Where do our test cars often come from? | Articles

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…