Our Cars: Volkswagen Up GTI

As any committed internet car forum contributor will tell you, motoring journalists are never at liberty to say exactly what we think. Apparently we live in fear of being uninvited from the next launch event or, a fate worse than death, getting banned from reviewing a manufacturer’s cars altogether. We therefore pull our punches and write far more favourable reviews than the car in question could possibly merit.

But there is an interesting corollary here: if the car we’re reviewing doesn’t belong to a manufacturer press fleet but we own it ourselves, as is the case here, nobody in the communications department in some glass-fronted office building can do anything at all to influence our verdicts. It follows that the most honest and forthright car review you’ll ever read will be written about the author’s own wheels.

Or will it? Because as those very same forum users will also tell you, car journalists are utterly rapacious when writing about our own vehicles. We’ll say or write whatever it takes to pump values, desperately pulling at whatever levers we have within our reach to supplement our own meagre incomes. I couldn’t possibly comment. Instead, you will have to decide for yourselves if what follows is honest and from the heart, or simply intended to inflate Up GTI values for my own personal gain.