Testing, testing

For obvious reasons, the concept of a ‘passenger ride’ doesn't light the fires of sweaty-palmed anticipation in most road testers. Car maker A will put you on a predawn flight to Helsinki, whence you'll board an internal connection up to Rovaniemi, followed by an hour or two's transit and plenty of hanging around, only to sit on the less interesting side of some compact crossover prototype, staring at an entirely disguised dash while being driven around a frozen lake for 15 minutes. Then home you trot, too little the wiser.

- By RICHARD LANE

For Car maker A, this is a fabulously effective method of stringing out the coverage. It gets the new product's existence out there long before the project leaders are confident enough to let an outsider with a critical arse have a proper go. We normally play along because, ultimately, on these trips there is still news to be broken: there are insights to be made and engineers to be quizzed. But we'd rather be driving, seeing as we've often travelled far, as has the damned car.

Alas, so fruitful and risk-free is the passenger-ride approach from a PR standpoint that it is not unknown for car makers to tempt us out to drive a prototype, only for that drive to quietly morph into a ride after the travel has been arranged. One German OEM particularly loves this stunt.

But there’s another side to the passenger ride, and it’s among the very sweetest parts of this job, depending on the equation of vehicle, driver and environment. It’s also something I’m sure we're going to see more of, as European marques frantically seek to underscore their heritage as a differentiating factor against Chinese brands.