As a journalist, if you do your job you’ll end up having some uncomfortable conversations. My favorite line from an old editor is that, at its core, reporting is just “professionalized rudeness.” That doesn’t mean you should be a jerk, it really means the opposite. If you’re asking a tough question it’s on you, as the reporter, to be as polite as possible both for tactical and purely human reasons.
In covering young companies there’s always a tough reality you have to contend with as a reporter: Young companies screw up. They all do. Even if they’re just making pretzels. Cars are more complicated than pretzels, so young car companies are always screwing up.
Probably because of this, young car companies are always extra super sensitive. This happened with Tesla and Top Gear with the Tesla Roadster. Oftentimes, the reaction just makes the screw-up seem bigger and worse.
I mention all of this because the current version of Fisker has had a month and is struggling with both the reality of some software issues and with the way those issues are being magnified by the press and the non-press. So, I wanna go back to a time when a different company (also named Fisker) got upset with me.
Also, while we’re at it, there’s a timely piece out about how automakers are struggling with the era of “software-defined vehicles” and even the FCC is having to figure out how to make sure people can’t stalk owners of “connected vehicles.” Also, VW decided it isn’t going to do an IPO for its battery company anytime soon because IPOs are hard.
The Failure Of Nuance
I’ve probably mentioned this before, but one of the hardest things I had to learn as an editor was the power that I possessed. For years, especially at the old site, the assumption was that we were the dorky outsiders firing shots at the established old guard who held the “real” power.
That attitude was true for the first few years, but it slowly started to dawn on us that that relationship was changing. I won’t get into the details, but we wrote about an established “buff book” magazine and what they were doing and it was kinda mean. When someone from that publication complained I pointed out that we were just “punching up,” as was our mandate.
This person rightly pointed out that I couldn’t simultaneously go on Twitter and Facebook and brag that we were bigger than them and also claim to be punching up. This interaction left me feeling pretty awful. As did the growing awareness that, as a blog designed by a company to maximize online attention, we could sometimes carelessly hurt people even when telling the truth. Our defense was always “but it’s true.” But not all truth deserves equal attention. If a car company is cheating its emissions testing, everyone should know; if that same company’s HR person cheats at their weekly bridge game that’s not really anyone’s business outside of that bridge game.
Another way I learned this was by dealing with the older Fisker company. This was the company that made the plug-in hybrid Fisker Karma (see above), which is a vehicle that was ahead of its time in many ways.
Cars are hard, and the Karmas had an issue where they kept catching on fire. When it happened I wrote about it and, because I was good at the Internet, our story was probably the most read version and ranked highly in Google searches.
From that point on, when a Fisker would catch on fire someone would email me and I’d call Fisker PR. They clearly began to dread these calls and would react with increasing grumpiness, eventually pointing out that I didn’t call GM every time a Silverado caught on fire.
Ultimately, Fisker did issue a recall over the fires, which turned out to be from a cooling fan from the gas motor (a 2.0-liter turbo Ecotec motor from GM). This would have probably all gone away over time, but then Hurricane Sandy hit and a large number of Fiskers that were in port in New Jersey caught on fire. Only one person knew and, I can’t divulge how this person knew, but when they got photos they sent them to me.
Why? Because I was the one getting all the attention for it, so I wrote it up and called Fisker PR. To say the person on the other end of the phone was mad would be an understatement. I tried to be polite and assumed the company had some sort of prepared response.
Naively, I hadn’t taken into account that the company had no idea it had lost a lot of its inventory and, not just that, lost it in a way that would only continue to support the narrative about its cars being fire hazards.
The beleaguered press person expressed surprise, admitted he had no idea what happened, and accused me of effectively destroying the company before saying they’d get me a statement eventually. Soon after the company stopped making cars, and that PR person and, pretty much everyone else, was laid off.
I never reported anything that wasn’t the truth, and the cars, in fact, did have an issue that required a recall. The cars also caught on fire in the port (as did some other, non-Karmas). I don’t think that I caused the company to fall apart, as it was probably headed that way already. In fact, many years later I broke bread with that same PR person (who has a new job and is doing fine) and we quickly buried the hatchet and are on friendly terms.
Though what I wrote was truthful, I didn’t fully grasp at the time the echo that was created because of the prominence of my stories and how that ultimately impacted perception.
I say all of this because Marques Brownlee, aka MKBHD, an extremely popular tech review/influencer/journalist reviewed the Fisker Ocean, made by a new company named Fisker, under the headline “The worst car I’ve ever reviewed.”
I’m a fan of Marques, and I think this review, if you watch all of it, does live up to the headline. I think for a software-focused, HMI-intensive reviewer who mostly focuses on electric cars this is probably the worst car he‘s reviewed.
