THE MIDDLE NAME
These days, car manuals come in all shapes and sizes, says TGTV script writer Sam Philip
As any seasoned road tester will tell you the latest Audi
R is a spectacular supercar with just one real flaw the only transmission you can have is a double clutch auto The R doesn’t have a manual and that’s a travesty
All these road testers however are wrong The latest Audi R does have a manual It’s made of paper it lives in the glovebox and it is officially massive
Yes in the type of utterly pointless research of which I greatly approve a company called ScrapCarComparison com recently took it upon itself to analyse the owners’ manuals of some of the bestselling cars out there today And it found that when it comes to word count the longest of the lot was the Audi R ’s clocking in at a monstrous words
The R ’s handbook ScrapCarComparison sagely noted weighs in words longer than War and Peace and would take the average reader hours to read in full Which is a slightly unfair comparison as even the most dedicated new car owners don’t tend to consume the handbook cover to cover
The R ’s manual isn’t just a little longer than average It’s massively longer The Ferrari Superfast’s handbook? A mere words Is an R really six times as complicated as an
“HAS AUDI CONSIDERED THE IMPACT OF THOSE WORDS ON ITS POWER TO WEIGHT RATIO?”
Superfast? Or has Ferrari deduced that the sort of buyer in the market for an bhp rpm V firestorm on wheels is possibly a little too highly strung to spend hours researching the intricacies of its Bluetooth system?
Maybe it’s about value for money After all the R has always prided itself on offering more of the supercar experience for less and in the handbook department at least it’s doing so That said has Audi considered the impact of all those words on the R ’s power to weight ratio? In this era of marginal gains lugging around all that additional ink and paper could cost valuable milliseconds around the Nürburgring
Also I know what you’re thinking how long is the Lamborghini Huracán’s handbook? After all being very closely related to the R you’d assume it would be of similar length right? Wrong The Huracán manual is just lots of drawings of flame spitting rockets and dogs on skateboards
ScrapCarComparison’s excellent research didn’t only analyse car manuals’ length but also their readability The most complicated manual it discovered was that of the McLaren LT which though a mere words long boasted a ‘reading ease score’ of which basically makes Ulysses the James Joyce book not the Fiat MPV look like The Very Hungry Caterpillar
The easiest manual to read? The Tesla Model Y’s which apparently could be understood by the average year old At least until Elon releases an over the air update to add a whole bunch of extra complication
Sam Philip is the TopGear telly script editor, and a TG mag and website regular for 15 years. Once wrote a Vauxhall Corsa joke that Paddy McGuinness described as “not totally crap”
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