One of the biggest perks of my chosen profession is that people give me cars to drive, and I get to tell you, dear readers, all about them. Sometimes, automakers even fly me to fancy places to drive these cars. I was remarking to my daughter yesterday that if I wanted to drive as many cars as I do without being an automotive journalist, I’d either have to get a well-paying job I’d hate or become a valet.
The unavoidable paradox of being a critic, especially of consumer products, is that the more reviews you write, the harder it gets to write them. As you become more knowledgeable of your subject area, the more challenging it is, at least for me personally, to write in a way that differentiates one review from another.
Inevitably, this creates a risk of laziness, which, for writers, means falling into the trap of leaning too hard on cliché. It happens. In the older days of auto journalism, when there was still good money in magazines, the amount of output required of the average reviewer was lower than it is now, and it still happened.
I say this not to be critical of the profession in general or to pick on anyone in particular. Lauryn is only human, so don’t think I haven’t been through the same predicament. If you go through my corpus of reviews, you’ll probably find an example of each of these somewhere (or, like, multiple in one article).
Consider this a peek behind the curtain into the mind of the average car reviewer.
“The shifter falls at hand…”
Translation: This one drives Jason crazy, because it really doesn’t mean much. Where else should the shifter fall? Should it fall at the knees? This means the reviewer had nothing to say about the shifter, but probably gets paid by the word and had to say something.
“…understeers at the limit”
Translation: This is a FWD or AWD car. Or it’s a BMW i3 with not enough tire up front.
“It falls apart at 10/10ths…”
Translation: The reviewer has been flown around the world to the greatest race tracks and had literal Le Mans 24-hour winners give them driving instruction and, in all that time, they’ve somehow never learned to drive. They do not understand what trail-braking is, and only do it inadvertently and haphazardly. A car’s limits are so approachable to them because when they get to a turn, they’re either smashing the gas too hard or the brakes too late.
“It makes all the right sounds.”
Translation: It has a functioning motor. Probably not an NA V6.
“Torque is instantaneous…”
Translation: This is an electric car.
“The car’s designers neatly bisected the DLO with a thin b-pillar”
Translation: The reviewer has been to many press conferences, and while they’re mostly only paying attention to the bank app on their phone to make sure they don’t get accidentally billed for all that room service, they do glom onto one term and use it in every review because it makes them sound knowledgeable. Why should you trust this person to give an accurate and honest car review? Because they know the weird terminology that you don’t. See also: Heckblende.
“Butt-dyno”
Translation: Someone told the reviewer the actual stats, but looking up numbers is for nerds. How they feel about the power is more important than the actual, quantifiable number.
“The car’s bulbous rear…”
Translation: The reviewer knows we’re not supposed to compare cars to Sophia Loren anymore, both because it’s maybe sexist to only compare cars to beautiful actresses and because Gen Z doesn’t know who Sophia Loren is.
“Horsepower”
Translation: When a reviewer refers to the experience the kick of horsepower, they usually mean torque.
“Torque”
Translation: Also torque.
“… fine …”
Translation: How do you refer to a car that’s not so bad that it makes you angry, nor so good that it draws comparisons to your favorite song, plane, flower, drink, or actress? You just call it fine.
“Piano black”
Translation: At some point, reviewers realized that no one likes piano black interiors. The taste of the average car reviewer is probably not the same as the taste of the average consumer, so now that reviewers have realized this is something that they’ll win points for complaining about, they’ll take any remotely shiny piece of plastic or metal, call it piano black, and say it’s the worst thing to happen since the Spanish Inquistion, the Bubonic Plague, and According to Jim combined.
“Like a [Insert Power Tool] in a washing machine…”
Translation: A reviewer many years ago (Peter Egan? Sam Mitani?) compared the exhaust note of a car to a chainsaw in a washing machine, and reviewers have all tried some variation on this. It means the car is loud.
“Handles like it’s on rails…”
Translation: The reviewer was still hungover. Also, the reviewer, if American, has never been on a train.
“Handles like a go-kart”
Translation: On rails, but the car is small.
“Rides like a cloud…”
Translation: The pre-production staff for the vehicle launch drove every road within a 300-mile radius of the hotel and selected a route that has no bumps, no dips, and nary a crack in the pavement.
“Some Interior Plastics Are Hard”
Translation: Especially if this is an inexpensive vehicle or a truck or an off-road SUV, this usually means: I really need to add something else to my “cons” list, so this should work.
These are just a few of my favorites. If you’ve got more, add them below, and I’m happy to translate for you.
Top graphic images: Honda; depositphotos.com
Can you translate what is meant by “Grounded to the ground”
This is hilarious and just confirms what we all suspected. 😀
My absolute favorite:
Doesn’t have enough torque to break the dick off of a chocolate moose.
Can’t remember where I heard it.
“Falls to hand” is an oxymoron as well as a cliche since no properly functioning shifter (or any other control) falls anywhere because they’re fixed in place. It’s the hand that does the falling. I got an object lesson as to what happens when a shifter literally falls to hand when my shifter parted its mooring on the transmission case and flopped into my hand. Shifting gears with no fulcrum point is quite challenging and I never want my shifter to fall to hand again.