I do think the title of the video undercuts the actual review, though, which is fairly close to what David experienced when driving Beau’s Fisker (Beau is also an investor in Fisker, which makes all of this interesting for us). According to David (and also others), it’s an attractive car with a lot of clever features and good range that has software issues that impact usability.
These issues seem more minor than, say, the issues with VinFast when it launched its vehicles. In fact, none of these appear as bad as when I drove the Lucid Air Grand Touring and it temporarily stranded me at a toll booth. Software-defined vehicles, especially new ones, have these issues. The Blazer EV, made by GM, is currently having these issues.
For all of the credit Tesla gets for OTA updates to its cars, what people tend to ignore is that part of the reason why Tesla has OTA updates is that it’s absolutely necessary to update these cars constantly. I’ve had EVs from other automakers that needed updating in the short time I had them. You can’t expect your car to be like your iPhone and not, you know, need updates all the time like your iPhone does.
Marques is one of the smartest people making reviews right now. Three people got early Cybertruck reviews (Jason Camissa, Top Gear, and Marques) and I think the review that Marques did was the most critical. And that’s a good thing.
The challenge Marques faces in this particular instance is that he is bigger than Fisker. His criticism carries more value and more weight than any defense Fisker might make. The title of his video, then, has a huge impact because, even though many people have watched the video, many will also skim or draw conclusions and miss the nuance of what he’s saying.
But Marques is smart and he knows that if he titles a video “The worst car I’ve ever reviewed” many people will watch it and, ultimately, views are the most important measure of success on YouTube. I think the title is accurate, but the impact is profound.
And to prove this, look at what happened next:
@georgejsaliba MKBHD reviews the fisker we have in our iventory and tears it apart! Calls it the worst car hes ever reviewed! In this video i get a call from fiskers senior engineer to come and fix the car. #fisker #tesla #mkbhd
This is George J. Saliba, a car broker who specializes in EVs and whose whole deal, like a lot of people trying to make money off of social media, appears to be maximizing attention. The thumbnail for this TikTok video, which has been viewed 2.4 million times, is “MKHBD DESTROYS FISKER”:
Mr. Saliba claims he’s the one who provided the car to Marques for the review, because Fisker didn’t want to get a car to Marques until the company had one with the 2.0 version of the software installed. Is that fair? The point made in the review is that many owners are living with cars sans updates, and I think that’s mostly fair. Also, Mr. Saliba sells EVs and uses social media to gain attention for his business, so he’s clearly incentivized to share the car as-is. Marques has a huge platform.
The call in the video above itself is slightly mundane. It is set up like this is a PR person calling to find out info on Marques but, actually, it’s a field service engineer calling to try and get the car fixed. Once the engineer finds out the car doesn’t belong to the reviewer he says getting the contact info is a “moot” point and works to try and get Mr. Saliba’s car fixed.
The framing of this call, the way Mr. Saliba almost luridly pulls the mic to the phone and looks at the camera (he appears to be in New Jersey, which is a one-party consent state for phone recording), and the way he highlights the video afterwards gives a different impression of the actual context of the call. But that’s his job. He’s not a journalist, he seems to want attention and he’s definitely getting it.
But then things get really gross. I came across this video because it was shared on Twitter by one of many attention-hungry, blue-check “tech influencer” bros. Here’s what he wrote:
Marques ended Fisker, the whole Company is in panic mode💀 pic.twitter.com/iLWMWGZ9Sb
— Rjey (@RjeyTech) March 3, 2024
“Marques ended Fisker, the whole company is in panic mode [skull emoji]”
That isn’t what’s happening in the recorded call, and this isn’t the voice of a person in panic, but rather of a person whose boss told him to make sure this car gets fixed ASAP. The situation is a little weird, and I’d be peeved if my update was delayed so this guy’s car could get fixed, but the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Why is this Rjey person seemingly misleading people? I don’t know, but I do know that this is a surefire way to get attention on Twitter.
This is the power that Marques has, whether he realizes it or not. The careful nuance of his headline can metastasize into a weird, unnuanced service call blowing up on TikTok and then spreading to be something even further from reality on Twitter/X (owned by, hilariously, Elon Musk — who runs a Fisker competitor).
I don’t know what the solution is here, and I’m not suggesting I would have done anything differently. It’s probably better to live in a world where the individual voice has more power than the corporate one, which is the opposite of what normally happens, but it’s hard to ignore that the medium itself naturally disincentives the responsibility one is supposed to assume with that power.
[Ed Note: As someone who reviewed the car, I am amazed by how public perception is being changed by this single video title, which led to that recording, which led to that tweet, which is being spread all over to mislead people into thinking it’s a recording from a Fisker that is actively freaking the hell out (again, the recording was just a field tech trying to fix a car). The Ocean is actually good! But alas, nuance is dead, and I say this as someone who also writes (accurate) headlines for clicks. -DT].
