For many people out there, when you say “Autocar” you say “one of the most respected car magazines on the planet,” or the “car magazine with some of the most professional reviews.”
Autocar themselves claim that they have invented the road test as early as 1928, which should have given them plenty of time to perfect their testing techniques to the point of offering readers some of the if not the best car reviews on the planet.
Maybe we're alone in this, but lately only about one in three Autocar reviews has looked professional enough for us to even read it or watch it until the end, and the following one is a perfect example of "how not to."
In short, Autocar Editor-at-large Steve Sutcliffe got the chance to drive the all-new Mercedes-Benz C 250 BlueTec (W205) in what looks like Germany, and obviously decided to make a proper review about the model in both writing and video form.
Unfortunately - albeit we tried getting over the poor attempts at mimicking Jeremy Clarkson's adversity against modern technological improvements such as voice control or touch pads in cars - we couldn't get over three seemingly wrong conclusions that the Autocar road test editor kept repeating about the C-Class he reviwed.
The first one is the blatant lie about the official acceleration numbers that the not-yet-launched C 250 BlueTec possesses. According to Sutcliffe, they are even worse than the ones from the C 220 BlueTec, which uses a less powerful, single-turbocharged version of the 2.1-liter four-pot in the C 250 BlueTec he drove.
The second inadvertence in the review is about the weight of the model, which is quoted by Autocar to be identical to the C 220 BlueTec equipped with a manual transmission. Since the C 250 BlueTec in the video uses two turbochargers and an automatic transmission, we would expect it to be a bit heavier than that.
The third and last amateurish glitch we found in the following review is Steve Sutcliffe's quarrel with the way that the four-cylinder diesel engine sounds, comparing it with the more melodic tune of the Porsche Macan S Diesel. Well, we would expect pretty much every six-cylinder engine out there to sound better than a four-pot, in almost any circumstance, wouldn't you?
All in all, the video bellow looks like it has been directed/witten by a stay-at-home blogger and not a professional journalist with years of race driving under his belt, but maybe that's just us and/or we're being a bit too harsh. What do you think?
Alex handled his first real steering wheel at the age of five (on a field) and started practicing "Scandinavian Flicks" at 14 (on non-public gravel roads). Following his time at the University of Journalism, he landed his first real job at the local franchise of Top Gear magazine a few years before Mircea (Panait). Not long after, Alex entered the New Media realm with the autoevolution.com project. Full profile
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