A grain of salt

One of my all-time favourite movies is The Blues Brothers. I've probably seen it twenty times and could watch it twenty more, and yet, when it came out, most of the critics savaged it. It was the wrong film for them, but it was the right film for me.

The moral of the story? Be critical when you read criticism.

I make most of my living reviewing cars, but I'll be the first to tell you that my reviews, and the reviews of all my colleagues, are only guidelines. A smart buyer uses them to help make a buying decision, but never depends on them.

For the most part, here's how car reviewing works. Each manufacturer puts specific vehicles into its "press fleet". They're usually introductory models, which is why you don't see up-to-date reviews of cars that have been around and unchanged for several years. The option packages vary with each company, but I'm more likely to get a moderate- to fully-loaded vehicle than I am a base model, especially with trucks and SUVs. These come to me from the automaker -- I don't go to a dealer and get a car out of their stock -- and I drive them for a week. They're not specially-prepped for the journalists, as some people suspect; it's not unheard-of for me to pick up a car that's dirty or out of gas, or with obvious problems.

I like to look for things that most people don't find on a test-drive and might later become an issue. When you see these things mentioned in a review, you need to decide if you can live with them. If you never drink coffee in your car, for example, a poorly-placed cupholder isn't an issue. I also like to look at how a car will be used. It's my pet theory that a lot of inexpensive cars get a bad rap from journalists who just got out of sportscars, and who forget that there's a huge market for people who don't need road feel and brilliant acceleration -- or a big price tag -- to get to the office and the grocery store.

Keep in mind, too, that most of us get low-mileage cars and drive them for seven days. We seldom know what a new model's long-term reliability will be.

All of those are reasons why reviews can be an important buying tool, but they shouldn't be your only one. Use them to make a list of the cars you want to try -- and then put your butt in the seat and drive them all for yourself.