The Struggle Of Software-Defined Vehicles
Still with me? Ok, I’m gonna do the rest of these real quick. Here’s a really apt story from Automotive News today titled: “Why creating software-defined vehicles is ‘costly, painful and intense'”
ORLY?
There’s a lot here about why this is so hard and you should read the whole thing, but I think this part is key:
“Customers have an expectation in terms of what a consumer product is because they hold a smartphone or a tablet in their hand all the time,” Qualcomm head of automotive Nakul Duggal said during a Jan. 25 roundtable discussion led by the Financial Times.
Today, the value of a smartphone’s hardware is secondary to the value it generates from delivering software-based services via apps. However, the way the smartphone and automotive industries capture value is very different. Automakers still primarily make money by charging customers for hardware features.
“The history of the automotive industry is that the value addition has been in the plumbing of the car,” Duggal said. “You do not change things that are foundational to the plumbing.”
And this is where, to some degree, my bias comes in. When I review a car I probably care more about handling, steering feel, et cetera than a more tech-focused journalist might [Ed Note: Hence why my review title was so different than Marques’. -DT]. As with car companies, I probably care more about the hardware than the software. That doesn’t make my take on a car better or worse, but it’s something to consider when reading a review.
FCC Looking At Regulating Connected Cars To Help Curb Stalking And Domestic Abuse
Old movies and TV shows made a big deal of attaching these huge tracking devices to cars in order to be able to follow them. While this was still not great from a privacy perspective, there’s almost a quant fairness of having a big box with a blinking red light on a car. At least it gives you a chance.
New cars are so connected now that, frankly, the little box you attach to the car is no longer necessary. The whole car is the blinking red light.
This comes with its own issues.
Nearly all new vehicles have convenience features that use telecommunications to find cars in parking lots, start the engine remotely, and even connect with emergency responders. But those features can also let abusers track the whereabouts of their victims.
Last year Congress instructed the FCC to implement the “Safe Connections Act,” which gives the agency the authority to help abused partners. Early rules passed by the agency required cell service providers to separate phone lines linked to family plans if an abuser is on the account.
The FCC is now trying to figure out if it can apply those same rules to automakers, which makes a lot of sense.
VW Is Not Going To IPO Its PowerCo Battery Unit
For all of the huge positive swings in the stock market, non-Tesla EV stocks have taken a bath the last year or so (and Tesla itself is down 24% year-to-date).
To wit, Reuters is reporting that Volkswagen is now considering not doing an IPO for its PowerCo subsidiary in the near future:
Volkswagen will not consider a stock market listing for its battery unit until its factories are up and running and its unified battery cell is in use, the division’s boss told Reuters, essentially ruling out a possible IPO before 2026.
Thomas Schmall’s comments provide the best indication so far for when Europe’s top carmaker may float its PowerCo battery business on the stock exchange, as a follow-up to bringing in an outside investor or entering strategic partnerships with other cell manufacturers.
Seems smart.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
Charli XCX has a new single out, but I just went back to her latest album “Crash” because I needed something pumpy to get me through a quick 2,500-word morning.
The Big Question
Where do you get your reviews from? YouTube? Twitter? The written word? Car magazines?
I started off gleaning automotive news from magazines.
I subscribed to Road and Track, Motor Trend, and Car and Driver. Like the three bears, only one of these fit just right.
R&T didn’t seem to really give a damn about anything that hadn’t been flung down the Mulsanne Straight or looped Nurburgring and it was too tech-y.
Motor Trend seemed to focus on cars that would make good taxis and they got too excited about practical stuff.
Car and Driver, though, that was the sweet spot. Knowledgeable writers, just enough tech, nice mix of the exotic and mundane, and the perfect amount of irreverence. This was the David E Davis era and it struck me as just right.
I stuck with this triumvirate for decades until I fell out of the car buying mainstream and then just hung in with C&D for the occasional fun article.
Beyond magazines, I would catch an odd episode of MotorWeek or TopGear here and there.
Today, I sample many of the on-line versions of the above sources, but not religiously. I used to read J_______ fairly often, but that passed.
Then I discovered The Autopian and it is the closest thing to the mix of facts, fun, and enthusiasm of the old C&D experience I loved so much – only better because it’s daily versus monthly and I can actually converse with the writers!
So that’s where I’m at these days. And occasionally I’ll tune in to public television on the weekends to see if John Davis is still breathing.
What’s funny with the automotive industry trying to out smartphone smartphones is that consumers (like myself) will still default to wanting to use their smartphones. Just give me Android Auto/Apple Carplay on a decent screen and make the rest of the work around it. Physical buttons for sound and HVAC with a temperature display and I’m good. Heck, my ’97 Mustang’s radio is more responsive than my ’23 Maverick’s because there’s not a crappy Sync3-lite OS trying to run the car.
