I got some new neighbors a few months back, which meant I had to walk over and give them the talk. No, not about the birds and the bees, but about press cars.
Here’s the gist of my speech: When a car company loves a target market, it parks loaner cars in random journalists’ driveways for a week at a time in hopes they’ll drive them and write about them.
Why am I telling you this? To explain why there are constantly different brand-new cars parked in front of my house. No, I’m not a drug dealer or a crypto billionaire; instead, Kia or whoever just really, really wants me to write about how nice the interior of the new Carnival is.
For decades now, roughly two press loans per week have been deposited with the staff of GRM, and we also have access to press fleets in most major cities when we travel. I never signed anything saying I wouldn’t talk about the system behind the reviews, so here it is:
First up, let’s chat about who has access to these free press loans. In short, it depends. It’s an invite-only system, and the best way to get an invite is to have a proven track record of providing exposure for press loans. (I know, I know.)
Generally, this means that loans go to media like GRM, celebrities and VIPs like famous musicians, company executives traveling for business, and, in recent years, influencers from all walks of life. The same car might do a track test with GRM, deliver a celebrity to the red carpet, shuttle the manufacturer’s CEO to a shareholder meeting, and feature in a mommy blogger post about car seat fitting tips.
Sounds complicated, right? So let’s chat about the middlemen. Rather than manage the people, cars and loans themselves, most manufacturers instead use a fleet management company that specializes in this business. In our neck of the woods, we work with two that provide professional, concierge service, and I’ve got nothing but fantastic things to say about the people at both of them. Their job is to maintain and deliver assets, both the cars and the people writing about them.
The standard here isn’t “rental car” but rather “untouched showroom fresh.” Generally, cars are driven from a central garage through a standard schedule of people like us, with a team of drivers spending all day every day moving a batch of cars one stop further along the chain.
They’ll park the new car in the driveway, quickly wipe off any bugs accumulated on the drive, check for personal items, and then get in last week’s loan to drive away. While we almost always return the cars clean and full of gas, that doesn’t seem to be the expectation, and we’ve heard horror stories of press car treatment.
What if something goes wrong? In short, they handle it. The goal in every single step of this process is to generate good publicity, which means even bad cars are prepped, polished and maintained to be as good as they can possibly be.
How do we pick which cars? Well, we’ll make special requests when new cars are announced (think GR Corolla or new Mustang), but in general we take what we’re offered. The cars are specced and loans are planned strategically by the fleet managers, in partnership with the manufacturers’ PR staff.
We’re local to the Miami metro area, for example, which means most of our test cars are luxury-oriented and fully loaded. A fleet in the Northeast would have plenty of AWD cars with heated seats, while a fleet in SoCal would have every flavor of off-road-oriented special truck to play with. Generally, we learn the make and model of a loan a few days before it’s delivered. And after a tour of duty (usually the current model year), press cars are generally sold to the dealer network as run-of-the-mill used cars.
So what are the rules? Just a few. It’s polite to give notice if you’ll be putting the car on track or driving thousands of miles in it–the fleet managers like to adjust the service schedule to make sure it doesn’t get delivered with an oil light on halfway through the loan–but the entire system of norms and relationships is incredibly old-school, built on mutual trust and respect. There’s no contract guaranteeing positive coverage or even coverage at all.
Which brings me to the elephant in the room: our track testing regimen, which you can see with Subaru’s new BRZ tS as our latest candidate. If a sporty car is dropped off with GRM, odds are good it will hit the track for a few hot laps. We’re known for mechanical sympathy and our rabid audience of enthusiasts tracking each car’s results. I should give a huge shoutout to J.G. Pasterjak, our newly crowned tech editor, for his dedication to our lap times leaderboard and the data he’s gathered on nearly every sports car you can buy in a showroom today.
I hope you enjoy J.G.’s BRZ review, and I hope you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at the weird system of press cars that made it possible.
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