I’m here in the DFW area and about two months ago I was invited to attend a car review for two days and I was paid $250 per day.
It wouldn’t be a bad retirement gig if they came along once a week.
It was held in a huge wear house that was just north of the DFW airport.
It was put on by a company based in Orange County, CA and there were four rows of full size SUVs stacked two deep.
Each car was blacked out with large sheets of black cloth so you couldn’t identify its manufacture.
Me being a car guy I spotted they had the Lincoln Navigator, Jeep Grand Wagoner, a mid-level Chevy Tahoe and a fully decked out GMC Yukon.
No cellphones were allowed (camera) and when you walked in the door they gave you an armored rubberized iPad with pages and pages of questions to rank from 1 to 5 on looks, feel, is it masculine, is it feminine, asking for your opinion on the exterior of the car, the wheel rims, interior fit, how does it feel, looks, etc.
The first car in each row had everything except the driver’s compartment of the car blacked out with cloth covers.
Each car had a three foot cutout of a little girl at the right front corner and one of the questions was on visibility and could you see the little girl?
After you finished with the first row of cars you went to the same make of SUV car on the second row and sat in the second row right passenger seat, then the third row passenger seat and then went aft to cargo compartment to open and close the hatch.
Each spot had a few pages on your iPad to rank from 1 - 5 more of your thoughts and opinions.
One row of cars had VR Googles.
You got in the driver’s seat and put your hands on the steering wheel.
The technician adjusted the VR Googles so your computer generated hands matched your real hands on the steering wheel.
After the VR Goggles matched how you were sitting in the driver’s seat the technician put up several different kinds of cockpits with gauges, cup holders, etc.
My report time was 14:00 and I wasn’t done until 19;00.
The guy said they were running about 500 people through in one week.
Once you finished one row of cars you reported back to the head table and they gave you your next assignment of cars.
I noticed as someone new came in they would be assigned a different row to start on.
I assumed it was due to fatigue because I noticed I was dragging towards the end and perhaps not giving the same response I had given at the beginning of the reviews.
By giving each person a different random order of cars to review it averaged out the fatigue issue, just guessing.
Most were there for just for one day but about 20 of us were invited back on day two for a round table discussion.
On day two we were all mic up and there was a guy running a video camera and they recorded our discussions on different slides they put up of SUVs and what we wanted in a full size SUV?
All of us had recently purchased a full size SUV that put us on their radar.
For me it was our 2025 Lincoln Navigator L we bought last August specifically for the 6+30 road trips we do about six to eight times a year down to a little fishing cabin on the Texas Gulf coast I share with my brother and sister that was built in 1923.
I hated that Lincoln Navigator within one hour on our first road trip down.
The list is long on what I didn’t like but the 28 different ways to adjust the seats just couldn’t overcome how bad the seats were for comfort.
It was mandatory to run the massaging seats the entire trip to overcome the numbness in your legs from the lousy seats.
Add in the left door arm rest was about six inches to low so you either drove leaning to the left or you constantly were driving with your right hand.
The gauge package on the Lincoln Navigator has little twinkling pixie dust on both the RPM needle and the Speedometer needle.
For our trips to the Texas coast we take IH35 down to Waco where we exit and now we are on two and four lane Texas highways.
From DFW to Waco is 25% of the drive and the Blue Cruise system will work but once we are off of IH35 it’s old school manual driving for the next 75% of the drive.
When you get down to it I’m not impressed with Blue Cruise because it drives like a 12 year old.
On a highway with a long sweeping curve it constantly bumps as it makes minor corrections
Back in 2015 we took the kids to see Yellowstone National Park.
We flew into Salt Lake City and I had a Suburban reserved for our week in the park.
The car rental (Alamo?) company had upgraded us to a Lincoln Navigator L and I had no issues with the car on the long drives all over Yellowstone.
Back then it was just a mere six way adjustable driver’s seat with some really great memory foam.
I asked my Lincoln Service Advisor if I could find a set of Ford Expedition seats and swap them out?
He said the computer would go nuts because it’s looking for the original seats.
Last Friday I swapped out the less than one year old Lincoln Navigator for a GMC Yukon XL.
I took a huge hit in deprecation but life is too short to go through with lousy seats.
Both the Lincoln Navigator and the GMC Yukon get a report card grade of a C+ in displaying information to the driver.
Both FoMoCo and GM have a software already written for their pickup trucks and I find it hard to believe Hot Shot drivers in their F450 have pixie dust twinkling around their gauge package.
With the modern cars and their large iPad like displays if I was designing cars I would have it where your key fob would also trigger what gauge package is displayed for each driver.
Mom could have a minimalist display of only speed and perhaps a clock while dad could have a gauge package equal to an old school Mack truck.
After two six figure SUV’s in under one year I’m severely unimpressed at what could be displayed or how it was displayed on both the driver’s display and the center display.
It’s still to early on the GMC Yukon to rant but with what is a few lines of code that would make a button bigger to press, the stored radio station play list is horrible (I have to be doing something wrong) the list is long for both FoMoCo and GM to improve on.
One would think Motown has groups of people who test these things before they put them into production but it must be a huge table back in DTW that shoots down the ideas from the little people in the trenches who actually will be using the car on what they want on a car.
