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
Another pet peeve — sporty suspension, instead of backbreaking…
How many average people know what oversteer, or understeer actually is?
Not many.
“When you go into the corner too fast the front of the car stops turning to the steering wheel and the tyres squeal….” is something you never see written. Especially as it hardly ever happens with ESP and other controls now standard.
For some reason I remember a magazine review onthe late ‘70s saying the radio sounded like “a bee buzzing in a tin can”. Don’t remember what car it was.
I love this. So accurate.
I’d like to know if reviewers are really being serious when they disparage the prior generation of almost any vehicle during one of their ‘first drives’ of a newer model when that same vehicle was considered great just a few years ago.
The 3rd generation Fusion comes to mind. The the 2.5L engine once viewed as steady, efficient, and peppy in the 2nd generation was then routinely criticized as slow and inefficient by writers lost in their 1.6L ecoboosted haze.It turned out the 2.5L was still the better engine.
Ironically, the old pulp sci-fi writers were among the best. They were paid by the word and rarely used 2 when one better would work.
“The door dilated.” is among the most famous examples (Heinlein).
I realize the mag writers, in the peak mag era, didn’t have to produce as much material in a month that you all do in a week, sometimes a day. And I admire some of the clever turns of phrase the writers here frequently come up with.
But I do miss the gems of (in no particular order and I will be unable to retrieve the names of more than a few) Peter Egan, John Phillips, Csaba Csere, Pat Bedard, Brock Yates, Jamie Kitman, Jean (Lindamood) Jennings, PJ O’Rourke, Sam Smith, George Kacher and some kid, whose name escapes me, from Boston. I found (sacrilege?) David E. Davis a bit pompous, but he did hire a lot of great writers across his many outlets.
I still remember a John Phillips Cadillac Escalade EXT review that did anything but review the dumb thing! Yes, I had to look it up (here’s the link), and I’m surprised it was from 2002. (Yes, I’m now what some people may call “old”. Damnit…)
I’m not sure anyone can truly pull that kind of article off any more, though Torch may be the one to give it a try!
There was a multi-vehicle comparo they did in either Wyoming or Montana where someone, I think it was Phillips, referred to dinner at a local restaurant as a “serious meat storm.” It’s a phrase that always comes to mind when I see a large portion that I’m too old to even contemplate anymore.
Sounds a bag of bolts in a tumble dryer.
Describing GM diesels of the 90s. 100% accurate.
Dry clutch on a motorcycle = shake a metal can with loose nuts and bolts
The late NASCAR racer Bobby Isaac was attributed with the quote about the Chrysler 426 Hemi with the sound while idling, as like “a coffee can full of rocks”.
That sounds feasible for a first source.
The first time I heard it was from a friend’s father who was an army mechanic, describing the noise a transmission was making. Had to be in the late 1960’s. He had stock piles of sayings saved in his head for all occasions.
That’s how I describe the Fiat 500L diesel rental we had years ago in Italy, but it was at all engine speeds.
“Here’s everything wrong with our new [blank].”
Translation: we intentionally spent good money on a bad car for “content”.
Really makes me miss ol’ Uncle Tom McCahill. Now there was a guy who could turn a metaphor like a cannibal at a cookout.
Also the inventor of the 0-60mph metric. If you’ve never read his stuff, get ye hence and Google him.
IIRC, it was Uncle Tom who once wrote that a car (Jaguar sedan?) went around corners…”like a peanut going up an elephant’s trunk.”
Hilarious and accurate
This probably says more about me than the writers, but when I see “handles like it’s on rails” I think of the Autopia at Disneyland, not trains.
I think of Julia Roberts in a Lotus.
That thing lays the door handles on the ground / handles like a refrigerator full of bowling balls / handles like a nun carrying a mattress
Translation – vehicle handles poorly
That thing stops like a laser beam
Translation – mediocre brakes are functioning at max 50% effectiveness
The car equivalent of Bike Snob’s favorite targets “laterally stiff yet vertically compliant” and “beefy bottom bracket”.
I suspect an in depth study of car reviews would create a collection of cliches similar to wine reviews or audio reviews, in which the silver plated USB cable “opens up the sound stage”.
Or the desert hipster will say something like, “If you get it in the black colorway you won’t find a better looking bike at this price point.” I guess if one word works two should work better. I think this gets used in bike and car reviews
A lot of cliches and reworks for page fill, probably funny if you are a newbie.
Hey I”ll have to remember that one.
I think the “Malaise Era” was the trigger of the downfall of printed automotive mags.
