What goes on during a new car launch?

Largely, it’s arrive, be briefed, drive, coffee, drive, coffee, arrive at a hotel, coffee, press conference, dinner, coffee, bed, breakfast, drive, coffee and home. With, in between, increasing amounts of blogging, news updates and Tweetery.

Don’t just take my word for it, though. See it for yourself, in my ad hoc flickr gallery of launch imagery.

Car makers like to give us the full gamut when launching their vital new models. Check out with your own eyes the sights and random scenes…

Motoring journalists road-test cars by living with them: doing all the things with them that they’d do with their own cars. 

It’s not as glamorous as blasting round the test track, but it’s the best way of finding out what a car’s actually like in the real world.

The track is great, and reveals useful stuff, but the shchlep to the supermarket reveals more about the car for the people who’ll be buying it.

Enter, then, my flickr set of road test images. Here, I’ll bring insights into what I’m actually doing with the cars I’ve got on test.

It won’t always be interesting. It will often incorporate Asda, or the tip, or a multi-storey car park in Birmingham. But it’s still representative of how I find out what I think about cars.

I’ll update it constantly too: as a guide, the images are arranged in date order, newest first. Lo, it’s the evolution of the test car diary in pictorial form…

Apologies if it gets repetitive at times. That’s another secret of road-testing: get yourself a favourite road, a favourite route, and drive all the cars you have on test across it for back to back comparisons.

You thus may be seeing the car park at the end of my route more than once in a while…

God is in the details, and how VW engineers know this.

The 2011 VW Passat is a masterpiece of detail engineering – taking the base of the existing Passat and honing it to the nth degree, rather than throwing it out and replacing it in its entirety.

Some would say this is VW smartly saving a buck or two. I would say it’s VW granting its engineers free reign to do what they do best – pour over the details and obsess over the intricacies.

The 2011 VW Passat is the perfect example of this. It’s familiar to the old one, but just that bit better, in every area. Many of these have been covered in great detail elsewhere, which is why I’m taking a different approach.

Find out, thus, what little intricacies impressed me on the 2011 VW Passat, via my VW Passat Flickr Road Test…

+ Volkswagen Golf dials in extra speed

+ Security threat for VW-conquest Renault drivers

+ Skoda inspired by Volkswagen Golf

BMW is launching the new 5 Series this week – and, on Friday, I’m driving one of the Brit cars back to the UK.

It will be a 24-hour flurry from the South of France to the Middle of England. Plans are afoot to blog it, photograph it, film it and Tweet about it.

Question is… what would YOU like to know? I have a day with the new 5, and will be putting 1000 miles on it. In that time, is there anything you’d like me to investigate?

I’ll also be speaking with the BMW chaps before I depart for home: any burning questions you have? Any details on the 5 you simply have to know, that I could possibly help with?

If so, drop me a line, and I promise to do my very best… join in now for your 5 questions (hopefully) answered!

BMW Z4 has 3 Series Convertible to thank

What Porsche gives to BMW M

BMW MX5… MX6…

FIRST impressions are everything. And so on. And on. There are a billion quotes or more I could reference. Which have given me an idea.

Here, I’m going to share those first few seconds, miles and minutiae of new, interesting, intriguing or plain cool cars with you.

Motor industry God, Richard Parry-Jones, said it was all about the 50 metre test*. Here’s a loose variation on this – something so new, I don’t even have a fancy title for it yet.

The first car to be sat in for 5 minutes, driven for a couple of miles then parked up again while I have a cup of tea is the new 2010 Citroen C3.

Head over to Flickr and let me know what you think of what I thought.

Oh, and once I’ve actually driven it some meaningful distance, I plan to post back here with more rounded impressions. Just so’s you can compare suspicion with, hopefully, a bit more reality.

Share here what you think of what I fleetingly think and share with you…

* ‘You can tell how good any car is within 50 metres from the ways it responds to your inputs and provides feedback,’ Parry-Jones told Brian Appleyard in The Times. ‘It should feel connected and coherent. If you work hard enough, you can do this for ordinary customers at ordinary prices.’

Motorsport and Twitter aim for Groundswell

Nissan Qashqai photostream on Flickr

Renault Clio 2009 photostream on Flickr

NISSAN was selling more Qashqai models last year than ever before.

Why? That’s what we were keen to find out at Motoring Research – so we got one out for a week’s test, courtesy of the kindly press office.

It really did impress, in many ways that surprised. That’s why it has its own Nissan Qashqai photostream on Flickr, honing on some of the details that stood out.

Head on over there, take a look-see, and leave any comments you see fit!

My hit car colour of 2010

What Porsche gives to BMW M

BMW MX5… MX6…

Renault engineers have been busy, facelifting the best-selling Clio range. Enter, thus, the Clio 2009.

I’ve just waved one goodbye, after a week’s test. Here, via Flickr, is my image road test of what it’s like!

Feel free to rock on on over there, to see what you think.

And do please leave comments on all the images!

