A brief recap: a few weeks ago I’d taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing out to run some errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. I was backing out of a parking space in front of my local Kohl’s when four cop cars came screaming up and “initiated a box and pin on the vehicle,” as the police report says. Hands on their guns, the officers ordered us out of the vehicle, patted us down, and eventually told us the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM—was stolen, they suspected the vehicle itself was stolen too, and they’d used Flock cameras to track me down over the last two days.
The scenario involving my wife and I is just one of many like it. Thomas noted that the system is 99% accurate today, but it’s performing 20 billion reads a month. That 1% error rate, of which I was a part of in June, makes for two hundred million misreads a month.
I know people here want to talk about flock, but does no one find it questionable a journalist got loaned a $150k vehicle to review? And then another alleged journalist according to the story got pulled over in a $105k Land Rover they were loaned to review? As a journalist, do they also receive homes and women to review? Sounds like some serious corruption right there.
25 years ago I was a motoring journalist. I have had loaned to me: a Ferrari for two weeks, a Rolls Royce for three days, an Aston Martin for a month, and a Mercedes G series (not a G63) for three months. All of this and a whole bunch of other cars and motorcycles. I would be horrified if companies stopped lending out vehicles
How did you think product reviews happened?
By companies that buy reviews. Not journalism.
You think a free to read website is going out and buying $200,000 (and up) cars every day for a 2 week review?
Even at the height of automotive print journalism there wasn’t budget for that.
Ferrari is famous for cutting access to critical journalists. Most companies expect a blend of positive and negative reviews and lend cars to any credible outlet. American automotive media has typically been pretty bad about the PR regurgitation, but that’s a choice they’re making - hiring people to read the PR, not to write their own.
That definitely happens some of the time, in some places. Journalism still exists, however.
Product reviews require more than a ‘test drive’.
Ah yes, we all thought ‘Journalism’ was a real thing, but alas, Capitalism/corruption has taken over all mainstream ‘journalism’, and ‘truth’ is who pays the most… …pretty sad…
Oh bless your heart.
If they are automotive journalists, which in this case they are, then yes this is completely normal. People get review copies of games / books / movies / phones. So why wouldn’t they loan out cars?
That isn’t journalism. That is corporate PR and marketing.
Read more product reviews from more varied publications. You will see that there is a range of accountability in the sourcing of the product. Not all of it is direct marketing.
However, you can expect all of it to be ideologically consumerist.