Car and Driver Ten Best

[rporter]

I've subscribed to C&D, Road and Track, Car Craft, Motor Trend, Hot Rod, etc. for long enough to know one constant.......the cries of "biased" or "good reviews paid for by advertising" are always leveled by people who are miffed that their personal car choice was not given a verbal bj in the latest comparo or write up.

 

If it were so easy as paying advertising bucks to get a good review, why wouldn't every car maker do it and win a ranking on Ten Best or win their comparo? Talk about cheap, effective advertising. I guess BMW and Honda are the only two manufacturers to figure it out. Subaru must be run by either idiots or morally righteous people who won't play the game, or they could've gotten in the latest comparo and beaten the new Jetta, especially since BMW wasn't paying money to win this one. Yeah right.

 

Look at the sales of cars, there's a reason Honda is well liked by car mags - because it's well liked by an awful lot of people that buy Hondas because they're very good cars. Ever hear of a BMW owner that didn't rave about how much they loved driving their car? The big car mags write for the majority, not a particular fan base, as a result, typically their reviews and rankings will reflect this.

 

The LGT is a niche market car. My parents certainly wouldn't buy one. Heck most of my friends wouldn't. The reason people aren't standing in line at the dealership to buy a LGT isn't because Subaru didn't buy enough ads in this month's car rag, it's because the car does not offer what they want for whatever reason.

 

Frankly I'm ok with that. It's more fun to feel I'm in on a secret with a relatively cheap, high performance sports sedan that few people have.

 

I do agree though that a magazine does need to be careful in avoiding bias. I'm sure car makers try and pressure magazines. I tend to keep subscriptions to magazines that will point out faults on cars, even if they love the car. I don't care about if it came in 1st or 4th in the comparo article (unlike some here obviously). I care that I can read the article about the particular car and get enough factual info to do my own personal ranking. I gave up on Motor Trend a while ago because I felt that even if they tested a Russian Lada, they'd only have glowing things to say about it. Every car has pluses and minuses, just tell them to me and let me make my own decision.

 

+1

 

WRT the LS, I personally know people that own/used to own them, and they love them. At the time, is was a VG value for the money in that class. The car has not been improved, the price has risen, and time has passed it by. The Jag version, IMHO, suffered from the expectations of a Jag, plus it was less "sporting" than the LS.

 

Any cars are ranked with a particular group, at a particular point in time. I don't find it unusual that rankings drop over time against other cars. The same has happened in C&D tests with other cars that weren't updated WRT the competition. A car that might have been tops in tests 5-10 years ago wouldn't fare very well against today's competition.

[fancub]

Car and Driver sucks Jingle Bells.

 

I fully agree and have let my subscription lapse for the first time in twenty years. There is no rationale as to why the LGT should not be on that list, other than editor pref (payoff) erences.

[rporter]

And yes, here's another vote for the old Car and Driver magazine. During the first half of the eighties it had the best editorial staff of any auto mag. (Davis, Ceppos, Sherman, Yates, Bedard, Setright, Csere, etc.)

 

 

Uhh...Csere, Bedard, and Yates are still there, plus some great writers. Good riddance to Davis, I always viewed him as pompous, and why I never read Automobile magazine.

[Lubeman]

When that test came out last year, we had threads with folks bitching about C&Ds choices. I don't know if folks have been following the recent threads here about what other cars that current LGT owners considered, but the TSX was high on the list for many folks. The only beef was the lack of power (WRT the LGT). I can't fault C&D for liking that car best in the test. Honda does a damn good job.

 

I think what upset a lot of us wasn't that the TSX finished first, but that the Volvo - a car none of us here would really consider performance-oriented - finished second ahead of the Subaru. I agree that the TSX is a very well-made car and have no problem with C&D's decision to award it first place, but seeing the LGT fall behind the Volvo seemed very odd.

[rporter]

I think what upset a lot of us wasn't that the TSX finished first, but that the Volvo - a car none of us here would really consider performance-oriented - finished second ahead of the Subaru. I agree that the TSX is a very well-made car and have no problem with C&D's decision to award it first place, but seeing the LGT fall behind the Volvo seemed very odd.

 

Really, not that odd......