RenaultSport past to inspire turbo future?

Why RenaultSports don’t have rear spoilers

The latest thing to sell cars

VOLKSWAGEN wowed everyone in the Motoring Research office when it sent the Volkswagen Golf GTD to us.

I took it for a weekend, and almost became violent when it was taken away. Dan also fell in love with it. And CJ. Indeed, the entire office…

Find out why I was besotted in my Flickr photostream road test. You’ll get a sense of why from some of the images I chose to take.

Feel free to comment away, and do please let me know what you think!

MINI John Cooper S Works photostream on Flickr

Audi A6 3.0T photostream on Flickr

BMW Z4 photostream on Flickr

HOW is this motoring journalist finding social media is helping him?

For the past few months, I’ve been religiously following the many, many bibles; it quickly became clear socializing would be no hardship to me.

Hard as it may be to believe, Twitter wasn’t the first to be mastered. But it’s certainly been the most useful. Particularly as I’ve chosen some brilliant people to follow. @jakehumphreyf1, @steverubel, @grandprixcom, @richardpbacon and the genius @PerryBelcher, to name but a few – they’re constantly posting useful Tweets and links.

Indeed, it’s the links that’s really cemented Twitter, rather than the updates. I’m hooked into motor industry experts, so get news far quicker than I ever have. Through Twhirl, my trusty desktop AIR, it’s brilliant.

Google Reader was my first love, though. I discovered RSS, was introduced to this by Brendan Cooper, and nowadays have it a staple of every browser I use. Never, ever before have I been so clued up in the areas that matter – cars, technology, PR, journalism – and there is never a time Reader lacks something of interest. I am never now stuck for something to read. Never. It’s ace. Albeit making a tiny Sony Vaio P Series even more essential…

Reader does take some commitment; as with emails, I don’t like to have unread things sitting there. Which is why I’ve been finding read-it-later resources such as, well, readitlater, very useful. And Xmarks saved me in a million ways, when I had a recent Firefox 101. (Still not working, alas: social media hasn’t quite managed to solve that one.)

Twitter, though, you can’t help but keep coming back to. It’s omnipresent, but a real weapon for me. My editor, @cardealered, uses it to inform of new stories on our site; here, we’ve discovered the power of the retweets to drive traffic. And, outside of work, there’s nothing better than Tweeting the random car thoughts that come into my head…

Hopefully they’re useful to people. The reciprocal insights from those I follow are.

It’s via Twitter, and Reader, that I discovered @bmwblog; here, I’ve been able to promote some road tests I’ve written using Flickr. I was trying to think outside the box; car nuts like images, like detail. And, road tests, you can get very good one from lots of outlets. What I try to do instead is harness the power of the picture with bite-sized snippets for 20 or so images; a road test, well, in pictures.

It seems to have gotten quite a good response, and it’s all down to the genius of Flickr. Fans of the cars in particular have responded in kind, and I’ve met quite a few new folk and groups via this.

Of course, I’m a Facebooker – have been since way back in 2007. Didn’t understand it fully then, but loved the concept. Now see it as a part of my life; just what social media should be.

I haven’t really cracked Last.fm yet – need to give that some time. I can see the potential. I’ve also been foisted off a Mini blog, through stumbling straight into advanced social media techniques, without fully introducing myself to the audience first. Learning curve, that one (and reason why my future car choice has changed…).

LinkedIn, I’m on, and reckon it’s potentially huge, but isn’t quite ticking over fully for me yet. And delicious is just that.

What all this has really ingrained in me, though, is the sheer vitality of the web. The Cloud is the future, permaconnectedness the next crucial element. A few months ago, I longed for the most basic phone out there. Now, I need – NEED, I tell you – an iPhone or BlackBerry.

I want my house networked. I want to stream music onto my hifi. I’m looking at Mir:ror, and blogging on the go, and tidily coding up my own website, and all sorts. It’s changed how I work. It means my goals, aims and desires within motoring journalism are completely different. It’s even changed the relationships I have with PRs and other journalists.

With the socially savvy, I’m closer. There’s more trust. Confidence. We work together better. With my readers and our respective employers the ultimate beneficiaries.

So, what next? Your guess, etc… Reader comes up with something new every day. I’m no longer signing up for them all, but filtering the useful ones. Question is, where do you find the time to experiment? You make it, that’s how. With the Cloud, office hours are fluid. Boundaries no longer exist. Just like any good social media rockstar.

Even writing about it is exciting me. Must dash; Who knows what Reader might have for me…

Social media brings close access to heroes!

bmwblog and UK car dealer agree

First blog

CELEBRATIONS surround this week’s road test car – the MINI JCW. The Mini is 50 in ’09…

So, via Flickr, here’s my images of what it’s like!

(Turbo)charge on over there, to see what you think.

And feel free to leave any comments you wish!

Audi A6 3.0T photostream on Flickr

BMW Z4 photostream on Flickr

Bentley Continental GTC Speed photostream on Flickr