Thomas Holland on Driving with Your Hands Blindfolded

As many of you have probably gathered, James and I have more than our fair share of controversial opinions on cars. There have been many times where we simply didn’t agree with the general consensus, or we were flat out the opposite in our opinion. In all honesty, at first it was terrifying. It felt like walking out of a final exam feeling confident about that huge one-page question at the end, only to find out that all your friends got a totally different answer. You know the feeling - heavy pit-of-the-stomach dread.

Except in our case, it’s not a final exam. It’s a conversation with other journalists over dinner, at some car launch in a far off place. And often these journalists have many more years on the “car-launch circuit” than us. So after hearing them say “Yea it was great! It felt so dialed in.” James and I would glance nervously at each other across the table and simultaneously ponder:

What f*ckin car did THEY drive?

That's when the panic would set in. Were we wrong? Because it's too late now. We filmed our video. Our impressions of the car are on an SSD somewhere being furiously smashed together into a video in a silent hotel room by Karston, who is likely, very heroically, missing dinner. 

This still happens today. Except the difference is, instead of seeing dread in the eyes of my co-host across the table, I see a look of “here we go again.”

It took a while for me to try to comprehend why this keeps happening. It’s not just for the sake of being controversial, because, as you might have guessed, our lives are already idiotically hectic. We live in a constant state of last minute calendar panic. Creating drama for no reason would be counterproductive. Our usual mantra from a business perspective is likely familiar to you: simplify and add lightness.

And yet, when we drive a car we don’t like and are given the choice of delivering a review that just says “oh yeah that car’s pretty good eh!” or alternatively, being true to what we feel, we always take the road less traveled. And it’s usually a stupid road. Filled with thorns and potholes. 

But what keeps driving us there? 

What do we see differently in these cars that others miss or choose to gloss over? Cars like the new Mustang, the GTR, many recent BMW products, the new WRX and so on?

We see one thing that tends to make or ruin a car. It’s a thing that I realized we tend to care more about, not only because of the unique sampling of cars we’ve been lucky enough to play with over the years, but also because of my personal fascination with this trait going back to when I did some racing in go karts and felt the purity of that experience. It’s a disease that I admittedly have infected James with.

Steering. 

I can hear the eye roll on some of you from here. But the truth is nothing can make or ruin an enthusiast car in such a singular fashion quicker than steering. 

Steering is an elusive and complicated mistress. It can be fast, or slow. Heavy, or light. Filtered, or unfiltered. Accurate, or vague. Tactile, or numb.

Sometimes it helps you. Sometimes it betrays you. Sometimes it talks to you, and sometimes it leaves you in the dark. 

But when a car gets it right, steering delivers something magical: Pure, distilled, unadulterated confidence.

And this confidence almost sounds subjective. As if it’s totally in your head. But it isn’t. Even though I don’t think the instruments exist to measure it.

Good steering is the literal voice of the car. If you are able to speak its language, it can tell you what you can or can’t do. It lets you know if you are turning too sharply, or not enough. It tells you if you entered a corner too fast, and then describes to you how you can correct it. It can tell you where the limits of all four individual tires are at any given time, and if it’s particularly vocal, it can paint a picture of what the surface actually looks like. Is it rough? Smooth? Bumpy? Slippery? Grippy?

Good steering can allow you to place a 4000 pound hunk of metal on a piece of road the size of a penny, as you hurtle it through a corner in a slide so delicate that the car is effectively floating on a layer of melting, superheated rubber. 

Good steering is the thing that truly lets the driver feel (literally), that they are part of the experience of driving. Otherwise you are just a monkey in a seat operating a few pieces of rubber on hinges. 

Bad steering on the other hand, robs you of this. It completely removes an entire layer of information. It’s like losing one of your senses. It removes that all powerful thing we call engagement. 

The problem is, none of the above facts are believable, or understandable if you haven’t personally experienced what steering CAN be. 

This is what I believe to be the core of why James and I occasionally disagree with the masses. As I mentioned, I have infected James with steering disease. Whether it was originally from karting, or perhaps from how much time I spend in old BMW’s, the fact is we seem to value steering more than others. It has clearly been exacerbated by the fact that not only have we been lucky enough to drive a HUGE variety of cars, but also we have done many “Old vs New” comparison videos, where we got the rather uncommon chance to drive two of the same car from different generations, back to back. 

Getting out of an R34 GT-R (a car that was accused of being TOO digital back in the day), and into a 2017 GT-R was like putting on a blindfold for your hands. Or even doing consecutive drifts in the new E63 and a 2010 E63; something was just… better… in the old car. This is the thing that you might miss, if you only spend time bouncing from new car to new car. You can lose sight of the characteristics that can make a car feel like more than an appliance. 

It was in these moments that we realized that steering is the bassist of the car communication band: sometimes you can only understand its impact when it’s removed from the song. Couple that with a few blasts in something like an old Lotus Elise, and you are ruined forever.

And so, as a result James and I are far too often disappointed with a car that gets everything else right, but is let down by the fact that the engineers seemed to either not care, or not understand just how much steering can make or ruin the experience of a car.  We’re left wanting more.

To be fair, much of this is due to the nature of electric power steering (long story short it’s harder to communicate information through the power of electric motor assistance).  However, we have seen that it is indeed possible to make EPAS good. Most Porsches, and the BRZ/86 for example, give us most of what we’re looking for. It’s also worth noting that in some cases certain parts of the steering characteristics can be good while others are not. The new Z06 for example has extremely accurate and well weighted steering, but there is zero feedback. So it feels good until the car starts to slip. Then you are blind.

We can’t help but see a trend in new enthusiast cars where steering is given lower and lower priority. Too often, press briefings on new cars are focused on the experience of the new digital gauge cluster design, or how “avante garde” the new styling language is. It's a shame. 

So to all manufacturers, I say: Forget about the speed. Forget about the 12 way configurable driving modes. Forget about the 0-60 times. 

Fight to give us the perfect tincture of steering characteristics, to cure the disease that is numbness. Bring back the only thing that separates the choice to drive a car from the choice to be driven in one. 

 Engagement.