John Phillips: Take The Test Drive; Really, Take It
From the June 2013 Issue of Car and Driver
There are certain workers upon whom Americans would gladly deposit sheep entrails: trial lawyers, Wall Street bankers, congressmen. Of course, the most virulent contempt has historically been reserved for car salesmen. Which is odd. I love car salesmen. I love their stories, I love their tactics, I love undercoating, I love the occasional sewer transaction, I love their pants. When Saturn announced no-haggle prices, I thought, jeez, there goes half the adventure. I mean, who’d sign up for a safari in which you sit at home and a hardworking Kenyan fellow simply FedExes you a couple of dead lions?
Plus, salesmen afford one of life’s chocolate-covered cherries: test-driving someone else’s automobile. For free. I made a whole career of it. “You live 80 years,” George Carlin said, “and at best you get about six minutes of pure magic.” I’ve already spent all six of mine on test drives. Pre-C/D, of course, I had to connive my own drives. The only surefire tactic was to haul my trial-lawyer father along. But by age 17, I did unilaterally bag the metaphorical lion, nailing a longish hair-tearer in a four-speed 1968 Plymouth Road Runner from Spitzer Dodge in Columbus, Ohio. I dressed up in rayon slacks, a starched white shirt, and a black clip-on tie. I looked like Ralph Nader. I won’t say I scared the ride-along salesman, but when he climbed from the car—heat waves radiating off every surface—he had on his face the look of a man who had come to a firm decision about fathering a son.
In 2006, I wrote a story in which I interviewed maybe 25 car salesmen, amassing 15 reliable tricks to secure a satisfying test drive. The dealerships’ protocols were all over the map. A Volvo salesman told me, “If I believe you’re serious, I’ll let you take a car home for the night with unlimited miles.” Yet a Honda general manager said, “Our test drives are restricted to less than five miles, with the salesman driving half that distance”—which sounded to me like having your mom arrange your prom date.
Anyway, imagine my surprise to read a Maritz Research study suggesting that 11 percent of shoppers, before purchasing a car, conducted no test drive at all. In fact, only 52 percent indicated that a drive was even “very influential.” One reason, apparently, is that buyers coming out of the same brand often assume that the replacement model will drive identically, which is like assuming that Nixon would equal Lincoln’s performance because they were both presidents. If it’s true that the average U.S. car buyer has been absent from the market for 6.5 years, well, he’s naturally going to be blind to the myriad advances that accrued in the interim. A customer who trades his 2006 Ford Explorer for a no-test-drive 2012 Explorer with MyFord Touch might well be in for a hilarious burst blood vessel or two on that first drive home.
Now there’s an IBM study indicating that the number of buyers who eschewed test drives is even higher—21 percent. The survey further implies that 40 percent visited only one dealership, and 24 percent researched only one car—the car they purchased. Who’d get married after one date?
Among a certain segment of our population—and I’m not playing the brain-damage card, here—there is a kind of tone-deaf complacency about buying cars. It’s baffling, like selecting a doctor by the type of shoes he wears. Some of the carelessness derives from the notion that internet research is more credible than what is fact-checked and peer-reviewed and professionally edited in newspapers and magazines, not that I have an ax to grind. But it’s also probable that more and more buyers view a car as a tiresome transport pod, the equivalent of a refrigerator or that Orwellian nightmare of a train at the Atlanta airport. I understand it, sort of. In fact, I’m guilty in reverse. Six months ago, I bought a $1900 refrigerator after shopping only at Lowe’s, ultimately basing my decision upon the blue LEDs that looked like Paul Cézanne might have exploded inside the vegetable crisper.
My father test-drove everything, year-round. A 50-mile cruise to Plain City was merely “a hop, a skip, and a third-gear press.” He routinely kept the test car overnight or until a panicky salesman phoned, and he enjoyed parking dealer-plated cars in front of the courthouse because they never got ticketed. He once removed a black ’74 Dodge Charger 440 from a detailing station, and the salesman reported it stolen. He once drove home in a red ’67 Shelby GT500 that he somehow wangled right off Dan Rohyans Ford’s waxed showroom floor. The next morn, I stood before him, reciting 20 reasons why the Shelby so faithfully reflected our family’s unique lifestyle. “You’d make a fine lawyer,” he said. But instead of purchasing the GT500, he came home a month later with a factory-ordered ’67 Mercury Cougar, red with black vinyl roof, a car that later died during my driver’s exam and whose mechanicals were so foul and paralyzingly contemptible that my sister, Angie, for the rest of her life, could not even approach the Large Cat compound at the Columbus Zoo.
So, my theme today has been cats. But also this: My dad never test-drove that Cougar.
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