Yeah, I miss when a command resulted in immediate compliance from the machine rather than these “smart” systems that respond with a teenage huff of derision before slowly stomping off to—hopefully—comply with the request without further asking if I’d rather it did some other thing I will never have any use for or throwing up some stupid CYA lawyer disclaimer I have to approve.
My ’13 Santa Fe’s radio takes 15 minutes to boot up in the morning if the ambient temperature is below 50 degrees. Oh, and the climate control display is on the screen. It has separate controls/brain so you can still change the climate controls, but you will have absolutely NO idea what they are set to until the radio boots up. I can’t imagine a car with the climate controls ONLY through the touchscreen after a failure like this.
Once integration blew past using your phone as the car’s navigation system, it was all bound to go sideways.
Answer to the question: Like I’ve told a couple decades worth of trainees, “Written word or GTFO.” AI is making me rethink that stance, so we’ll see. I might evolve. Why I favored it for so long, though, was that it had the barrier to entry of literacy, and the kind of permanence that would allow the good stuff to filter to the top where it would be discoverable by your old-school Google algorithms and a bit of cleverness. As it is, now, I have trusted sources for information surveillance (“news,” if you will. Basically this site for cars.). If I’m going to go looking for other stuff, I’m going to formulate a question, first, and try to answer it. Like, “is it a good idea to buy a drivable 911 and get a shop to make it into a safari spec?” That one is Porsche owner forums, usually the archives (“no.”). “Would a plug-in hybrid be better than an EV for my wife?” That one is impossible to answer by itself. It takes a lot of thinking, looking, and thinking again. But if somebody didn’t write the words down, I don’t care. Their audience was not me.
On the other subjects, software defined cars have become such a misery. I would say this is because car companies are not software companies, and this is part of it, but also modern software sucks. Everything app-based has long-since left behind serving the customer with a nice, functional product they can adapt to their life in favor of bloated, tracking, glitchy, paywalled, money-and-time traps. This was the great hope of the Apple car: That there might be some new-standard, cleanish-slate system that would just work and not suck. Oh well. That was probably unrealistic, since Apple hasn’t actually done that in decades, anyway. The companies that pursue this approach will fail, because they suck, and unlike an app which is disposable entertainment, or a pain-in-the-ass crutch you use to download airline tickets, cars are big, expensive, and potentially awesome.
Does anybody else get Keith Phipps vibes from Hardigree? I do, in a good way. I came to this through the AV Club, to the old site. It was kind of a revelation finding that people could be into cars in the same way I was into movies. I wanted to be into cars that way, too, but never had exposure to that kind of community. Of course, now, both of those sites have become sub-literate swamps, chasing dumb trends into the hopeless feedback loops of mediocrity they used to rise above and stand against. I think that’s the context of Matt’s introspection, and I love that he’s written this. I think the source of the dynamic is the codependence of the journalists and the companies, but I don’t know what the right answer is. I know what THE answer is, though, and that’s going to be companies that don’t depend on journalists, who have bottomless financial backing routing the field. We’re going to be pondering the right question while sitting in the answer which is BYD before we know it.
I’m big on written, as well, but I tend to find video helps me contextualize things better than photos. I don’t tend to listen to what is said on video reviews (I tend to keep my phone and web browser on mute unless listening to music or talking on the phone), but the movement helps me get a better view of the paint, the size, and the shape of things (assuming I can’t go get a look at something in person).
Oh yeah, totally down with that. A mental picture has to be obtained somehow. I actually like BaT driving videos. What most producers think of as fancy photography usually detracts from the experience, IMHO. But I’m not usually perusing them. It’s like the curiosity strikes and I want to know what somebody’s pet MG looks like driving around Kentucky, or whatever.
Basically, I’ll go right to whatever level of membership gets me mailed your ‘zine.
I too used to be an avid reader of the AV Club and its descent into useless garbage has been a real bummer.
I find MKBHD to be refreshingly thorough and detailed in his smartphone reviews, and while I haven’t watched his Fisker review, I would expect him to be similar in his approach. However, I only expect him to give me a good review from a consumer electronics perspective, which focuses on high initial quality with an emphasis on the software experience, with only an afterthought given to long term usability and hardware. In the smartphone world, hardware has converged and matured and as long as it supports the software well, it’s fine. Additionally, long term usability testing is not a huge deal because people don’t keep their phones for very long, and there just isn’t much that changes (the biggest being battery degradation, followed by future software becoming heavier).
A lot of this contrasts heavily with cars, which are kept for a long time, and more importantly, are not as easily replaceable given lease contracts and financing. Additionally, hardware affects the user experience a lot more in cars, even the boring appliance ones.
While out at lunch before reading this article, I saw an Ocean in the wild. It had just pulled into the parking lot I was leaving. I waved at him to stop and asked how he liked the new Fisker. “I love it, got it in late December, and have 3000 miles already.” then the wife in the passenger seat also said she loved it.
