They say that time has a way of wiping away the wide-eyed optimism of youth to leave an empty husk of cynicism. Nowhere is this more apparent than my view of industry award announcements like the Oscars, the Grammys, or one of many Car of the Year titles.
It is no surprise that the Oscars and Grammys have had an awful start to the new millennium. Both awards were unable to recapture the viewership highs of the decade before. Even with a media witch hunt campaign to force diversity and relevancy, all indications point to an unchangeable trend. People are just turning off.
The same can be said about Car of the Year titles. There was a time when it meant something truly extraordinary. Now, many see it as a clandestine extension of the industry’s marketing apparatus. Some would even suggest that it has fallen into the pay-to-win business model.
Where Car of the Year awards are going wrong
Even if you give these titles the benefit of doubt, it is hard not to take the title recipients seriously. Many winners are exemplary creations of technology and engineering that few will have the means – or circumstances – to afford.
Can you imagine a more suitable World Car of the Year than 2019’s winner, the Jaguar i-Pace? What a wonderful choice. One that I’m certain will change the marketplace in the far corners of Chile as it certainly will in Tibet. Only a tiny segment of the population who could afford to own and put up with its electric limitations would see nothing wrong with naming it as the best car in the world.
It isn’t just the World Car of the Year where we see many egregious examples. The roll call of former Car of the Year recipients is full of ‘what were they thinking’ choices. Of course, it is unreasonable to expect judges to account for unforeseeable aspects like ownership costs, reliability, and utility. Only God knows what the depreciation will be like, and the poor suckers who bought it.
Awards rarely bring mainstream success
That said, can you blame the judges – who are mostly career journalists – for being blindsided? Journalism by its very nature is retrospective. And when it tries to be forward-looking it comes off as disingenuous. With cars like the i-Pace, you have a sense that they are trying their hardest to gaze into the crystal ball only to see an idealised vision conjured up by futurists and their imagination.
Adding further criticisms to the legitimacy of Car of the Year titles is the fact that winners rarely become segment leaders or even best-sellers. However, as it is in the entertainment industry, you would rarely see Oscar performances smash the Box Office.
Critics will forever hail the cowboy sexual adventures of Brokeback Mountain as a cultural touchstone. But it will never beat the sheer number of viewers the increasingly incredulous Fast and Furious franchise can draw in. Industry excellence is rarely analogous to mainstream popularity.
Even so, the divide between the market and industry pundits is growing ever larger. A divide that is now impossible to ignore as we enter the millennium’s third decade. Why is that so? Like any boomer pointing at the source of all of today’s degeneracy, I would blame the internet.
Lost in a connected world
For decades, any review of a piece of media could only be seen at the time of its publication. If you miss its publication, that is too bad. You would either get a word-of-mouth opinion from a friend or trust that the advertisements aren’t peddling you a turd. Don’t despair at that notion, after all, you can always see what gets picked in the annual industry awards.
Unfortunately for many industry awards, when the internet came around, media in all its forms, include the reviews and critiques of it, became less transient. Now you can access a whole database of in-depth reviews, discussion boards, and recommendations from anywhere at any time. And with such an informative tool available to everyone, the industry award lost the keys to the gate it kept.
Like the Oscars, it also doesn’t help that the voting process of many of these Car of the Year awards are opaque. Compared to the standard review’s rundown of its pros and cons, award judges usually skip over the details and breeze straight to the summary notes.
What exactly did the winner do better than the nominated competition? Who knows? But why bother with that, accept the validity of our verdict, proletariat. Unlike the average reviews and comparison tests, its methodology feels very impersonal.
Changing audience engagement
Is it any wonder why the stats from Google Trends show that the search term ‘Best Cars’ is more widely used than ‘Car of the Year’ by a factor of 40? (You know that people are using search term when it registers a catastrophic drop in March 2020 – the height of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic fears).
To a general audience of car buyers, finding out what is the most exceptional car of a certain year is a moot point. Why would such an award matter if I’m not even looking in its market segment? A Car of the Year recipient will be better than the rest that came out in the year, but is it better than previous year cars of the same segment? Will it have exactly what I’m looking for in my next car purchase?
Getting Car of the Year right
All that said, there is one Car of the Year award that gets it right, and it is the annual calvacade done by evo Magazine. Here there are no categories, no award-giving, no insufferable ceremonies. Just one big end-of-the-year comparison test to cap off the year. One big motoring adventure that every subscriber looks forward to.
The lack of any market segmentation in evo Car of the Year sounds hypocritical to my earlier criticism. But in evo’s case, they aren’t picking a car for the broad general audience. They know that their audience is not looking for an objectively superior car, but one that exemplifies the magazine’s ‘Thrill of Driving’ ethos.
Like any award, evo Car of the Year is not free from controversial results. Even the most ardent defender would admit the magazine does have a love affair with rear engine Porsches.
Unlike many other Car of the Year awards, evo’s writers take readers on a tour of the whole event. Setting the scene, discovering the candidates, and dissecting its individual merits over its competition.
That is what evo got right about the whole Car of the Year shtick. It is like any memorable road trip really. It isn’t the grand prize’s destination, but the journey to the conclusion that readers are there for.
Outdated by the medium
Unfortunately, in today’s internet age, replicating such a format is unlikely. The mainstay of publications, the long-form feature, doesn’t suit the internet readers’ short attention span. Nor will it garner significant exposure from today’s search engines due to its form.
Not only that, but internet culture, born from an era of counterculture, is brasher in its criticism of the content. A point that is not lost to the founder of one of the internet’s most popular automotive sites. He dismissed the idea of organising his Car of the Year award from early on.
To him, the idea of picking an annual favourite would only serve to inflame critics and question the legitimacy of his site. He is not wrong in that regard. For a publication that rose from the internet, there is extraordinarily little to gain in such an endeavour. Why attract criticism when you can feed the audience ambiguous ‘best car’ listicles and let them do their footwork.
All about spectacle, not merits
Sadly, traditional motoring publications have yet to wise up to the internet’s rules. No matter how prestigious your name is, you cannot build a repertoire on the internet by grandstanding as an absolute authority. The flak and general indifference that traditional Car of the Year awards receives online is a sign that netizens aren’t warming up to the choices.
As the likes of evo Car of the Year demonstrates, perhaps reinvention isn’t the answer. Instead, publications should embrace the theatrical possibilities it presents. Just as how the Oscars and Grammys have become a show of spectacle, rather than merits.