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MKBHD, Fisker, and "the worst car ever reviewed"
- throwaway4good 3y agoGranted Fisker seems to be run by amateurs but high-impact social media influencers like MKBHD need to be carefully managed, pampered, and yes, probably paid.
- bantunes 3y agoHe reviewed the current state of affairs for Fisker buyers, which is valuable to prospective buyers. What do you suggest Fisker should have paid him for? Change the narrative?
- throwaway4good 3y agoNow it is probably too late - but yes - before the review - carefully manage, pamper, and pay.
- archerx 3y agoI disagree, I prefer when reviews are not bought and paid for. Whenever I find out a reviewer is doing paid reviews I know to disregard everything they say because objectivity is gone.
- throwaway4good 3y agoThat is the trick of tech influencers; they pretend they are not getting paid. But they are.
- thih9 3y agoWhy would they, if they can profit more from delivering a review that is not aligned with the manufacturer? Case in point.
- blitzar 3y agoThey get paid in access - you cant make a review if you dont have products to review. (and envelopes full of cash of course)
- thih9 3y agoNote that this submission is again a counter example. The manufacturer withheld the product and asked the reviewer to wait, the reviewer got access to the product themselves.
- agsnu 3y agoRecommend listening to the segment on the Waveform podcast about it - they say Fisker was weird from the get go, they asked for a loaner vehicle to review and Fisker kept trying to offer them money (that they didn’t want).
- throwaway4good 3y agoFisker should have hired someone who knows how to handle this stuff.
- SllX 3y agoMarques Brownlee is a professional. Good product reviewers don’t accept money for good reviews.
- throwaway4good 3y agoA professional is someone who gets paid for his work.
- SllX 3y agoNot by the people making the products they’re reviewing. Marques Brownlee runs an extremely popular YouTube channel; his money comes from YouTube ads and subscriptions and his reputation is everything just like any other product reviewer.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoYou seem unaware of the term "press junket" - events where car companies invite press to fancy locations and wine/dine them. The top tier press are invited to that, and they're expected to have nice things to say or they aren't invited back unless they have such a large audience nobody can say no to them. Just getting access to the press car fleet alone is worth something to a reviewer; if they can't get access to cars, they starve, especially if they can't get access before the embargo lifts; all the traffic will go to the reviewers who had pre-embargo access. If they're honest and don't pull punches, and don't have the clout of say Top Gear - the car company's PR team will cut them off. The way most reviewers get around being able to sleep at night is by focusing only on the things they like, and lie by omission. Any criticism is focused on subjective meaningless things like "this color is horrid." For example: go read reviews of the VW Mk8 GTI, see how many reviewers tow VW's line about them "curing" understeer, and how many reviewers are honest about the press car being delivered with softer tread compound tires up front and harder compound tires in the back, to cheat and make the car handle more neutrally. See how many mention that the press cars were EU models (normal) with a slew of features that won't be available in the US at all (not at all normal), like the fancier adaptive suspension system. See how many of them rave about how good the suspension is...a suspension the US didn't get!
- mattrighetti 3y agohttps://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1766231831345541571.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1766231831345541571.html
- l5870uoo9y 3y ago> Separately, Fisker announced last week that it may not have money to survive the year. Brutal if this is primarily due to one bad review from a social media influencer. No wonder why companies fear them and Fisker wanted to postpone the review.