I don’t know those people who I asked about their car, but I also don’t know who this Marques guy is.
The only review of the Ocean I’ve seen was DeMuro’s some time ago (and nearly all of the reviews I get now are from car guys on YouTube…especially since C&D turned into a flimsy mag that’s mostly ads). Seemed like a neat car, with specs for an EV that the market needs.
But the one thing about Fisker that I can’t get over: A version of the company has already failed. I know that this is technically a different company, but in it’s relationship to the market it’s much of the same. I honestly don’t see how Fisker could be successful even if the car turned out to be the best EV SUV on the market.
Why would someone choose a Fisker Ocean over anything that’s similar from an actually established automaker? At least with the latter, you have some certainty that the automaker will exist throughout the length of the warranty. I just can’t see small companies cracking this market now that the established companies are all in on EVs.
The first story reminds me of why I got off social media (FB and instagram). It’s too easy to be our worst, snarkiest, most critical, thoughtless versions of ourselves online. I now limit myself to commenting on subject matter specific stuff (like cars). Even on here I find myself sometimes typing out a shitty comment and, usually, deleting or revising it before posting.
100% agreed, and finding a community that engages meaningfully has gone a long way towards smoothing my messaging and manners in online discourse. I’ve been wrong and called out for it, and the folks that took the time to address what I got wrong have had a much more profound impact on me than “you’re an irredeemable idiot for not thinking this way or that.”
Social media often brings out the worse in people, Instagram comments are exhibit A
I concur. This site and some online forums are as close to social media as I get. I always strive, though sometimes fail, to provide more upbeat comments that are less critical of things, simply because I see so much negativity everywhere else. When I did use social media a decade ago, I only posted silly things to try to get a laugh, but intentionally non-offensive (think silly Nate Bargatze-like anecdotes about mundane, everyday stuff that were, at worst, self-deprecating). I finally decided social media wasn’t for me when for the hundredth time I experienced someone doing their level best to suck any and all joy out of everyone else’s lives, and then to watch with disappointment the echo chamber that followed from others in my network. No amount of hardwork, consideration, or positivity could overcome the lure of pithy, vapid, and insulting remarks. I still find it disappointing how often people forget that just because you CAN say something doesn’t mean you SHOULD say something.
I don’t use social media, but I also sometimes fight these urges to be an asshole in comments. While I can certainly be that way IRL, I start off with better assumptions of people, so it’s a rare thing in practice. It’s probably some conditioning to the typical cesspool of online comment sections in most places, but since I have that awareness, I should more often try to give the benefit of the doubt like I do IRL or just disengage/don’t bother engaging.
Thanks. Never felt the need to do social media. At least the way has been for a very long time.
But I do appreciate this site very much, and enjoy reading all the different commenters take on things.
That whole first section could be summed up by saying “humans are generally terrible”. I get my car reviews from multiple sources, but not a single one of them is a tech youtuber.
If I need to be quick, I rely on Car and Driver because they write their opinions in a concise paragraph and from their I can compensate for their biases, which are quite consistent.
Otherwise, I look through a variety of sources, often giving more weight to written ones since I can deduce their biases easier, but video reviews are fine too. I tend to ignore a lot of subjective aspects of reviews, and take into account time/acclimatization based criticisms (reviewers are often forced to form an opinion after only a couple days with the car, which is not enough time to get used to the Mazda rotary dial infotainment for example).
I thought Marques’ actual review was fair when I saw it, but I thought the headline was too extreme. It seemed like the problems were software gremlins that will probably be able to be fixed. Some hadn’t been mentioned in other reviews, so I wasn’t clear to me if it was a one-off problem with the reviewed vehicle or common across many of the vehicles. I think that’s very important to know.
I also feel this kind of review should be held until after the vehicle manufacturer has a chance to fix the problems. How a company handles problems means as much to me as the problem in the first place.
I will preface this by saying I have not watched his video nor read David’s review (yet), but there’s no nuance in that headline. There may be nuance in the review, but the headline is about as nuanced as a brick to the face.
Is it justified? I can’t say, although the reason I skipped the video when it popped up in my YouTube recommendations is that it sounds like clickbait. Contrarian that I am, anytime I see a sensationalized video title like that I tend to skip it because they rarely live up to billing. I expect I’ll read David’s review and continue to ignore the video because I trust David to review a car much more than I trust a tech reviewer, no matter how good he may be.
I’d say you understand the why pretty well.
Gosh, this. I don’t have the same concerns about stiff rides as like, older reviewers or folks with worse roads. I can’t comment on cold—we just don’t go out then. I can comment a lot on excruciating heat, though, unfortunately. I also can’t really comment on child seats unless a friend brings a kid along, either. I have a vastly different experience in a lot of cars from tall/big folks. I usually end up placing more emphasis on how fun a vehicle is than a lot of reviewers because that’s my biggest concern with a car. (Oh, and I will always give bonus points for convenient purse space.) How a review goes is so, so, so dependent on the reviewer, what their experience is and where they’re reviewing a car.
