Some very wise words from the +Detroit Free Press auto critic Mark Phelan in his column today. Much to the chagrin of engineers and designers most people actually have no idea what they really want before someone else creates it and presents it to them. People are very bad at anticipating.
Mark Phelan: ‘Vette, Mustang, Cherokee fans, stop complaining already
As new versions of the Chevrolet Corvette, Ford Mustang and Jeep Cherokee draw near, I’ve got a request for the vehicles’ purists: Stop complaining that they’re different from the old cars you revere. Close your eyes, count to 10 and get back to me after they’ve been on the road for six months.
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I can only wonder what percentage of the
fanspeople complaining about the new models are actual future customers.If everyone complaining on enthusiasts forums actually bought a car I could walk into any car dealership in the world and buy a brown, diesel, manual station wagon.
The fact is, the single best way I've ever found to predict a car's success is to go into the comments of a story about a controversial model on Autoblog annd see how many negative comments it gets. Almost all the time the more it's hated by internet car nerds the better it will sell to people who spend money.
After two years of writing for Autoblog, I could no longer stomach reading the comments and even now I only very rarely tread into that territory. They are almost as uninformed as most of what is written there by certain people.
+Sam Abuelsamid it's not so bad if you can ignore the fanboy wars, the guy with the tuned Evo writing treatises on why his blown four is better than any V-8 ever and a lot of Tea Partiers who desperately want to blame liberals for everything from GM's continued existence to why Chevy is putting Camaro tail lights on everything.
I mean, if you ignore that it's fine.
I still do hold out hope that you, Shunk and Dan will do another podcast. You guys were the best podcast hosting crew, IMHO.
+George Jones thanks for the comments on the podcast. Unfortunately, that's not likely to ever happen at Autoblog. However, if you know anyone with some money that wants to back a new project, well you know where to find me…