What's Wrong With This Picture: The Rise Of The V-Four Edition
Don’t blame Jerry Hirsch for this headline. Heck, don’t blame the LA Times either. This headline comes courtesy of the Modesto Bee, which demonstrates its auto reporting incompetence by making the oldest assumption in the non-car-guy book: if they make V6 and V8 engines, they must make V4s as well. And though this abject ignorance may be good for a chuckle, it’s indicative of a larger problem: no matter how good of an auto writer you are, chances are you have to send your piece through an editor who knows little to nothing about cars.
And this is not just a problem in instances of syndication, like this Modesto Bee embarrassment… even Hirsch’s original LAT piece had to include the following correction:
An article in the May 28 Section A about Americans shifting to cars with smaller engines said that BMW would still offer the Z4 sports car with a V-6 option. It will be offered with an inline six-cylinder engine, not a V-6
And lest you think that these kinds of writer-editor disconnects only create embarrassment when technical issues are being discussed, consider this: when I was asked by the NY Times to write an op-ed on the Chevy Volt, that august paper slapped my piece with the headline “GM’s Electric Lemon,” a highly loaded turn of phrase I would never use to describe a car that had not yet been produced (as the word “Lemon” implies mechanical disfunction or lack of reliability, an issue my piece didn’t touch on). That one headline, over which I had no control, has become the major cudgel with which my detractors have sought to prove my unsuitability as a legitimate auto writer.
So non-car-versed editors take note: before you slap a clever or provocative headline on a piece, you might want to consult the piece’s author first. It may go against the fine traditions of editorial hierarchy, but it could just save you (and your writer) some serious (and unnecessary) embarrassment.
More by Edward Niedermeyer
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Regading the NYT piece, If you look at it a certain way, I can understand their use of the work "lemon" in the title. I say this because when I read your piece, it seemed to me that you were creating a direct connection between the development of the Volt and the demise of GM and, specifically, that the entire amount of the bailout was being flushed down the Volt development tubes. I think the word I'm looking for here is "metaphor" which is something altogether different than mis-naming an I4 as a V4.
I thought this piece was well-written. I have some slight knowledge of the author of the original LAT piece; enough to suggest that he's smart enough and a good enough writer not to have committed even the "V-6" mistake himself.