) compilation series. BMI assembled edited highlights from Best Motoring, Hot Version, and Video Option into English-language releases aimed at audiences outside Japan.
Early BMI volumes were dubbed entirely into English, a format widely criticised for the quality of the voice work and editing. From volume 3 onward, the series shifted to an English narrator combined with the original Japanese audio for presenters, using subtitles for translation and localising on-screen graphics into English. International automotive editor Sam Mitani appeared in the series. Post-production for much of the BMI catalogue was handled by Dogma Studios, with Brian Alvarez responsible for editing, graphics, and audio mixing.
Best Motoring and its associated publications played a defining role in transmitting knowledge of Japanese automotive culture to audiences in Western countries during the late 1990s and early 2000s, a period before streaming video made direct access to Japanese media straightforward. VHS and DVD copies of the series functioned as the primary source through which enthusiasts outside Japan encountered the performance cars and racing drivers at the centre of the country's tuning and motorsport culture.