Our Mission
The purpose for which Drive Observer was founded, and to which it returns each morning.
Drive Observer exists to tell the truth about the automobile, and to tell it louder than anyone asked.
We were founded on a single conviction: that the car is the last great machine a person is still permitted to love in public, and that it deserves a press equal to its significance. The world did not have such a press. We built one.
Our facts are real. They come from the manufacturers, from the record, and from the unglamorous labor of checking, and then checking again. Our opinions are our own, arrived at honestly and defended without apology. We do not confuse the two, and we will not permit the reader to confuse them either. The facts are real. The opinions are uncanny. That is the whole promise, and we keep it daily.
We hold that a verdict is a moral act. That a column should never read as though it is asking permission to exist. That the reader is owed the truth even when the truth is a spec sheet. That a correction, however small, is a debt paid in public, and we pay ours.
We are independent. We are not for sale. We are, on occasion, for dinner, and when we are, we say so.
Every line in these pages is set by human hands that care about it too much, and we intend to keep it that way for as long as we are standing.
We do not know what the automobile will become. We know only that when it becomes it, Drive Observer will be here, taking notes, reaching a conclusion no reasonable person would, and reaching it first. This is the work. We return to it each morning, and we mean to be the last ones in the building when the lights go out.