I am not a petrolhead. I have only ever owned one new car, a Citi Golf, which I drove for 14 years until it was stolen.
As a result of this, and of a bad accident that destroyed another car, I found myself having to shop for two cars.
So I read reviews, downloaded brochures, checked specifications and looked around showrooms.
I know there are people who walk into a car showroom cold and buy a car as they would buy toothpaste.
But sadly, I am not one of them. I found the exercise very frustrating.
The kind of journalism one finds in the motoring magazines and supplements is clearly not aimed at me.
I was looking for sensible advice about small to mid-sized cars that would be safe, reliable and cost-effective. What I got was glitz.
Motoring pages tend to be filled with gushing praise of the latest model, which the journalist was flown to some exotic destination to test-drive.
My favourite example was a junket that took journalists to Venice for a car launch.
It was not explained how they tested a car in a city that has no roads, only canals, and is slowly sinking into the Adriatic Sea. But this is not a column about the freebie culture.
Fuelled by the excitement of driving a brand-new car and the manufacturer’s free-spending hospitality, it is unsurprising that launch reviews are generally enthusiastic. It is not impossible to find a critical review, just hard.
Of more use are the comparative reviews the car magazines sometimes do, in which they compare a series of similar models.
Overwhelmingly, the focus is on luxury brands: fancy 4x4s, the latest Mercs and Beamers. In fact, they are driven by only the tiniest proportion of the country’s population.
Motoring writing is focused on styling, power and performance, liberally spiced with impenetrable figures and motorbabble, as if it were all written by teenage boys with too much testosterone.
The top issues that mattered to me were safety, consumption, running costs and reliability.
It was possible to find information on safety features, although in most cases these were presented as little perks, not the basic necessities they should be. Consumption figures were always given.
After some work, I found a regular survey done by JD Powers, which ranks manufacturers according to the complaints buyers have. It’s not a perfect tool, but it helped establish reliability.
But, surprisingly, there seemed to be no measure of long-term running costs.
If motoring journalism was aimed at the ordinary buyer, these are the issues that would be at the top of the agenda, not buried far below excited prose about the open-top’s acceleration and how solidly it handles at speeds far above the legal limit. But maybe that’s not the point.
In fact, motoring journalism should probably be seen as a species of entertainment. It’s aimed at people who enjoy the dream of sitting behind the wheel of a car they will never really own.
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