By Larry Edsall
Photography by Randall Bohl
“You are the link between the engineer and the customer. It is a big responsibility.”
Those words were addressed to the Phoenix Automotive Press Association by Chris Céret, an instructor for the Audi Academy and one of the panelists assembled to suggest how automotive development engineers think car reviewers could do a better job for their readers, viewers, listeners and website visitors.
Joining Céret on the panel were Paul Berardi, recently retired after a long career in customer service and development engineering for Ford, and Jim Contes, who retired from the General Motors’ engineering staff to teach automotive engineering at Arizona State University.
“What is the clientele for that vehicle, or are you testing merely for yourself?” added Céret, a former French rally racer who introduces Audi dealership employees to the automaker’s newest vehicles.
“I get a laugh when I see 0-60 mph times for a TDI [diesel] or a hybrid,” Céret said.
The panel (from left): Chris Ceret, Paul Berardi and Jim Contes
On a less humorous note, he said he finds factual errors in nearly all of the car reviews he reads in magazines. Such errors, he said, evaporate the reviewer’s credibility in his eyes.
“You have to push the vehicles,” Berardi suggested. “What you write is what people are going to decide to buy. Push the envelope when you’re testing. It serves a purpose.”
But, the panelists added, judge a vehicle the way its potential buyers will judge it.
Céret noted that German cars are designed and engineered for European driving conditions. But, he said, Volkswagen’s new Passat, which is built in a new factory in Tennessee, was created specifically for American drivers and their families.
Berardi said sometimes even within a single country such as the United States there can be regional differences that complicate vehicle design and engineering efforts. For example, he said, the size of cup holders.
“Everybody in Detroit drinks 12-ounce soda cans,” he said. But in the heat of the Arizona desert, where he, Contes and others worked at hot-weather proving grounds, “we drink Big Gulps!”
Berardi said it took a long time for Detroit to be convinced about enlarging its cup holders.
Jim Prueter of AAA's Arizona Highroads magazine asks a question.
“Let’s not talk about cup holders,” Céret suggested, knowing how reluctant his company was to incorporating such things into its vehicles.
The panel was assembled by PAPA member and automotive spy photographer Brenda Priddy, who’s business is to photograph prototype vehicles.
“She knows where we all live,” Berardi said.
Contes told of the time he was testing Corvettes in the Australian Outback, only to be captured on film by a spy photographer.
But he said he scored one on the spies in the 1980s when he was testing a future Oldsmobile Cutlass and had to create camouflage to hide the car’s design as much as possible. Contes fashioned a pair of cardboard fins, spray-painted them and attached them to the rear quarter panels.
Sure enough, he said, the car showed up on the cover of a car magazine with the headline: “Detroit first fins since the ‘50s.”
“I really did a good job,” he said with a smile.
Berardi encouraged reviewers to look under the hood and let customers know whether it will be easy or difficult to perform typical service, such as changing oil or spark plugs, and to push the automakers on such things.
“Making customers more knowledgeable is what you guys can do,” he said.