Recently I rode the BMW R 1250 GS motorbike that featured in Steve Cropley’s column, partly because he was so impressed by it. I’ve read great things about GS models over the years and wondered how good the tech-heavy, archetypal adventure bike had become.
Cropley rides more bikes than me, as do bike reviewers (obviously), and it took about five seconds on the GS for that to show. The lower seat height, on what I had always considered to be a bigger bike than my old Honda Africa Twin, was a pleasant surprise at a standstill. But as I tottered out of our office car park on it, I thought: “I don’t like this.”
My feet felt too low. The bars were too wide. The ergonomics were all over the place, the digital display was complicated, the throttle response was sharp and the speed at which it tipped into corners was unnerving.
Ultimately, though, those things all came down to familiarity. A week later, it felt similarly weird getting back onto my own bike. Why the narrow bars and high seat, pegs and centre of gravity? Why did it feel so heavy? Because exposure to vehicles – lots of vehicles – is the key to getting comfy quickly and being able to make a decent assessment.
Mine isn’t the most skilled job in the world, but one of the assets that writing about cars gives people is the ability to suss out a lot about a car in a short space of time. Then, after a longer drive, while reviewers have slightly different tastes, a consensus about a car is usually easy to find.
And so to automotive engineers. Some like to join us on events where we have lots of cars, if they can, because they know how valuable an exercise benchmarking is.
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Totally agree that for engineers and designers, driving and assessing lots of vehicles would be very useful. I'm less sure of the value of the broad experience of motoring journalists. Some are great, but many lose sight of the customer and the customer's perspective, perhaps partly because they get to drive so many vehicles, which most customers don't. We then get comments in reviews about things that most people in the real world don't care about. My personal bugbear is 'scratchy plastics', which some motoring journalists seem obsessed with. To me, this is irrelevant and not something to base a purchasing decision on. If they drove fewer cars, maybe motoring journalists would focus less on petty details?
Sometimes you don't need time. You just need to do it the way others do from the start.
For example, why is the fuel release on a Nissan Qashqai hidden just above the pedals next to the bonnet release, so that you are always in the footwell when you want to fill up? How long does it take to realise that a filler door that works with the central locking is much more sensible, that you just open or press.
How long does it take to realise that every time you start a Peugeot based Vauxhall Crossland, the lane keeping guidance does not need to default to on, and require a press of the button seemingly for hours to turn it off. Why didn't the engineers realise that it's only useful on motorways, and the constant beeping when you are not following the lines because of parked cars at the side of an urban road, which is 90% of most owners' driving is very annoying?
And who at Hyundai didn't realise when they created the speed limit notification on the screen, that sometimes it shows the correct limits, and other times it shows limits that are clearly wrong such as 37 mph or 95 mph.
Sometimes manufacturers seem to spend more time looking at others cars to see how they handle, to please the Chris Harris school of reviews, and forget what is really important to real world buyers.