- BoiledCabbage 3y agoThe car being that terrible, they had no business putting it on the market. You don't get to release a v1 of a product and tell people "no don't review the v1, wait until v2". People want to know what they are buying.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago> Brutal if this is primarily due to one bad review from a social media influencer Improbable. The bad review can't help, especially now as the back-and-forth is getting even more publicity, but Fisker's issues were known beforehand. They are a small startup, with limited means (they have to outsource manufacturing to a company called "Magna") in a now crowded space, with big hungry Chinese companies moving in, slow sales, limited name recognition, and a buggy product. Does their product stand out, in a good way? or does it come across as half-baked and gimmicky? It's in a space where people do expect support for years from an established company, so even mentioning "limited runway" will alarm potential buyers. And rising interest rates, so it's now harder to get more financing. The smaller, less successful companies in the crowded space will either go under or get bought up. See this from May 2023, it was Known: https://www.teslarati.com/fisker-massive-earnings-miss-q1-2023/ https://www.teslarati.com/fisker-massive-earnings-miss-q1-20... I don't see the financial, sales and product quality issues as being all that separate, each one impacts the others. This one bad review (which is not the first bad review) is merely a focus of attention on the deeper issues.
- 3y ago
- mongol 3y agoHe called it "the worst car I've ever reviewed" How many cars have he reviewed? I thought he mostly reviewed smartphones.
- deanCommie 3y agoHe also has a car review channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AutoFocus/videos https://www.youtube.com/@AutoFocus/videos
- RJ12345 3y agoHe has a car review channel now where he most (exclusively?!) reviews EVs.
- sluongng 3y agoHe switched to a 911 recently so it's not all EVs
- adrusi 3y ago42 videos on his car review channel plus 13 videos on his main channel (a few might be crossposted) plus a couple tesla reviews from several years earlier than the others. So 50+.
- nixass 3y agoThat makes him in no way relevant to the topic of cars, but he has a huge audience on his main channel who just followed him to the car channel.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoWhich does not mean he's qualified to review cars. There's been a huge trend in the last 5 or so years for corporations to go to "influencers" like Brownlee because they're ignorant and uninformed to the depth the industry press are. This has been going on for a decade with shitty kickstarters for bicycle accessories which had to be kickstarted because the designers couldn't sell the idea to any existing companies, get funding, secure distributorship, or all of the above, because the industry knew their idea was shit. Nowadays it's fly-by-night e-bike importers who hire a firm to do some high-end looking branding and import some shitty e-bikes with some gimmick (for a while it was lightweight single-speed ebikes, for example), last just long enough to sell a bunch, ship out replacement parts at the drop of the hat to keep early adopters happy and then evaporate as the bikes really start to break down and the brand's reputation tanks. Brownlee knows a lot about cell phones and cameras, but his knowledge in the automotive industry is shit and everything he puts out is tepid and "safe". He regurgitates the press packet, follows the standard "nice things to say but a few subjective criticisms/opinions to make it seem impartial", and that's a wrap. Look down his list of videos: "the Bolt EUV is the best deal in EVs!" "The Kia EV9 is surprisingly good!" Whoa whoa Keith, don't get too controversial!
- dvh 3y agoERROR> https://twitter.com/MorningBrew/status/1766231831345541571(0) https://twitter.com/MorningBrew/status/1766231831345541571(0...: ResizeObserver loop completed with undelivered notifications.
- thih9 3y agoWhy is that car so bad? The software seems at fault, but I’d like to know more - what exactly happens?
- k8sToGo 3y agoAn unfinished mess that was rushed to release due to money issues.
- thih9 3y agoI wanted a more detailed description. I watched the video, these software related issues were mentioned: - driving modes seem impractical and half-baked - no hill hold; expected in upcoming software update - UI gets slow and unresponsive when switching screen orientation - there is a burst mode with a hard limit of 500 activations (!) - general unreliability; affects bluetooth pairing, key fob operation, cameras (!) - color backgrounds behind the meters can sometimes blink in a distracting way These are the ones I remembered.
- Arnavion 3y agoIt's a 20min video and a little over half of it is everything that's bad, so it's too long to summarize. Watch it yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xWXRk3yaSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xWXRk3yaSw 8:10 onwards. Most of them could be fixed by software, though the problem with the steering buttons being too close to the hand grip (14:11) may not be?
- nixass 3y agoIt's so interesting to see how every tech bro has opinion on everything car related nowadays.
