Why we still fly around the world just to drive in circles

When The Beautiful South wrote their song Rotterdam (Or Anywhere), they could have been writing about the itinerant life of a road tester. Motoring hacks travel to locations that serve a particular purpose: to drive around in big circles. And then we go home. To the outsider looking in, I can well appreciate that you might wonder why it’s done quite so. The motoring press calls these events launches, although others might well describe them as junkets of a sort. A new model comes along and so many demonstrators are arrayed outside a generously sized hotel for us hacks to test and review – while benefiting from the hospitality of the manufacturer, to a greater or lesser extent, in order to do it. Over days and weeks, different groups from different countries are flown in in orderly daily rotations. A press conference and a product briefing, a formal dinner and interviews with company executives are scheduled. You will probably get more than A Little Time – three to five hours – of driving done, mostly on the road, although some events include track sessions too. Very often, it doesn’t matter too much where it all happens, because the location isn’t really why we’re there. For the recent Nissan Micra launch, it happened to actually be Rotterdam – although it could just as easily have been Rotherham, or indeed Liverpool or Rome. Well, maybe not Rotherham. Hull might work: it has an airport and decent driving roads within striking distance. As the weather turns, however, southern European cities tend to be preferred. That’s partly because manufacturers can avoid fitting winter tyres, which would affect the ride, handling and steering feel that the engineers have spent so long tuning. So why not just do it at company headquarters? Or else ship individual cars to particular journalists? After the pandemic, we did all question the thinking behind launches – and there has been some worthwhile consolidation of such events post-Covid. The honest answer is that this is still the at-least-relatively easy, cost-effective way to manage it all. If you’re a car manufacturer, you want to publicise the market availability of your new model as widely, quickly and efficiently as possible. Shipping 20 cars to one place, hiring one venue, assembling what event resources are needed at that one venue and then flying people in to attend is actually cheaper and easier than shipping one car each to 20 different locations and then another 20, or travelling around the world in some year-long media circus. By inviting them directly, a manufacturer also has more control over who in particular attends (at Autocar, launch invites are received and allocated centrally so as to avoid the impact of this) and the circumstances in which they do so than it would otherwise. This idea appeals to PR departments, who pay media agencies to tell them which reviewers in particular are the toughest and which are the most generous with their praise. The most popular locations for launches are, right now, probably Lisbon, Barcelona, Nice and Frankfurt. But there are, occasionally, still grander jaunts about which you find Everybody’s Talkin’. Mazda chose to launch the third-generation MX-5 in Hawaii in 2005 – a location only even remotely convenient for the company’s own Japanese contingent, you would imagine. And I’ve personally travelled to different continents in order to test new Bentleys, McLarens and Land Rovers that I shouldn’t really have needed to leave my own country – county, even – to drive. So does the exotic, long-haul factor make you as a reviewer more inclined to award the Perfect 10? For me, it’s quite the opposite. When a manufacturer is bidding hard for your approval or has lavished lots of event budget, I wonder if they’re covering for something. If anything, it’s your instinct to Keep It All In that you have to be aware of.

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Why we still fly around the world just to drive in circles

Convening many cars and people in one place is about as efficient as launches get

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main menu

Why we still fly around the world just to drive in circles

Convening many cars and people in one place is about as efficient as launches get

More from Autocar

Top 10s

Latest car reviews

Top manufacturers

Quick search

We recommend

Legal bits

About Autocar