Sometimes, I read or see a car review and actually wince. You’ll know if it’s a particularly bad one as I’ll do this several times as I’m reading. Certain superlatives used in the car world really drive me nuts.
Things like ‘best in class’ – I mean unless you’ve actually driven every one and can objectively say why it’s best then you’re not qualified to say that. Others are just silly, such as ‘useable performance’. If I wanted ‘unusable performance’ I’d drive a drag racer to work and back.
The thing that got my goat today was a review of a turbocharged car (more and more common today when we’re striving to reduce CO2 emissions). Old school turbo cars are well known for having a certain area of the power band where the turbo would kick in. Not hitting this would mean that the turbo wouldn’t be fully wound up and the car would be using basic engine power and induction alone.
More modern cars have a turbocharger that is programmed to spool very low in the rev range, winding up to provide more induction further up in the revs. Simply put, they are more flexible but don’t have that massive punch delivered from a traditional narrow band turbo.
This makes driving an old school turbocharged car awfully complicated – but it isn’t. It’s really rather simple. It’s just a case of keeping the car in the correct range.
To put it another way, if you drive any car at all, you don’t whack it into fifth (or sixth) to pull away. This is essentially the point where the review annoyed me. A car designed in that way is a driver’s car. So you’d know how it should be driven. Wise up fair reviewers and use a car as it is designed – not in such a way as to simply make what you think is an amusing point.
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