- ravetcofx 3y agoPopular influencers getting sponsored by the auto industry to perpetuate their sales with the younger generation even as we enter into climate crisis and should be focused on walkable communities, public transit and less consumption overall.
- curtisblaine 3y agoEverybody using a car has opinions on cars. They're consumer products: you don't have to be a car expert to buy, operate or otherwise use a car. You might be just a passenger without any driving license and still have a strong opinion on some cars that you've been a passenger of.
- Dwedit 3y agoWorse than the Chery Amulet? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7rrk3ZjN-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7rrk3ZjN-I
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y agoHe said "The worst car I've ever reviewed". So the worst of 50 or so vehicles. He did not say "the worst car ever". I doubt that he has reviewed a circa 2005 Chery Subcompact. And if so, there's no relevance at all. His reviews are good in the modern EV space. The more relevant omission - vehicles that might actually be worse, but which he has not reviewed yet - would be any vehicles made by Vinfast.
- unsupp0rted 3y ago> More people subscribe to Brownlee's YouTube channel than to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today combined. In the recorded call with the senior engineer, he called Brownlee "this kid". Should have taken "this kid" seriously earlier.
- reaperman 3y agoMKBHD is 30 years old and runs a fairly large, surprisingly stable business in a difficult industry/market. He has 13 employees whose livelihood directly depends on his leadership. The caller is a "field service engineer" - which I have been myself across multiple industries, and even while running a crew of 6 people with very dangerous equipment and explosives, I never felt like I was doing much of particular import or really all that much responsibility compared to managing people directly and owning a company employing them.
- znpy 3y agoThis most likely means that this youtuber is doing a better job at delivering information than all those institutions combined
- xethos 3y agoOr that the Youtube subscription is free and none of the newspapers mentioned are
- znpy 3y agoOr that none of the subscription fees are worth paying
- mingus88 3y agoStrongly disagree. I pay $2/mo for an all digital NYT subscription and it’s worth it alone for 10 minutes of Wordle every day $2/mo is a rounding error for most people’s commute costs, even mine and I am fully remote. The fact of traditional web content is that companies who led with free content gave away too much for too long to build their footprint and the result is that people are trained to refuse even the smallest charge to read articles, even things they seek out daily I also feel that literacy in general has declined. Long form written content just doesn’t garner attention in a world where influencers are posting videos and images. The dopamine hit from social is something a well researched and written article can’t compete with today. Tying all of this back to your comment, Netflix subscription costs have balloned and their subscriber counts have picked up 30 million in 2023 according to statista. Netflix costs 10x what I pay for NYT. Journalism is far more valuable than the type of true crime docudramas cranked out on Netflix but it’s too late now
- TD-Linux 3y agoOther reviews also voiced the same complaints. Here's one from November of last year that mentions things like the obnoxious animations: https://electrek.co/2023/11/21/fisker-ocean-review-coming-soon-in-a-future-software-update/ https://electrek.co/2023/11/21/fisker-ocean-review-coming-so... I think the input lag on the accelerator pedal is what kills it for me, though.
- adrianmsmith 3y ago> Unaware that they were being recorded, the rep let some things slip How is it OK to record a private phone conversation and publish it publicly without consent?
- akmarinov 3y agoIt’s legal in some states
- eXeP 3y agoIn my opinion, the Fisker representative made it abundantly clear that the phone call was not private, but part of an official inquisition by Fisker. Asking to pull out your customer's fingernails while representing your company is a sure way to attract attention.
- GrumpySloth 3y agoIt’s called one-party consent, which is standard in Europe and most states of US: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws#...>
- slim 3y agoThe reaction of the market is disproportionate with regards to the issues. Something else is going on here. Either shareholders know something we don't know, or Fisker got caught in an opportunistic crossfire originating from Competition and Shorters
- giovannrobin 3y ago[flagged]
- mahbran10 3y ago[dead]
- mahbran10 3y ago[dead]