Anche autocar aveva partecipato al famoso mastertest (prova comparativa di alcune berline della classe Golf).
Nel numero del 22 giugno autocar ha finalmete parlato di questo test.
Questi i punti salienti che 4R non ha riportato:
Mastertest è stato organizzato praticamente da auto motor und sport.
AMS era rappresentato non solamente dai suoi giornalisti ma anche dalle riviste "figlie" cioè AMS romania, AMS norvegia, AMS grecia ecc. ecc.
Tra le altre riviste veramente indipendenti c'erano: autocar, l'automobile e 4R.
Altro punto interessante era la difesa ad oltranza nazionalista delle diverse testate:
La stilo difesa da 4R
La renault e la peugeot difese dai francesi
le macchine tedesche difese da AMS e consociate.
Quello che sarebbe stato interessante è di sapere il punteggio di ogni rivista per ogni macchina.
Peccato che 4R non ce lo abbia fornito.
Questo il commento in perfetto inglese:
EURO TESTING IS NEVER EC
Motoring journalists from different countries rarely think the same way.
Especially when a car from their own country is being discussed. By Chas Hallett
Ever wondered why the EU doesn't seem to work? Why
countless Eurocrats have endless debates, pass
innumerable laws but end up deciding, err, not a lot? All they seem to learn is that everyone's got a different point of view depending on what corner of the continent they're from.
If you'd had the 'pleasure' of accompanying road tester Adam Towler and myself to Stuttgart for the Mastertest in April, you'd have twigged the Common Market's shortcomings immediately. At Autocar we do things differently to the Euros. Not necessarily better, just different. And there's no better way of illustrating it than to get 20 journalists from 11 different European nations, point them at eight hatches and try to find a winner.
I'm used to arguing the toss over group tests - without divulging too many behind-the-scenes moments here at Autocar, I can confirm that things sometimes get pretty nasty when the inevitable 'what's going to win?' debate takes place. I've never actually seen fists fly, but there have
been countless full-bore rows on many Welsh hillsides in the past, followed by sulky drives back to London, where the barney starts again back at the office.
And these 'discussions' take place when we're in tune with each other.
Add in the requirements of 10 more countries, another 1 5 or so testers who don'? think like us, a melee of European languages and testing procedures laid down by the Germans, and things get a lot trickier.
So a typical Mastertest assessment goes something like this:
Yours truly has eventually muscled his way into the driving seat of a Fiat Stilo, after waiting half an hour for the French and Norwegians to have a fiddle. Then a fierce German lady thrusts a clipboard in my face and asks me how many points out of 20 I am going to give it for 'ze quality'.
I stare intently at the Fiat's rather disappointing shiny, black plastic fascia, stroke the un-leather like optional hide, operate a knob or two and then think how much nicer the Golf is before blurting out ' 1 2'. By now the obvious fascination of the British journal?s assessment of the
Stilo's build quality has gathered a crowd around the open doors and my judgment is thrown open to the floor. A couple of Swiss and the Greek bloke nod in agreement - they want 1 2 as well. But there's dissent from
the Spaniards who reckon 14's about right, as do the Portuguese. A few minutes of murmuring turns into an open argument before the fierce German lady who, in the spirit of entente cordiale, tells us to settle on
1 3 out of 20. As it's already half-way through the first day and this is the first of eight cars, everyone agrees.
You can see how this sort of pan-European pondering could start to irritate. But it's not quite as annoying as realizing that the European car testers are borderline obsessive about judging every car, using a mesmerisingly complicated point-scoring system which would be more interesting to my accountant than the road-test desk.
I was entering an alien world where every last detail was awarded points, so that a grand total could be added up and a winner anointed. Gearshift quality? Marks out of 10 please.
Engine refinement? That's up to 10 as well, but engine flexibility, that will be worth up to 20 And so it goes on, culminating in a final score out of 550.
We tried hard, honestly, but our little two-man Brit contingent just couldn't get its heads around this way of testing. No Autocar tester would last too long if he couldn't tell a good car from a bad one, but our judgments simply aren't arrived at in such a structured way. It might
look like a chaotic mess from the outside - I'm sure the Germans would be horrified - but this organic way of doing things makes sense to us. After taking into account the figures that matter (price, specs, performance and economy), we end up recommending the sort of car we
think you'd most like to buy, because that's the sort of car we'd like to buy as well. Take the Eurovision Song-Contest approach to car testing and you inevitably end up rewarding mediocrity - a car that does nothing much right, or nothing much wrong, but keeps its nose clean and scores consistently often ends higher up the rankings than it deserves. Or, to look at it another way, the Peugeot 307 ends up beating the new Astra, Mazda 3, Ford Focus and Renault Megane. Enough said.
We also didn't get our heads around some of the naked nationalism on show. Maybe if there had been a Rover 45 on test we'd have been just as guilty (then again, maybe not) and, to be fair, most of the hacks were playing with a straight bat. But it was funny how the lads from the
Italian Quattroporte magazine always had much kinder words for the Fiat Stilo than anyone else did, while the French road tester took every opportunity he could, in-between cigarettes, to tell me why he couldn't understand how people weren't able to see that the 307 was streets
ahead of the Focus dynamically.
So, no, I don't intend to start catching the Eurostar to work for quite a while yet.
« Ultima modifica: Luglio 15, 2004, 09:05:41 am da HansMuller »
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