We publish Reviews and First Drives of new cars every week on CARiD Drive. Our staff of automotive journalists has been evaluating vehicles for more than 40 years, collectively, and we’ve got an amazing perspective on what’s good, bad, or mid in the new car landscape.
Our goal with Review content is not to reiterate a list of specifications you could find on an automaker’s own website or to regurgitate the marketing department’s positioning of a new vehicle. Rather, we strive to provide readers with detailed, experiential driving notes, with comparative data about competitive products.
To help our own analysis of a vehicle and to give you a quick idea of our overall opinion, we also score every vehicle we drive on a 10-point scale (provided we are allowed adequate time behind the wheel, under appropriate conditions).
Some of our scoring is based on industry-standard concepts like value and performance. But because CARiD Drive has a different mandate and audience than many other car sites – we’re here for owners of older cars, modifications, and maintenance, not just brand new vehicles – we also pay attention to categories that will matter over the long haul.
How We Score
Value: Relative to the competitive set are you getting a lot for your money?
Tech In-Cabin: Is the car keeping pace with the competition, leading the way, or lagging behind where connectivity, ADAS, infotainment, software logic, and more are concerned?
Tech Elsewhere: Does the car offer new or novel technology, anywhere but the cabin, that its competition does not?
Performance: Separated into subcategories for Sport, Off-Road, Tow-Haul, EV, and Daily Driving, our performance category looks at the factors that make a vehicle stand out in very different disciplines. So a vehicle like a Rivian R1T will be evaluated on EV factors and “truck stuff” like towing or driving off-road, while a Corvette doesn’t get dinged for having a poor payload rating.
Apparent Quality: Does the vehicle have good panel fit? Do interior trim pieces fit well? Do all of the systems seem to work as intended? Are touch points solid or flimsy?
Collectibility: Is this a car people will tend to keep for a long time and treasure, or drive for a few years and mostly forget about? Is this a car you’ll want to buy later in your life? Is this a car you’d save for your kids?
Intangibles: Does the car have something special that isn’t captured elsewhere in the rating? Is it a unique offering? Do the individual elements compose something far greater as a whole?
Scores from all of the categories are aggregated and then normalized for an easy-to-understand 10-point scale.
Our system isn’t perfect – no single number can capture the nuance of something as complex as a new car or truck – but we think that it’ll provide CARiD Drive readers with a useful baseline. And, as is true of anything we publish here, if you have feedback on our rating system or individual evaluations, please drop us a line at tips@carid.com.
