I got some new neighbors a few months back, which meant I had to walk over and give them the talk. No, not about the birds and the bees, but about press cars.
Here’s the gist of my speech: When a car company loves a target market, it parks loaner cars in random journalists’ driveways for a week at a time in hopes they’ll drive them and write about them.
Why am I telling you this? To explain why there are constantly different brand-new cars parked in front of my house. No, I’m not a drug dealer or a crypto billionaire; instead, Kia or whoever just really, really wants me to write about how nice the interior of the new Carnival is.
For decades now, roughly two press loans per week have been deposited with the staff of GRM, and we also have access to press fleets in most major cities when we travel. I never signed anything saying I wouldn’t talk about the system behind the reviews, so here it is:
First up, let’s chat about who has access to these free press loans. In short, it depends. It’s an invite-only system, and the best way to get an invite is to have a proven track record of providing exposure for press loans. (I know, I know.)
Generally, this means that loans go to media like GRM, celebrities and VIPs like famous musicians, company executives traveling for business, and, in recent years, influencers from all walks of life. The same car might do a track test with GRM, deliver a celebrity to the red carpet, shuttle the manufacturer’s CEO to a shareholder meeting, and feature in a mommy blogger post about car seat fitting tips.
Sounds complicated, right? So let’s chat about the middlemen. Rather than manage the people, cars and loans themselves, most manufacturers instead use a fleet management company that specializes in this business. In our neck of the woods, we work with two that provide professional, concierge service, and I’ve got nothing but fantastic things to say about the people at both of them. Their job is to maintain and deliver assets, both the cars and the people writing about them.
The standard here isn’t “rental car” but rather “untouched showroom fresh.” Generally, cars are driven from a central garage through a standard schedule of people like us, with a team of drivers spending all day every day moving a batch of cars one stop further along the chain.
They’ll park the new car in the driveway, quickly wipe off any bugs accumulated on the drive, check for personal items, and then get in last week’s loan to drive away. While we almost always return the cars clean and full of gas, that doesn’t seem to be the expectation, and we’ve heard horror stories of press car treatment.
What if something goes wrong? In short, they handle it. The goal in every single step of this process is to generate good publicity, which means even bad cars are prepped, polished and maintained to be as good as they can possibly be.
How do we pick which cars? Well, we’ll make special requests when new cars are announced (think GR Corolla or new Mustang), but in general we take what we’re offered. The cars are specced and loans are planned strategically by the fleet managers, in partnership with the manufacturers’ PR staff.
We’re local to the Miami metro area, for example, which means most of our test cars are luxury-oriented and fully loaded. A fleet in the Northeast would have plenty of AWD cars with heated seats, while a fleet in SoCal would have every flavor of off-road-oriented special truck to play with. Generally, we learn the make and model of a loan a few days before it’s delivered. And after a tour of duty (usually the current model year), press cars are generally sold to the dealer network as run-of-the-mill used cars.
So what are the rules? Just a few. It’s polite to give notice if you’ll be putting the car on track or driving thousands of miles in it–the fleet managers like to adjust the service schedule to make sure it doesn’t get delivered with an oil light on halfway through the loan–but the entire system of norms and relationships is incredibly old-school, built on mutual trust and respect. There’s no contract guaranteeing positive coverage or even coverage at all.
Which brings me to the elephant in the room: our track testing regimen, which you can see with Subaru’s new BRZ tS as our latest candidate. If a sporty car is dropped off with GRM, odds are good it will hit the track for a few hot laps. We’re known for mechanical sympathy and our rabid audience of enthusiasts tracking each car’s results. I should give a huge shoutout to J.G. Pasterjak, our newly crowned tech editor, for his dedication to our lap times leaderboard and the data he’s gathered on nearly every sports car you can buy in a showroom today.
I hope you enjoy J.G.’s BRZ review, and I hope you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at the weird system of press cars that made it possible.
Comments
Ah, the Miami market! That explains the weird collection of luxo-SUVs that GRM gets. I've always wondered.
FYI, our first NC development car was an ex-press fleet car. We got it with 3500 miles on the clock and it had bald rear tires. On a 150 rwhp Miata :)
My family has always had the suspicion that Miata 338 was also a press car, as the original owner was Mazda and it was a very, very early car. Miata 348 was the long term test car for R&T.
Another press fleet story! I was present for a TV shoot of Proving Grounds, which was a pretty fun track-based test of various performance cars shot at Chuckwalla. BMW had provided an M2 Competition and Hyundai a Veloster N. The guys burned the rear tires off the M2 in pretty short order doing big lairy drifts on corner exit. Called BMW, they said "sure, take it to the dealership in Vegas and they'll hook you up". That's a 7 hour round trip.
Eventually, after looking through the race garages, we took the front tires off the Mustang that was also there, mounted them on the BMW wheels and finished the shoot. Mustang went home with bald front tires and the BMW went home with a totally different brand of tires front and rear.
Meanwhile, Hyundai dropped of 2-3 sets of spare rubber with the Veloster. They knew what was going to happen :) I was there with the V8 ND Miata and I also had a spare set in the truck.
Hah, I've heard so many horror stories. Many I can't repeat, but here's one of my favorites from a friend at a major OEM:
[OEM's Phone Rings]
"Hey, we're in the desert jumping press trucks, and yours just blew all of its airbags. You're out of the story unless you can get us a replacement truck in six hours. Oh, and same specs and same color since we've already shot half the photos. Also, you're going to need to send a tow truck for the truck we destroyed."
My buddy happened to have the keys to an identical press truck in his hand... because he was on his way to deliver it to a major celebrity for a major event. He canceled on the celebrity, turned around, and had the truck delivered to the middle of the desert before the deadline. The story ran, and they remained a part of it.
Such is the life of a press car.
Another related question I get a lot is about ringers. Whether manufacturers are supplying us with specially-prepped vehicles to outperform their own capabilities in dynammic tests.
First, I'll say that after years of knowing a lot of the folks at manufacturer media departments, this has absolutely happened in the past. Maybe not full cheater cars, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that a little more camber or boost had been cranked into a test car, or that simply a particularly good exxample was chose from a fleet for delivery to a specific outlet.
That said, I don't think this is happening in our case at all. We're far enough away from the LA/Detroit hubs of the manufacturers and the consumer magazines that we're not getting any special treatment aside from rigorous dealer-based maintenance.
The was one brand that was suspected of supplying test cars with stickier than usual tires, and while our particular example did have excellent grip, i think there's enough variation between tire production runs and track conditions and atmospheric conditions to explain this, at least in the case of our tester.
Actually these days the manufacturers are so protective of thier IP and likely so worried about potential liability issues that on those occasions that we've asked their media departments if we could throw a track alignment on something then return it to OEM before we give it back they've basically said "hahahaha F no."
Why are you asking before doing an alignment? ;) It's the first thing any enthusiast should do with a new car, even if it's only to a low tolerance factory one. We picked up 1-2 seconds on our new ND just by doing a string alignment in the pits the second day we owned it.
Tom Suddard said:
Hah, I've heard so many horror stories. Many I can't repeat....
I'm down for as many of these stories as you can reveal. Keep em coming.
Thanks for the inside info.
Re: cheater cars/tires. More than one outlet remarked about the possibility when VW released the MK8 GTI.
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