Car magazines like to offer spiffy-looking performance charts and sling around neat technical terms and abbreviations like "bbl" for "barrel" (as in carburetor) and DOHC and so forth.  But how many of us can really interpret this stuff?  I know that for my part, what I carry away from a car magazine article isn't some stark statistic about maximum g-forces generated in cornering or a coefficient of aerodynamic drag.  It's the wonderfully colorful way the staff finds of saying "This one goes."

I thoroughly enjoy car magazines' driving analyses.  Not only is their subject matter of interest to me, but even if it weren't, I might still read them for the vivid expressiveness of the prose.

But in a practical sense, how useful are these reviews to me?  While it may be interesting to know how a car performs in controlled drifts through slaloms, such things don't really reflect how I drive.  For my own purposes, if I want to know how a car accelerates, I can always just step on the gas.  If I want to evaluate its cornering, I can make sure my test drive includes an appropriately winding stretch of road.   Anything else I might learn from a car magazine is in the category of how the vehicle might perform, if driven to its limit by a test driver with skills much, much higher than mine. This is pretty hypothetical stuff.

Why am I interested in capabilities that I'm unlikely to directly experience?  On a strictly practical level, an apt analogy would be if I were to read an extensive evaluation of a car's air conditioning system, even though I myself lived in a temperate climate and rarely did anything more to cool a car than put the windows down.

My interest in car magazines' driving analyses becomes much more understandable, though, the minute I say that I'm concerned with other people's perceptions of a car--especially whether it's going to be considered a "serious" driving machine or just a "wannabe."  Once I start dealing in matters of image and perception, I could scarcely get any more useful information than what the car magazines put out.  After all, when my friends and associates make comments like "They say that's a pretty good car," what "they" are they ultimately referring to, other than the automotive press?

In other words, in driving analyses as in styling assessments, the real core function served by car magazines is as arbiters of social perception and taste.  For the automotive world, the car magazines are the ultimate authorities on "what's hot and what's not."

And of course, when we concern ourselves with "what's hot and what's not," we are dealing with the subject of cooties (or the lack thereof).