What about the eternal Tom McCall classic?
“Corners like a weasel in a drainpipe.”
> It falls apart at 10/10ths…
What does that actually mean, literally? 10/10ths of what? Why not say 100%
I exceeded my skill but the car had more to give to someone with more talent.
“Passion” means “this vehicle is from an Italian automaker and may or may not have been assembled by Italians (I can’t be bothered to look up the plant.) Please expect to be extremely pleased approximately 30-50% of the time and irritated the rest.”
Avid reader of Car and Driver in the 80’s and 90’s and I always wanted to witness and feel first-hand their “pock-marked and cratered” roads, LOL
Also, when mentioning any Honda manual shifter: “snickety-snick” or it “snicks into gear!”
Just go anywhere in the midwest to east coast north of VA. I’m in Pittsburgh and our roads are TERRIBLE. I now see why dad liked full size Olds, Mercury, Lincoln – just float over the bumps. His ’90 Town Car with air suspension was sublime.
Snick shifter – it actually works!!!
Until the late 70s while the Ziffs still owned it, C/D had it’s offices in NYC, where the best description of pavement at that time was “mostly”
Speed enforcement was pretty much until the wheels fall off.
I think for a while the post office corner was a benchmark in their road testing.
C/D used to measure cargo capacity in vans/suv in beer cases. They have sice switched to carry-on luggage.
I suppose that’s better than keys.
Motorweek used to use a standard luggage set, but I dont believe they ever actually explained what or how many pieces were in it, and it seemed to vary from review to review
How disappointing. If I’m buying a utility vehicle, I need to know if I can take it on a beer run that becomes the stuff of legend. “Sport, did Grandpa ever tell you about the time I saved the homecoming tailgate with nothing but an E-150 and a heavy right foot?”
Our beer run of Legend was in an ’85 6.2L diesel Suburban that almost got lost due to confusing the boat ramp in the lake with our campground.
How much beer can college kids fit in an ’85 GMC Suburban?
Answer: If the rear bumper scrapes the ground, you have just about enough left for another case.
Well, it was a 3/4 ton.
No mention of how Tom McCahill‘s dog as a measure of trunk capacity?
If I were an automobile reviewer, the “as reviewed by my dog” segment is wide open.
The washing machine benchmark dates back to to when washing machines were were gasoline powered with one of these. https://youtu.be/_F7xWU3Yf_U
Almost all non-enthusiast cars “understeer at the limit” because Ralph Nadar, and also hitting the scenery head on means that the safety features will probably work better than hitting a utility pole sideways.
Oh, right foot steering is the opposite of “understeer at the limit”
Piano black and hard plastic are better than covering everything with fake wood or that soft touch coating that turns to goo in 5 years. that soft touch stuff is a big turnoff.
Am I the only person that reads car reviews, descriptions of interiors and wonders the hell somebody is supposed to clean all that stuff?
The car reviewer that reclaims the “reviewed by my do niche could also do the “how the hell do I clean this?” thing as well I suppose.
I do admire the C/D 40,000 mile tests. Live with the car for a few years and see how it actually wears and what it costs. In most cases I nope out over the running costs.
> No mention of how Tom McCahill‘s dog as a measure of trunk capacity?
The Autopian is now officially using the cello as a unit.
https://www.theautopian.com/my-friend-who-just-bought-a-toyota-grand-highlander-has-seen-your-comments-has-receipts/
I wonder about the cleaning aspect all the time. I detailed cars as a side job for about 15 years. People are fucking disgusting. They could have the cleanest house in the world, but they’re driving around in a biohazard. Cloth accents, or swatches, of the dashboard looks cool in the showroom. Try to clean it after a couple years. I’ve cleaned dashboard tops so filthy I would swear the car was heavily smoked in. When in fact, the non-smoking owner bought it new. Same for all those clever storage cubbies and bins, great sounding until you have to actually clean them. Piano black, people hate it for a reason! It will come clean but will always be scratched to hell. Yeah you can polish them out but it’s a pain, and who has time to do that? I could go on.
“electronic nannies” I didn’t read the manual to figure out how to disable said nannies.
YES. So many times I’ve read reviews of cars I’m familiar with and thought “you know you can pretty easily turn that off forever, right?
“The shifter falls at hand…”
Sometimes it does make sense, as some cars do have shifters that most drivers can readily grab without having to look whereas some other cars will have the driver fumbling around at least a little and might in fact require the driver to actually look where to put their hand. Some cars, like the Toyota Matrix with manual transmission, will have the shift stick kind of sticking out of the dashboard, sort of like what some rally race cars will have, but not in the most ergonomic spot. One of my kids has a manual Matrix and finds its shifter easy to use but some repair shop technicians find it hard to use. Perhaps the best known example would be the baywindow VW bus where a common mod is adding an extension to the shift stick.
