The Truth about Cars (TTAC) examines the "whoring" of car magazines to advertising revenue and the resulting lack of objectivity:
Like the authors, I've also been reading Car & Driver (C&D), Road & Track, Motor Trend, and AutoWeek since the mid-seventies, supplementing them in recent years with Sport Compact Car, Turbo, the always-excellent Grassroots Motorsports, Evo, Car, TopGear, Japanese magazines (including the always-fun video-magazine Best Motoring), and a selection of industry publications. And I've spent a large amount of my money on enthusiast cars and modifications over my lifetime - admittedly not all of it well thought-out.
Before I proceed, I want to split Grassroots Motorsports, Best Motoring, and probably AutoWeek, Turbo, Evo, and TopGear away from the rest. The issue is whether the monthly car-test magazines such as C&D, R&T, and Motor Trend "whore" their magazines because of advertising. The others in my experience do not. I'll also draw particular attention to the integrity of Grassroots Motorsports - it's as "grassroots" as the name implies. The articles there are written by the type of people that are the closest to the types of things I've done in this hobby over the years: rally, autocross, and high speed track events. I'd like to write for them myself. These are "car guys" who happen to write a car magazine!
Now down to business: I agree 100% with TTAC. And I take particular note of the example given by Stephan Wilkinson, a former editor-in-chief of C&D. Advertising is an inevitable trend - and in the software industry this is being put into "free" software that might contain some minor functional benefit to the user but in reality is bought and paid for by advertising. We have to live with more and more advertising in our lives - we have to learn to just have to lie and back and ignore it. We're all "whored" to advertising ourselves in more and more aspects of our daily lives.
Advertising "whoring" has always existed to some degree, although I do agree that the problem has grown considerably worse and is accelerating in more recent years. One problem is that there is little money to be made in specialty print magazines these days without relying heavily on advertising. Some specialty magazines are literally nothing but advertising - with "tests" of new products taken directly from press releases if not actually written by the manufacturers marketing departments.
There is still benefit for the enthusiast to be found in automotive print magazines. The major print magazines are the only media who can afford instrumented testing. Tests with technical test data are better than subjective editorializing. While nobody has ever suggested that the car magazines rig the tests to vary technical data.... you should avoid the editorializing and points scoring that often suggests conclusions. And car magazines are the only ones who have access to literally hundreds of cars for testing and comparison. Methodically testing cars is extremely expensive and time-consuming.
For the rest of us, even if we have press credentials from the manufacturers (which I do have), access to cars and testing venues is rare and it is impossible for us to test methodically.
For enthusiasts, the web offers the most recent news (far faster than print could ever deliver), as well as real-world feedback and opinion on the products. I follow the news closely and can keep up with official press announcements on an almost real-time basis. We can thank the web for that; it has completely changed the paradigm for every print magazine, newspaper, and evening news show.
But there is also a flip-side to the web: the rise of amateur and quasi- or outright unqualified reporters of news - real news or otherwise. Everybody and their brother has a web site these days - and you'd have to agree that my own site is hardly objective ("if it doesn't drive aggressively on a racetrack, blast it" - the dead-end I have fallen into because of my open track event hobby). Web-based opinion is rarely objective and has to be thoroughly filtered to find any remaining truth. Forums are the worst of it - how many posts do you see blasting anything and anybody that doesn't fit into the "this car is the greatest thing on the planet" purpose of the forum? Or forums that are dominated by a tiny handful of ill-behaved jerks? And posters who have posted or replied thousands of times? Is that their life, do they even have a job (most postings are made from 9-5)? And then you discover that most of them don't even have the car they are discussing and have never even driven one around the block. Some don't even have a drivers license! Nonetheless with some heavy filtering of the worst types of the inevitable flaming and arguments, and a lot of patience, a couple of facts about the cars do rise to the surface.
For the enthusiast, wading thru mountains of print and web material will eventually reveal obscure but significant facts about cars we are interested in. Introductory articles, for example, were over-whelmingly positive about the BMW 335i and the G35 sedan. The first road tests delivered the message loud and clear that everybody should go out and buy one immediately. It took a couple of months, however, before we found out a couple of points about these cars that would make all the difference in day-to-day life:
- 335i - no limited slip differential. In BMWs master plan to keep M3 owners happy, the 335i had to be hobbled ever so slightly to keep it behind the last M3. So if you want to spend your life with this car with one wheel spinning like crazy (assuming you've shut off the electronic nannies so that you can have some fun when not travelling in a straight line), this is the car for you.
- G35 sedan - the clutch take-up point for the 6-speed manual is almost on the floor. An enthusiast wants to shift his or her own gears - but shifting quickly and cleanly now becomes a major issue.
