AutoWeek Creates Meaningless "Best Truck" Award, Gives It To A Car
Dave Barry once wrote that “Corporations have meetings because they cannot physically masturbate.” One might also say that auto magazines give meaningless awards because they cannot actually get the automakers’ proverbial todgers down their proverbial throats. Giving an award accomplishes pretty much the same thing, plus it sends the right message: we are perfectly compliant cogs in your public relations machine, and we celebrate your entire catalog of automobiles. The public ignores the awards, everybody is happy, the party continues.
Time for AutoWeek to get its knees dirty, and it turns out they are no choosier than a heroin addict occupying a bathroom stall at the Troubadour.
According to the press release,
To be eligible for Autoweek’s Best of the Best honors, a vehicle had to be completely or substantially new – minor facelifts or mechanical updates didn’t count – and available to the general public. The Best of the Best process begins each January, with models unavailable at the end of the calendar year eligible for the following year’s contest.
Calling the award “Best Of The Best” implies something amusing: that all new automobiles released in a particular year are already The Best. The best one of those? Why, that’s Best Of The Best. Of course.
This meaningless award was handed out to two PR departments automobiles: Audi A7 is The Best Car Of The Best Car, and the Range Rover Evoque is The Best Truck Of The Best Trucks. Only in fantasyland is a four-cylinder, transverse-engined, front-wheel-drive (in some markets) compact station wagon a truck. Welcome to fantasyland. Come on in, the free trips to Europe are fine.
Given world enough and time, TTAC would circulate the globe to find a consumer whose purchase decision was influenced by these awards, but honestly it would probably be easier, and more profitable, to find the lost city of Atlantis. If you do find yourself buying an Evoque or A7 as a consequence of the AutoWeek stamp of approval, please feel free to contact us so you can be lampooned featured in a future article.
More by Jack Baruth
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So if this is all such bull, why write a story about it for TTAC? Doesn't that just make you the guy watching while standing on the toilet in the next stall over? Car magazine awards are meaningless crap, and this one is even more meaningless than most, plus Autoweek obviously made a bad choice for this irrelevant award, and somehow this is newsworthy enough that you felt the need to write about it?
I agree, "omg its not a bof truck" has been beat to death in the last month over many awards. I wonder why the publications have classified the Evoque etc as a truck, I expect the EPA does but is there a more "official" arbiter than that?