The first issue of World of Wheels appeared in the spring of 1983. What it lacked in thickness it made up for in thinness — and Canadian-ness.

Twenty-five years later we’re still relatively modestly sized — and still very Canadian. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but we print the magazine exclusively on paper from maple trees, and only those that have been felled by wild beavers.

Actually, we’ve always tried not to get too heavy handed with the Canuck thing. For one thing, it’s a bit like syrup from those maple trees — only good in the appropriate doses. You can chug maple syrup if you want to, but I won’t be there to call 911 when you’re gagging and the maple syrup that’s dripping down your jaw eventually cements you to the linoleum.

But for sure, World of Wheels was created because of Canadian considerations.

As all of you know, the big, slick U.S. magazines, of whatever stripe, have always done brisk business in Canada. They speak the same language as we, and offer a lot of the content we crave, so make it tough for less-well-funded Canadian magazines to get a leg up. So there has not been a proliferation of national road-test magazines in this country over the years.

In the early 1980s, Lynn Helpard ran an advertising agency in Montreal. He also was — and still is — a car nut.

Like any gear head in this country, he felt that the American mags were great, but found them wanting in several crucial areas — no mention of the differing model line-ups in Canada, no Canadian pricing information, no reporting on Canadian legislation and news that affected the driving experience, and just a general lack of interesting stories for, and about, Canadian drivers.

But because Lynn was in the advertising business, he was also keenly aware that many automakers doing business in Canada were also affected by the lack of a national road-test magazine. They often told him that such a publication would serve their interests too; they could stand to have more coverage on new models and their technologies, and such a magazine would also be the appropriate place for some Canadian-specific advertising.

So Lynn and his wife, Angie, sold their agency, and launched World of Wheels in the fall of 1983.

“We are out to inform and sometimes amuse,” said editor Chris Allan, in his inaugural front-of-the-book column. That’s the same formula we work with today, a quarter of a century later.

And as I noted off the top, that 1983 issue is very Canadian, even though it doesn’t contain any big Canadian-themed stories or lots of flag waving. Its Canadian-ness is done in a very, well, Canadian way. It contains information that Canadian drivers would find useful and entertaining, using Canadian pricing and terminology, and that’s about it for the patriotism, which is how it should be.

It goes without saying that when fuel economy numbers were listed in that ’83 issue, they were listed in the dreaded metric system, which is another differentiator between the U.S. buff books and us.

The Canadian government mandated that we convert to the metric system in 1971. But, as you know, the conversion is not complete. To this day, people just damn well refuse to order their Guinness or Labatt Blue by the cubic centimeter, and, if you’re of a certain generation, miles per gallon still means a lot more to you than litres per 100 km. That’s why we’ll continue to feature both fuel efficiency ratios in our roadtests and specs.

But we’ve made the decision, at this 25-year mark, to no longer include dimensions in the British system (inches and feet and all that). We have to start somewhere to achieve total “metricfication” at some point, and this is where we’re starting. It’s time.

I was a teenager during those heady days when we first embraced the metric lifestyle. I remember my father having a conversation about this metric development with a friend of his, a farmer named Reg Johnson. “This one here weighs about 1,400 lbs,” said Reg, pointing to one of his prized heifers. “How many kilometers is that in centigrade?”

Everyone should be a bit more up to speed on this metric thing by now, so I suspect this decision will not matter much to most of you (here’s hoping). Also note that, to ease the transition, we’ve included a metric-to-British conversion chart at the beginning of the spec section to this 2008 Buyers’ Guide.

Technically, one of the fall issues of 2008, maybe the September or November ones, will exactly mark 25 years of publication. But we’re going to celebrate it all year. Watch for upcoming special features and contests all through 2008.