A Note on Our Ethics

At Drive Observer we care, more deeply than is fashionable, about the ethics of automotive journalism. The reader's trust is the only asset on our balance sheet that cannot be replaced, and we guard it with a seriousness the subject demands.

That is why, when a manufacturer flies our staff to a five-star resort to drive a new model, and covers the airfare, the suites, and the tasting menu, we accept with the rigor the reader deserves, and we drive the car exactly as we would have driven it at home. The setting does not enter the verdict. We are professionals.

It is why we accept the ongoing free use of brand-new vehicles, delivered cleaned and fueled to the door and collected when we are finished, and why we regard this arrangement, which would compromise a lesser publication, as no more than the practical necessity of the work. A critic must drive the cars. The cars must come from somewhere.

It is why, when a brand sends a gift, a case of first-growth Bordeaux, a Swiss chronograph, a bespoke overcoat, the weekend loan of a villa, we record it in the spirit of full transparency at the foot of the article in question, and then think no more of it. Disclosure is not an admission. It is a courtesy we extend to a reader sophisticated enough to understand that a gift changes nothing in the hands of a person of character.

We believe, too, in transparency within our own walls. Each month we relay our advertising relationships to the editorial team in exacting detail: the precise dollar amount every manufacturer spent with us this month, and the sales targets we have set for the month to come. We place these figures before our writers openly, so that they may know them and rise above them. None of it bears on a single word of our coverage, per our strict ethical policy, because we are professional, ethical journalists, and a professional is simply a person who can be handed the number and remain entirely unmoved.

This is the standard. We hold it without exception, and we invite the reader to hold us to it, confident in the knowledge that the things which would corrupt another magazine have, in our case, simply been disclosed.

We do not merely claim this transparency. We publish it. Every gift this newsroom has accepted, and the coverage it did not influence, is recorded permanently and in full in the Gift Ledger, for any reader who wishes to check our arithmetic.