Beyond entertainment (most of my review consumption is for entertainment), I really just pay attention to people like me who share or post about similar concerns/priorities that I have.
What is your opinion on glass roofs in cars as someone that experiences extreme heat?
Not a fan, TBH. I like my shade. (Also, my inner Because Racecar nerd is like “that is a lot of weight high up in the car and will ruin the center of gravity.)
I don’t like the trend of flimsy fabric shades or electrochromic roofs, either. One seems…inadequate, and the other is an extra point of failure I don’t need. Just give me a solid top.
I was reviewing the Volvo EX30 accessories catalog and saw they sold a shade for the optional glass roof. Selling a solution to a problem they created themselves is peak capitalism!
Hm. Maybe some sort of standardised biography/reviewer specifications should be placed on reviews of vehicles, so that readers could could get a better off-the-cuff feel for how appropriate a reviewer’s conclusion is to them.
Either The Autopian or you could try to spearhead something like this, using the stuff you mentioned in your comment as a starting point for the standard.
Maybe even get a bunch of reviewers or even just random people who fit into various categories together, and hash out what is most important both to each individual group (tall, family, roadtripper, racer, etc.), and also what transcends group barriers – this would just help with reviews in general.
To be fair, there’s a lot of outlets that ask for multiple reviewers’ input where possible on a car if it’s around for a longer loan or purchased as a long-term review car. Sometimes there’s extra feedback from multiple people having similar models, too.
Honestly, that’s why I like that there’s a wider variety of reviewers out now. I’m a stinker who likes to read every Cayenne review I can get my hands on, but I do pay extra attention when someone’s using it to tow or talking about short-person problems.
Some niche/hobby reviewers (e.g. in audio) mention their own biases and preferences at the top of their reviews or in an about section, and that’s nice.
Then they write a florid paragraph about they got the item under review for free but that absolutely won’t sway their review, no sirree, unpossible.
This is why i think it’s extremely useful to take a sort of America’s Test Kitchen approach to reviews. One of the things i’ve always appreciated about ATK is before they give you a recipe they tell you exactly what their definition of a good version of that thing is. Without that, if you make a recipe and you don’t like it you are always left wondering if the recipe was bad or if you just have a different idea of what the good version of that item is. Or, to put it another way, whether you share the same values vis-à-vis the thing in question as the reviewer. This is all basically a way of being both more transparent and specific.
Hmm, that’s interesting. Usually, I consider it a good recipe if I liked eating it, though, haha. (This is why I write about cars instead.)
With all fairness to Marques maybe Fisker should have waited until the software gremlins were ironed out before releasing the cars on the public. This is what happens when the higher-ups announce some arbitrary deadline and ignore the engineers and QA folk. The 2.0 update might solve a lot of these problems but if Fisker hadn’t released them in the first place Marques’s review would have had a different title.
That said, I highly trust MKBHD’s opinions on smart phones and watches and tech in general but I’ve been taking his car reviews with a grain of salt so far. He provides some better insight on the infotainment but for now I trust Doug and Throttle Hoose (Canadians ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) and Cammisa more for the car reviews.
Marques frequently issues buyers beware comments in his phone reviews to not buy hardware on a future promise of software. Buy it based on what it can do that day.
If you don’t want reviews of a half-baked product that is currently being sold to customers, don’t sell a half-baked product to customers.
Marques is a tech reviewer who has branched into cars but he hasn’t been a car guy until recently so I appreciate his different perspective but I also wouldn’t buy or not buy a car based on his review.
Exactly. When I need a new pixel or smart watch I care about what it can do “today” because promises of future functionality so often never happen.
He sounds a bit like folks with a high degree of skill in one area taking positions of authority on other areas they don’t know. In many cases it just ends in bickering over Thanksgiving dinner with Uncle James who’s a retired pharmacist about the finer points of Baluchistan geography (which your PhD thesis was about). But in some cases, when you have a bully pulpit like 12m sub’s on YT or millions of Stans who believe your every word and make agreeing with you their personality like Musk or Jobs, it’s best to have the self-awareness to go hey, I don’t actually know this well, maybe I shouldn’t make big pronouncements about it.
I don’t disagree with you but he’s a non-car guy making reviews for non-car people who are more interested in tech than the feel of a V8 muscle car. So in this area, I would say he does come with a position of authority.
Since he mostly reviews EV which live and die by their tech features, I see him in the same way Demuro doesn’t tell you what a Super car is like on a track at the limits of grip but does give an impression of what a car would be like to live with every day.
