Prior Warning

I read Matt Prior's latest article today.

No, not Matt Prior the mentor and very good friend of Kevin Pietersen:





I'm talking Matt Prior the Autocar writer:

He is basically talking here about how it is important that car reviewers don't get freebies or payments or little extra jobs from car manufacturers.  It looks like a dig at other car magazines - he specifically points to "one US car magazine is actually presenting a TV car advert" - I'm guessing he is talking about Car+Driver who do sometimes feature car ads - but only to comment on the ad or show a particularly good one but I've never seen one and thought that they were endorsing the car in question.

I got the feeing that Mr.P is trying to say how wonderful Autocar is compared with the competition.  Understandable given that he works for them.  I hope it isn't an indication that the magazine is struggling though.  If they are, I am not exactly helping because I only read their articles online.  The only Car mag I purchase is Top Gear and I don't pay full price for that thanks to my Tesco Clubcard points.

I then looked back at some other Matt Prior articles.  Back in February, he was saying "why the Autocar road test is so important."  He is extolling the wonderfulness of his magazine for finding a potentially fatal braking problem with the Suzuki Celerio they were testing.  It caused the car to be taken off sale while it was sorted out.

At this point I should point out that Celerio is a stupid name for a car.  It sounds too much like celery or celeriac - which I believe is related to the turnip.

The other Prior article which caught my eye was this one.  Probably because of the picture they chose to illustrate it:

 

Ironically enough,  it is a short article about the use of glamourous women at The Geneva Motor Show (and all other motor shows) that Matty P had recently attended.  He plays the feminist card - and gets a lively little debate going in his comments section.

At this point, I decided to see if I could find any suitably sexist material in Autocar.  I can't speak for the physical magazine (because I haven't bought one in many years) but online they look very clean.  Best I could find was from 1973:

 

So then I decided to look up the 2015 Geneva Motor Show in Google Images - and I found hardly any glamourous females adorning the cars.  The few women that did show up there had two things in common:  "Autoevolution" written across the photo; and virtually no way of identifying the car.

I think I'll use this photo when I advertise this posting on my Facebook page.

Autoevolution, incidentally is autoevolution.com, a Bulgarian based car site that I delve into from time to time - they tend to have lots of stories, sometimes interesting, sometimes trashy.  I can guess which way their Geneva 2015 coverage went.

Are they competition for Autocar?

I hope not - but I suspect so.  Let's see if Matt Prior can knock them for six.