Things changed as the automotive product changed and a performance car was typified by today’s Shitbox Showdown Hornet AMX. The page of specifications and verified with a “Fifth Wheel” and track visit performance figures were atrophied until any such stuff was graciously supplied by the manufacturer of said vehicle.
It seemed as if R&T and C&D kept each other on their toes, but then everything started to almost get as bad as Motor Trend.
Now today a different world awaits us, I feel The Autopian is on the leading edge, head and shoulders above the automotive drivel that I’m convinced is AI fortified even though they claim it isn’t. There are great pieces of info and writing still being produced out there on the extremely diverse Internet, but there is something about The Autopian that has the magazine feel even though it’s a rolling daily and almost paper free.
11/10ths when Car and Driver was good https://www.virhistory.com/vir/69-jun/lola-art.html
(I could not find it easily at C&D online)
“It has a mouth like a bass on pills.”
No translation required. Thomas’s visual comparisons speak for themselves and are second to none!
Bass the fish, or Sid Vicious’s musical instrument?
These comments are great. Seems like we’ve stumbled onto a new sport here. 😀
I believe that auto journalists perceptions become skewed by repeated exposure to high end, high performance, and more expensive vehicles that the average buyer can afford or consider. This skewing shows up in the reviews of everyday, affordable vehicles. For example, a vehicle with a a 0 to 60 time of 7 to 8 seconds is tagged as “barely adequate”or slow.
Yep it is just influencer writing with no actual experience, next stop AI.
In 1966 a Porsche 911S, would manage 0 to 60 mph in 7.4 seconds.
I remember when a “Hot Hatch” would not make a 10 second to 60.
I think that Torch chap actually has some barely adequate or slow vehicles. (-;
My ’93 Fleetwood I believe it was C&D that described it as “spry” at under 10 seconds 0-60.
I’m more worried about people learning how to merge than putting them in faster cars.
Well said. I think the same is true for all the hate on CVTs. I’ve had a few rentals. They’re….fine? Might not be my first choice (probably because I read car reviews…) but for people like my mom? Priority #1 in a transmission: reliability. Priority #2 in a transmission: wait the transmission’s part of the engine, right? Priority #3: did I already say reliability?
Ok you got me thinking. I timed myself 0-60 at what I deemed to be a “socially acceptable” acceleration (ie: driving with your boss for a job you want to keep). I got somewhere between 10-11 seconds. I take that to be the level most people are driving—not because their cars aren’t capable, but because they don’t feel comfortable going beyond that. I know you need some buffer for emergencies and so the car isn’t regularly hitting redline, but it’s wild how overpowered most vehicles are for the drivers that use them. All to say yeah, a reviewer’s idea of “slow” is probably not the same as most people’s.
I used to drive a 2CV. 0-60 in 29 seconds.
I was almost always held up by someone when pulling away from a red light. People drive really slowly.
This, the wife’s auto ’07 Corolla is a hot rod compared to most ’70s -’80s iron. Is it underpowered? Honestly no in daily driving. The only time I want more power is an uphill highway entrance ramp. I don’t prefer it for more than a drive of an hour or so, but that is due to cross wind stability, NHV, etc… It gets buzzy over 75 or so and is not really suited for long haul journeys compared to other cars in my stable. That said, I could hop in and drive across the country right now with no reservation. It has quality materials that are LONG LASTING. This nearly 20 year old car could almost pass for new based on the interior condition and wear. The paint is a bit rough, but 18 years ungaraged does that. It does not have the peeling clear coat though.
The ‘best’ depends on situation. TBH, this was the BEST car for her needs at the time we bought it used in 2009.
I did another test — I got my i3s (a car reviewers seem to consider slow) from 0-60 in about 7 seconds. Unprepared surface, but I still managed to nail the launch. Anyway, this is a level of acceleration that makes my young children shout “WEEEEEEE” and would make most adults think I was a psychopath. But because we’re all idiots, when it comes time to cross-shop cars, the one that can do it in 4.8 seconds is better than the one that can do it in 5.2. And a helpful car reviewer will assure us you can really feel the difference in that .4 seconds (which is true, just not relevant since 90% of owners will never want to accelerate at either of those rates). So OEMs are forced to keep bringing the number down because even slow people still don’t want to buy the “slow” car.
This one might be limited to a certain YouTuber: “moving to the rear, you get cup holders, usb ports, and air vents but other than that it’s pretty basic.” I know there are notable exceptions but that describes 95% of back seats. No one is wondering whether the new Camry comes with massaging seats or a champagne flute storage.