Different people enjoy cars for different reasons. If I were buying a car based on new tech features and software promises, I would want to know if those features don’t work or are bad. My hope is that Marques gives a re-review to a Fisker on 2.0 software.
Yeah, that’s fair.
Canadians are biologically incapable of lying – kind of like jolly Vulcans with hockey as their pon farr, which provides new insight to the toques – so that makes sense.
I just pick on them because they named their channel “Throttle House” but they can’t quite pronounce “house”
At this point Henrik Fisker looks a lot like a con man. He’s a talented designer, but he really has absolutely no idea what he’s doing when it comes to making cars. It seems like comes up with some pretty design that’s great on paper, gets a bunch of investment, then everything falls apart and he disappears into the background for a few years. I mean his wife is the CFO of the current iteration of his company. Does that not seem a little weird to anyone else?
Unfortunately the EV scene and tech in general are ripe for this nonsense. It would be a bet amusing given how much I disdain tech bros and tech culture in general, but the amount of resources that are incinerated on these pet projects is appalling. Billions of dollars are being incinerated and what do we have to show for it? A bunch of half baked EVs that still aren’t as good as Teslas.
Don’t get me wrong-I loathe Musk and Tesla stans and I wouldn’t buy one personally, but I’m not going to sit here and tell you they aren’t still the market standard because they are. Anyway, when it comes to car reviews I’ll still look at Car and Driver, although the quality of their content has taken a dip in recent years. I do not touch anything related to the influencer crowd.
I take the opinions of a few YouTube channels that I trust quite seriously. Savagegeese is one of the few channels that does deep dives into the engineering and isn’t afraid to call manufacturers on their bullshit, consequences be damned. I also think Mark and Jack want similar things out of a car to what I do and the fact that a lot of their videos are hilarious and not super self serious is the icing on the cake.
I used to care a lot about what Brian from RCR had to say but he’s kind of become cynical singularly focused on Japanese cars. I still love the videos for how entertaining they are but I don’t necessarily take their opinions super seriously. I like Throttle House quite a lot as well and I really enjoy watching Topher’s videos. I find that he’s pretty unbiased, rather entertaining, and his perspective on what it’s like to actually live with cars is valuable.
And of course I’d trust you wonderful people with my life but that goes without saying 🙂
“I mean his wife is the CFO of the current iteration of his company. Does that not seem a little weird to anyone else?”
Yeah, that’s the kind of arrangement that would raise questions at a local volunteer fire department or Boy Scout/Scouts BSA Troop, not what you’d expect from a publicly traded corporation
And of course I’d trust you wonderful people with my life but that goes without saying
Don’t trust me with your life. I shouldn’t even be trusted with my own life. I commute to work on a motorcycle, FFS.
I’m in a really weird place with cars right now. I haven’t really caught up with a lot of folks my age in our careers, so a lot of car buying options are off the table. I also have a pretty jaded viewpoint of EVs, in that I think they are built disposably and will depreciate way faster than I would like. I am also very concerned about the fire risk and the huge repair bill from that one Rivian story.
Ultimately, I think the OEMs (and even Boeing for that matter) should have a good hard look at how they do things and maybe start completely from scratch on some of their next designs. I think they are getting too caught up in feature bloat, for good or bad intentions, and it ends up making their products a bit of a mess.
These piles of features get them naggy review stories like the one in this article where they get reamed for small things, which as this article suggests, can really put a dent in their reputation. They are also adding tons of additional cost to the purchase price. OEMs think they’re going to have lots of lucrative service calls, but what they get is people avoiding their product who can’t take chances on that kind of thing.
This makes me think that there should be somebody out there rating products for longevity, something more technical and long term focused than Consumer Reports. There’s a lot of focus on fancy features, but the high majority of the people I know—even people who care about tech stuff a lot more than I do—don’t really care about the latest stuff as much as they do about having something that just works and does so for a fairly long time with limited hassle. It would be nice if things were rated on repairability, economic repairability, longterm prospects on parts availability, and maybe even sustainability and recyclability.
Agreed. All too often a car will sit waiting around for parts to arrive for months and months. There should be some kind of repairability index that tracks part availability for x percantage of the car’s parts. That would be extremely helpful in making a purchase decision.
Meh, businesses want to blame someone when it goes sideways. One of the annoying side duties of a traffic engineer where I worked a decade ago was to manage the interstate logo program – the blue signs that tell drivers about McDonalds and such at the next exit. There’s federal rules for the program. When a business doesn’t meet the rules and can’t get a sign they naturally get upset at the messenger.
A chain sub sandwich place checked with me before opening, was too far away to get a sign, chose to open anyway, and constantly complained through all channels (news media, political, social) that my agency was responsible for their woes. When they closed after two years I was personally named in local media as the sole reason for their business failure.
Yeah. Fisker is doing a fine job killing themselves, just like most businesses. Join the legions of messengers with daggers in our sides!