 

I went back and reread the test (had not seen it in awhile), Although we LGT owners disagree, reading the LGT comments and the S40 T5 comments (as well as rankings at the end), I can grudgingly see how they picked the S40 over the LG (by only three points, anyway).

 

Here's the full link and the tiny version:

 

http://www.caranddriver.com/article.asp?section_id=15&article_id=8550&page_number=1

 

http://tinyurl.com/4luj2

 

Acceleration performance was won by the LGT, but other little features helped the S40 (better EPA, 6-speed, summer tires for cornering, etc). The test LGT should have at least had a short-shift, even if they couldn't swap the RE92s (which also hurt brake performance)

[spec.B-Jay]

It's interesting that a lot of people have stepped out and called the spec.B a "waste of money", but when you look at ratings and opinions like these and see what were considered short-comings of the LGT, you see a lot of these things were improved on in the spec.B. Interior quality? Check. Ride quality? Check. Summer tires? Check.... and on and on...

 

Anyway, it is absolutely the best car I've ever owned, and I compared it to cars like the TL, G35, 3-series, and Volvo S60R before I made the decision to buy it. Only the S60R made it a close decision, as I found the spec.B to be miles ahead of the other three in just about every aspect that matters to me. Sure it doesn't have the "elite" nameplate like BMW, Acura, or Infiniti... but it isn't a Chevy either. I'm horrified that the G6 would make this list before the LGT would - that's just disgusting. I come from a GM family, and I willingly turned down the discount to buy a vastly superior car, and would do it again in a heartbeat. The G6 is nicely styled, and has some neat features... it has a lackluster low quality interior, mushy ride, and a horribly antiquated motor. It's an incomplete package where some things were made to "wow" the buyer, and other things were made to "get by"... it's a hodgepodge of cool innovations and outdated afterthoughts.

 

As for C&D - this isn't the only time I've seen them snub a car. I'm also a Corvette fan, and watched as they achieved a low-mid 12 second quarter mile in the brand new Z06 while other mags were clicking off times nearly a second faster. It's a 450 rwhp car that weighs 3100 lbs and has a 7000 RPM redline. The sentence that really proved they didn't know what they were doing was where they said, "60 mph is nearly achieved in first gear". Actually, boys, if you drive the car to redline the way you should with this car, you will hit about 61 mph at 7000 RPMs... but since you might not have been at WOT while you were testing, I could see why this wouldn't be too big of a deal...

[rfd425]

WRT the LS, I personally know people that own/used to own them, and they love them. At the time, is was a VG value for the money in that class. The car has not been improved, the price has risen, and time has passed it by. The Jag version, IMHO, suffered from the expectations of a Jag, plus it was less "sporting" than the LS.

I know a couple of people who have LS's, and they are happy with them too, primarily because they were able to get them a year old for about half the original MSRP. C&D's ratings started dropping very shortly after the car was introduced, and were near the bottom of the heap after two years (not 5-10 years). Despite your comments about comparisons with the S-type, it seems very odd to me that the LS would be second in a six-car comparison (with Audi, BMW, and Lexus represented), and the Jag was dead last. One thing that can't be disputed is that Lincoln spent a ton on advertising dollars specifically to promote the LS, much of which went to C&D.

 

I think we're unlikely to convince each other in this argument, but I will say that I continued to subscribe to C&D for several years after I decided that their ratings were sometimes biased. I still thought that the magazine had a lot of good info about new models, and was entertaining.

[rfd425]

It's interesting that a lot of people have stepped out and called the spec.B a "waste of money", but when you look at ratings and opinions like these and see what were considered short-comings of the LGT, you see a lot of these things were improved on in the spec.B. Interior quality? Check. Ride quality? Check. Summer tires? Check.... and on and on...

I don't think the Spec B is a "waste of money"; I just think that at MSRP, it's tough to justify over an LGT Limited at ~$1,000 under invoice. That's a difference of as much as $8-9K for the suspension, wheels & tires, navi, and aesthetic improvements.

 

At invoice pricing, which remaining Spec B's are currently at or approaching, it becomes a more interesting proposition. One problem, though, is that for it to be justifiable, a buyer really needs to want all the additional features. I, for one, would have found it more interesting if they skipped the navi (or made it optional), and instead improved the brakes & gave it a modestly more aggressive ECU tune.