Fro the entire G35 family, particularly the 350Z, the 6-speed transmission has always been a major problem. This is a fact you'll be hard-pressed to find in any magazine. There are owners of these cars with this transmission that are in their third replacement transmission - if they haven't given up and sold the car outright. Suspension alignment is also a problem - particularly in the 350Z where alignment issues alone have ruined the car for many owners. And if you look at it from a track-enthusiast standpoint, you'll find that camber on the older FM platform cars(current Z, older G35) isn't adjustable - no factory provision front or rear. That's a fatal error in our way of thinking. Try finding relevant facts about this significant problem in car magazines. You'll only find these facts in enthusiasts forums after reading 98% of the thousands and thousands of posts.
This problem also goes back to the age before the internet. Take as an example the 1989 Taurus SHO in the Car & Driver article above. C&D praised the car... never mentioning how terrible the shifter was or how horrible the seats were if you drove the car more than 20 miles at a time. Their introductory article and various comparison tests that followed over the years never mentioned the problems with the Yamaha sensors, the Mazda-sourced clutch, or the wobbly brakes. I took the word of C&D on this car and bought a first model-year example because I immediately needed a stealthy daily-driver. If I hadn't bought the extended warranty, my repair costs for dozens of bugs would have literally approximated the value of the car. Another friend with one also suffered from many of these same bugs - even finding himself stranded in the middle of nowhere in West Texas (not a good place to be stranded int he middle of the summer!). I remained enthusiastic about the car and even bought a later example, but I also developed a more sober view of the realities of this hobby. Of course, we didn't have the web in 1989. If we had, and if I'd already grown a bit smarter, I wouldn't have bought one so quickly - and possibly not at all.
Putting aside the problem of the shear volume of sites and information available on the web, assuming you can filter it somehow, the web reveals a tremendous amount of information about a car during it's entire lifespan:
- Before. We get an early look at upcoming cars in spy shots. The pictures of the prototype G35 sedan in pieces a year ago were very informative. If the web had existed years ago, we would have instantly seen the '94 Mustang with slab sides before Coletti added the coke-bottle shape (allowing bigger tires). Or the Lincoln LS prototype that the press found abandoned with the hood up by the side of a Detroit freeway - and took full advantage of. Nowadays, we get to see- my personal favorite: manufacturers testing prototypes on the Nurburgring.
- Introduction. The web provides full specs and imagery at the time of announce. While these are usually only available to registered members, inevitably this information finds it's way to public websites nearly the minute it is made available (and often before).
- After. This is where the volume of information sky-rockets, and the most filtering is needed. If you have the patience, you can find experience and truths buried in it all.
One side note. Nurburgring testing is a personal interest of mine. We all know about the fabulous history of the track, and how difficult it can be on cars. That's the point - enthusiast want cars that have been tested very aggressively and the Nurburgring is the only place to do it. We see pictures (and sometimes videos) every week of upcoming cars being tested and developed at the 'ring. Neither of my SHOs (even though they were never track cars for me) would have lasted a single lap at the 'ring. None of my Mustangs (when stock) would have lasted a single aggressive lap - in fact the troublesome supercharged Cobra would have expired 1/4 of the way thru a single lap and would have been caught by the press garking it's coolant for all the world to see. That would have saved me thousands of dollars and the 5 years I lost off the end of my life. Note that the S2000 had been extensively tested at the 'ring and demonstrates the testing regimen of Honda by never loosing coolant or brakes in the toughest of circumstances. I'm considering a new personal rule for my own future car purchases: never buy anything that hasn't been tested and developed at the 'ring.
Back to the TTAC and similar sites: they won't have access to instrumented testing facilities, and will only have a very limited number of long-term test vehicles - if any. Long term means several months or tens of thousands of miles - we need that duration to reveal problem areas. We also have to depend on them finding and retaining writers that have enough of experience drivnig cars in a wide variety of environments (preferably including the track) to get the necessary technical experience, judgement, and wisdom to report back to us accurately and fairly. The staff of TTAC, other than one particularly bombastic writer, is building an honest reporting methodology that is better than most and doesn't owe anything to the manufacturers of products they comment upon.
Enthusiasts like you and I will have to learn how to filter ever-increasing amounts of information to find what we need. The average consumer, however, is certainly in a tough position - bombarded with slicker and slicker commercials, advertising, and mailings. Some will fall for that and may end up embittered. Some will find friends and acquaintances who will share long-term experiences (which is probably why Japanese cars do so well - they last a long time and everybody knows it). Some will find something like Consumer Reports and will end up with a boring utilitarian appliance - and a set of driving skills to match. That's a truly unfortunate fate.