Despite having long arms relative to my height I found it surprisingly hard to reach the shift stick in my 1969 bus even in second gear and especially in third gear (doesn’t help that the bus is still rocking its original non-retracting seatbelts, lol) so I made an extension by taking a long bolt, cutting the hex head off, bending the bolt in a vise, threading the top for the knob, and using a coupler meant for all-thread rods to attach to the shift stick.
(When I first acquired my bus, more than 30 years ago, a co-worker commented that he hated working on VW buses because he had a hard time reaching inside the engine compartment whereupon I joked that he probably had short arms because I didn’t mind working on my bus as I had long arms. Turned out he did indeed have short arms, lol. Generally speaking, people’s armspans will be more or less be about the same as their heights. My co-worker’s armspan was some 5′ 8″ despite his height being 6′ 2″, figures which I remember because they were almost exactly the same as my figures but transposed, as I am about 5′ 9″ but with an armspan of just under 6′ 3″. Ha, yeah, quite a few times I’ve been recruited by fellow shadetree mechanics because I could reach something they couldn’t; it’s sometimes surprising how much of a difference just a few inches can make when working on modern car engines given how they’re so crammed into engine compartments.)
As another longterm bus owner (a late Bay, in my case), I can confirm that even after all these years, the stock shifter indeed does not “fall readily to hand.” Couple that with the inevitable worn-out shift bushings and a convoluted linkage that was sketchy from the get-go, and the whole shifting experience means I’ve never really worried about someone else driving off in it.
Also, kudos for a truly epic parenthetical paragraph! 😀
Had VW buses for a while (a ’71 & a ’69), the reach for the shifter wasn’t horrendous for me (5’5″ with longish arms). And of course as imprecise a feel as heck.
A manual transmission has been long touted as a car theft protection, but then you may run into a situation like this:
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/bay-area-carjacking-kidnapping-stick-shift-20802885.php
I’m nostalgic for those VWs, but no real desire to actually own one again these days.
Extra long arms relative to height used to be called “ape factor” among my rock climbing buddies. +1 ape factor for every inch of wingspan over height. Very useful for rock climbing.
Punches above its weight class = nice engine, rest of the car is cheap.
This cliché (also popular in other, non-car contexts) makes me want to punch whoever used it above my weight class.
“gun slits for windows” = poor visibility
Something tells me there’s not really much difference between “leisurely” and “lively”.
Don’t forget the cliche of using egregious alliteration for a clickbaity headline.
When they repeat some stat the OEM fed them that means nothing to the rest of us (“impressive 40-55mph acceleration time.”)
“Fingerprint magnet”. Associated with anything shiny inside the car.
Handsome = Blandly styled. It’s the damning with faint praise of the car review world.
Wait, that’s what my mom always calls me. 🙁
I don’t consider it a veiled insult outside of cars, so I doubt your mom’s throwing shade at you. 🙂
I’ve been told I look kind and approachable, which I think means that I’m not good looking enough to get away with being a dick.
Well bless your heart…
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. But it’s probably ok to expect shiny black plastic.
“…understeers at the limit”
Translation: This is a FWD or AWD car. Or it’s a BMW i3 with not enough tire up front.
I had a 1971 Volvo 144S which understeered readily on cloverleafs when I would exit at warp. Spinning the wheel to the limit while doing 50%+ above the speed limit for the exit ramp – feeling the front tires lose and regain grip – was great fun!
Definitely RWD.
“Holy Grail” meaning a specific package or equipment combination that ran in low volumes. Oh wait…
Turbine smooth – Baby’s got a V12
Finicky – The electrical gremlins ate my soul
Stump pulling torque – Rear gearing so low this thing tops out at 85 (maybe not so valid anymore)
Rifle bolt shifter – I can’t cross gates
Bear trap clutch – I need to stop skipping leg day
When reviewers complain that the trunk release or whatever regularly used doohickey is “hard to find.” That will be an issue for the owner exactly one time.
I once rented a 300C, spent 5 minutes looking for the fuel door release. This is no joke actually.
I’ve become so ingrained into ‘std Japanese car’ ergonomics. All the major controls are exactly identical between our Toyotas and Acura.
I was thinking rentals are the exception. But these reviews are targeted at retail owners, not rental fleets (who could care less if their customers can find the fuel door release, mirror adjustment knob, etc etc).
But each and every time for the victims in the trunk.
Perhaps there are just too many automotive journalists today. Back in the day, there was John Goss on MotorWeek, and maybe a couple dozen writers scattered across 3 or 4 magazines. Now there are hundreds.
If you want to read good (and often hilarious) contemporary car reviews, go dig out the writings of “Uncle” Tom McCahill. He created a lot of the phrases that a lot of hack writers use today. “Jello suspension” is one of my favorites!
I found some of his old reviews … he is in the vein of Davis, Yates, Egan, Phillips.
Except he was writing about cars like them when Peter Egan was two years old. All of them are continuing the genre that Tom McCahill.created.
He even invented the phrase “zero to sixty” , “corners as flat as a postman’s feet” didn’t become part of the automotive vernacular as successfully.