Doug at it again..Ferrari Speciale A

Why should we care where their income comes from? Unless its from illegal means.

What matters is if you enjoy their video.

I can understand how Shmee's online persona could rub some the wrong way, but I enjoy his enthusiasm for cars. The same for Mr. JWW and Doug. I think Doug's scoring is sometimes wacky, but its his - so I take it with a grain of salt.

Anyway, none of these guys makes videos proclaiming to tell anyone how to make money or what to do with their money. They are making videos about cars. If you don't like it, don't watch it. Does anyone question source of funds for print car reviewers?

 

I don’t think anyone is disputing his videos have some informative content, however they appear to be getting longer, but NOT because more of the content is informative, more because he chooses to pad them out with uninformative diatribes about items such as fog lamps, side repeaters and door lock keyhole positions, of which 99.9% of viewers will have no interest whatsoever.
I watched the Aperta review vainly hoping I might get a reasonably informed insight as to what the car was like to drive. Alas as is frequently the case with these so called “YT reviews” my hopes were dashed ...
If you want fairly banal motoring entertainment, these videos tick that box, but if you want to gain a genuine insight into a car such as the Aperta, let’s not kid ourselves Doug’s YT efforts will tell give you anything other than “It’s yellow, the roof goes up and down and it’s expensive”. For a review that gives some genuine insight, you’d be advised to look elsewhere. Even your own Matt Farrah perhaps ?

 

Doug doesn’t try or pretend to offer what you seek, which can be found elsewhere. Doug provides deeper insight into the oddities of cars, that’s his angle.

 

You cannot get this information by watching some guy with a dash cam talking. They all say the same crap about every car... "the sound is intoxicating", "the brakes can bite a little too much", "the steering is a bit light". It's like a madlib for car names. How many times have people called the latest exotic "insanely fast"? Every new one gets described as the same thing related to the older one. Handles better, sharper this, sharper than, quicker this, smoother that. I bet if I bleeped out all the car brands/names, you couldn't even tell what car it was. It could be an F12 he's talking about or it could be an 812.

It's a 2015 high-end exotic car. Everything about it is perfectly fine and the fine details someone tells you will be highly irrelevant to you when you actually drive it. It's like when people said the CCB bite in the cold and require more modulating. Well, that's only the case for day 1, because you muscles quickly and completely adjust and now they feel just like every other set of brakes. I remember thinking clutch was comically light in a Renault I rented compared to the R8, but after a week it felt identical to the R8. It just felt like a clutch, and when I got back in my R8 I then had to readjust to that.

Every road car will become familiar very quickly, so what do you really stand to gain by hearing some guy give his only personal, physical feelings about how the car drives even though he barely even gets to drive it? The only thing you can get wrong when buying a modern exotic car is the subjectives and the reliability. Objectively, they are all incredible and more than necessary.

What you can get out of a review is useful factual details, like "this USB port is a pain to reach". "the infotainment is poorly designed", "the trunk latch is a pain to close".

Heck, people on this forum constantly tell each other they're wrong about the same cars.

 

Exactly. I've watched several Doug videos and I find him to be fairly consistent. He's always looking through instruction manuals and finding weird things to poke fun at. My criticism would be of his scoring- but its his- its subjective.

 

If you want to know the little details about a car, watch Doug's videos.

If you want driving dynamics, watch Chris Harris or Jethro Bovington. The latter took the Speciale Aperta on a curvy mountain road, turned ESC off, and began drifting around the road like nobody's business. Oh, and it was a proper rainstorm where the camera couldn't even work properly, and he did it all with the top down.

 

Thing about it, is that Salomondrin “buys” a car does a vid or two on it, then stores it in the garage and does goofing around vids while driving his Rolls, and then when X car comes out, he flips one of the cas that was sitting in the garage, usually one of the ones he was “so in love with, and just had to have”. He only did a few track vids—banging gears mini series—-which was taking cars to the track. After that, he doesn’t make vids (that I know of) of taking his “made for the track” exotics to the track. And we have to see what comes out about his Senna burning down by itself.
Then he makes a vid about “why he didn’t decide to buy X car” (Bugatti Divo). Sal is more about marketing his brand and his gang. Merchandise, auctioning off cars, promoting the tuner shop that he goes to, etc.
JWW is a more likeable version of Salomondrin.
Most of these dudes come off as fake, and the YouTube channels regardless of genres is full of hustlers who pass off their fake personas as genuine. So, I guess that’s why Doug has a certain following—-he’s genuinely geeky about cars. Has a certain formula that he doesn’t deviate from, and doesn’t pretend that he is a track god. Just some normal dude who is crazy about cars and their “quirks and features”.

 

I've noticed that Doug can get 'under the skin' for a lot of folks. That's common once a person has such a wide audience. I always liked him and his 'geeky' reviews. But I understand it might not be everybody's cup of tea. I think Jeremy Clarkson has his fair share of haters, and his production is as good as they come.

 

His voice doesn’t help lol.)
But hey he has crazy talent! I tried to do a video on the 458 too but I only got 180 views lol
So if anything I’m in the wrong ()



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Great engine sound!!

 

Thank u hobby of mine


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Like Jean Claude Andruet? Rally driver?

 

Don't care how much money they make or how they make it, my issue is that the overall quality in the vast majority of these channels is incredibly lacking in terms of production (everyone with a GoPro and a fast car now thinks they're a car journalist) and more importantly originality! It's always the same crap, once someone does something lame that somehow gets views, everyone else jumps on the bandwagon:

- Five reasons why I love my car
- Five reasons why I hate my car
- Here's why I'm selling my car
- I took my car to Carmax....
- Taking some hypercar to a fast food drive-thru
- I just bought the cheapest (brand/model) in the country

I wish there's a channel that posts decent content without over the top emphasis on gimmicky garbage purely for maximizing views.

 

Try this guy :
https://m.youtube.com/user/TheGetawayer/videos

Alas he concentrates mainly on Porsche, BMW and Mercedes, but his reviews make Doug’s “reviews” look nonsensical, revenue raising clickbait, and Doug himself a complete baffoon.

Davide Ceroni does some excellent stuff, but the cream of the crop are Henry Catchpole and Jethro Bovington.

Cironi :

https://m.youtube.com/user/davidecironi/videos

Catchpole :

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg9nnTKsVJ18w6dW8yZKnjuqJH3Sny2iw

(check out the videos he did for Evo too)

Bovington :

https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=jethro+bovingdon

 

This may have said before, but Doug’s appeal is to the everyday car enthusiast and also those who share his habit of “quirks and features”. He is not trying to compete with the likes of Jethro Bovington or Henry Catchpole.
Look at his method of doing vids. He is very consistent. Introduction, a little info, then exterior quirks and features, interior quirks and features, the infotainment quirks and features, if the car has backseats he tries to get in them. Then the drive on public streets , then the subjective Doug Score. You want more than that, you go somewhere else. His formula works. To the point where he has a secondary channel to address reviewing older cars or rants.

There is no track testing, no highly polished vids, no burn outs or drifting. Just a tall quirky man who’s a car nerd.