A ranking can be heterogeneous, in other words, as long as it doesn’t try to be too comprehensive. It’s only when one car is thirteen thousand dollars more than another that juggling twenty-one variables starts to break down, because you’re faced with the impossible task of deciding how much a difference of that degree ought to matter. The magazine’s ambition to create a comprehensive ranking system-one that considered cars along twenty-one variables, each weighted according to a secret sauce cooked up by the editors-would also be fine, as long as the cars being compared were truly similar. A heterogeneous ranking system works if it focusses just on, say, how much fun a car is to drive, or how good-looking it is, or how beautifully it handles. The tally would now be:Ĭar and Driver’s ambition to grade every car in the world according to the same methodology would be fine if it limited itself to a single dimension. So let’s imagine that Car and Driver revised its ranking system again, giving a third of the weight to price, a third to the driving experience, and a third split equally between exterior styling and vehicle characteristics. Even to a car nut, that’s a lot of money. (They leave penny-pinching to their frumpy counterparts at Consumer Reports.) But for most of us price matters, especially in a case like this, where the Corvette, as tested, costs $67,565-thirteen thousand dollars less than the Porsche, and eighteen thousand dollars less than the Lotus. To them, the choice of a car is as important as the choice of a home or a spouse, and only a philistine would let a few dollars stand between him and the car he wants. There’s no secret why: Car and Driver is edited by auto enthusiasts. Price counts only for twenty points, less than ten per cent of the total. The final tally now looks like this:Ĭhevrolet Corvette 192There’s another thing funny about the Car and Driver system. So let’s make exterior styling worth twenty-five per cent, the driving experience worth fifty per cent, and the balance of the criteria worth twenty-five per cent. Clearly, styling and the driving experience ought to count for much more. Suppose that Car and Driver decided to tailor its grading system just to sports cars. In other words, in trying to come up with a ranking that is heterogeneous-a methodology that is broad enough to cover all vehicles- Car and Driver ended up with a system that is absurdly ill-suited to some vehicles. But, for people interested in Porsches and Corvettes and Lotuses, the subjective experience of driving is surely what matters most. Has anyone buying a sports car ever placed so little value on how it looks? Similarly, the categories of “fun to drive” and “chassis”-which cover the subjective experience of driving the car-count for only eighty-five points out of the total of two hundred and thirty-five. Exterior styling, for example, counts for four per cent of the total score. The trouble starts with the fact that the ranking methodology Car and Driver used was essentially the same one it uses for all the vehicles it tests-from S.U.V.s to economy sedans. Yet when you inspect the magazine’s tabulations it is hard to figure out why Car and Driver was so sure that the Cayman is better than the Corvette and the Evora. When it says that it likes one car better than another, consumers and carmakers take notice. The results of the road tests were then tabulated according to a twenty-one-variable, two-hundred-and-thirty-five-point rating system, based on four categories: vehicle (driver comfort, styling, fit and finish, etc.) power train (transmission, engine, and fuel economy) chassis (steering, brakes, ride, and handling) and “fun to drive.” The magazine concluded, “The range of these three cars’ driving personalities is as various as the pajama sizes of Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear, but a clear winner emerged nonetheless.” This was the final tally:Ĭar and Driver is one of the most influential editorial voices in the automotive world. The cars were taken on an extended run through mountain passes in Southern California, and from there to a race track north of Los Angeles, for precise measurements of performance and handling. Last summer, the editors of Car and Driver conducted a comparison test of three sports cars, the Lotus Evora, the Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport, and the Porsche Cayman S. Rankings depend on what weight we give to what variables.
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