Consumer Reports is the most trustworthy as far as I’m concerned. That said, CR occasionally misses the point about some vehicles such as the Wrangler, which should be judged by a different yardstick than vehicles designed to never leave pavement.CR should own up to the fact some vehicles are just not intended for everyone.
The car nerd magazines are staffed by enthusiasts who don’t write for people who want to live with a vehicle for a relatively long time. I’ve found the car nerd writers want to be the next Jeremy Clarkson or John Phillips, which few are, and it can be annoying.
For the purely online publications, I don’t have a go-to review source.
Regarding Fisker Karma, there’s one nearby that I’ve seen maybe a half-dozen times parked at the local grocery. The Karma has real presence and looks great from every angle. Pictures don’t do the Karma justice. It’s a shame the company failed and became our generation’s Tucker.
Man, you guys went all sorts of inside baseball this morning. lol.
To answer the q, I tend to use YT for reviews on everything from smart locks, to TVs, to a bunch of other things that I’d feel comfortable with a visible confirmation as enough proof to order online. The side benefit is that it’s much more time efficient than reading, say, seven 10,000 word write-ups about it, and they tend to review multiple products side-by-side in the same category at the same time.
That said, while I might look at YT for a few car reviews to get a general idea, I’m no more likely to make the call to pull the trigger than I would be for a pair of running shoes. Some things need tactile confirmation and also tend to be very difficult to review in a comparison vid. At least not efficiently.
I think people really underestimate the importance of tactile confirmation.
For example, I don’t fit comfortably in a Tesla Model 3. I have freakish proportions, sure, but all of the on-paper discussions of its pros and cons are irrelevant to me because it is not physically advisable for me to own one.
Same deal with most Toyotas. No matter how reliable they might be, no matter how well made, I still have to think “I am the driver and one of my close friends who I regularly drive with is three inches taller than me, this car doesn’t work.”
Reviews can be great for deciding which car to test drive, but at the end of the day all the stats, impressions, and reviews don’t matter if my freakishly long legs aren’t going to fit.
Respect for saying all this. I gave recollections of the Old Site and its sister sites getting to the point where the ragtag, outside journalists speaking truth to the powerful progressed from a shield to an umbrella to a weapon in its own right.
We can’t amend the aggrandizement of our contemporaries, but can reflect and atone for our participation, whether directly or by proxy. It might not soothe the tempers of those we hurt along the way, but I regard this piece as an integrity move nonetheless.
Relatedly, this happens with distressing frequency in the private lives of celebrities. After Carrie Fisher’s death, within 10 minutes of finding out for himself, her brother was contacted by TMZ for a statement. I can’t find the link, but what I’m driving at is that we – journalists, sources, readers – need some balance of candidness, context, and respect. Otherwise we’re constantly tearing at each other and tearing each other down, and the whole thing falls apart.
Even the smallest outlet can have outsized effects, especially if more influential outlets are listening. Hell, when I was in college, I ran a tiny underground newspaper, but I got the university president to resign when I got a copy of a letter from the faculty about his mismanagement. Actual local papers picked it up and it turned into a local scandal.
As to where I get reviews, I go wherever I can find them for vehicles I’m interested in. Forums, Youtube, Reddit, various sites. As far as vehicles I’m not searching for reviews on, it’s mostly here.
LOL the company is named after a pair of scissors
https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/6b80b9bb-c020-4c30-9ecf-af0b0c908fea_1.188b435416a4ddb18372dba59c37da0e.jpeg
Spell checking is important. Fisker (the car company) is not the same as Fiskar (the scissor company.)
You’re no fun! 😛
At least it’s not Fister.
Ow.
That just means you’re burning oil
r/cars, mostly because time zones (GGMT+8, Philippines) so it’s my only to catch up. Back when I was still gallivanting around Drivetribe’s old writing team, I used Twitter as a pseudo-RSS with all the mags and official brand accounts, and I use both as my live ticker for racing events (shoutout r/wec because they’re the greatest forum for endurance racing today).
Matt, if it makes you feel any better, I never blamed you for the failure of Fisker.
I blamed Jason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFw95FFI0mg
For what it’s worth, this is the point where I became a huge fan of Jason’s work.
I still read C/D and watch some YouTube videos for entertainment and I obviously spend a decent amount of time here.
But if I’m seriously considering purchasing a vehicle, the only place I really go for unvarnished advice is owner’s forums. If you’ve put tens of thousands of dollars where your mouth is, I implicitly trust you a lot more than someone who sees the car for a few hours or a week under circumstances controlled solely by the automakers (and whose continued access depends solely on their good graces).
This is powerful advice no matter what car it is, both because you get to learn what the most common problems are and how to fix them, and also because you see ground-level discussions that paint a truer picture of what these cars can and cannot do.