Andrew Krok Really Liked His Free Hotel
I mean, he REALLY liked it. But what about the car?
The mainstream (lamestream, am I right?) automotive press pulled a moderately impressive sleight-of-hand a decade ago regarding the manner in which autowriters are cajoled, bribed, and influenced to promote new cars in their outlets. For perhaps forty years, there was a gentleman’s agreement among the press not to publicly disclose just how outrageous the free ride was. Canadian autowriter/iconoclast Michael Banovsky and I refused to honor the omerta, which led to a landmark 2011 article by Frank Greve in American Journalism Review that utterly humiliated the industry. (Now that I’m essentially out of the business, I can freely admit that I essentially wrote the article for Frank, giving him all the salient points, all the people, and all the places to look.)
This led to a flurry of imitation pieces from Jalopnik and others, the best of which was by Neal Pollack. It took aim at the ridiculous travel arrangements made by Mercedes-Benz for everyday newspaper writers. By the middle of 2012, however, the copycats had finished typing and the free-ride crowd had a ready-made response for any criticism: “YEAH EVERYBODY KNOWS ABOUT IT, IT’S OLD NEWS, SHUT UP AND DON’T BE LAME ABOUT IT.” Nothing had changed, mind you — but we were all supposed to let the topic die because it had been briefly discussed. This, from an industry that never tires of printing the same “NEW CAMARO ASKS THE MUSTANG TO STEP OUTSIDE!” article every two years.
Alas, I could never quite get myself to stop beating that particular drum, because I think every potential new-car customer in the world should know just how crooked, corrupt, and pathetic the whole carousel is, was, has always been, and likely always will be. And it got even worse. For pretty much my entire time at Road&Track, and afterwards, they really didn’t have enough budget to do a piece unless the automakers kicked in to help. Every once in a great while I’d manage to pry out ten grand to do a story about time-trialing Protons in Malaysia or something like that, but in general the active fiscal cooperation of the automakers was required and every story had to involve a relevant new car for which there was promotional budget.
That’s why I took a gig with a certain insurance company; Larry Webster promised me a world in which insurance premiums paid our whole tab, there was no need whatsoever to promote new cars, I wouldn’t have to ask car companies for money, and I could do anything I wanted without having to kiss automaker ass.
I’m still out there looking for the Holy Grail of Being Able To Write About New Cars Without Automaker Influence… but it’s unlikely to ever happen. Even Consumer Reports sends people to the new-car junkets nowadays. Because if you don’t, you’re in the uncomfortable position of printing last month’s newspaper this morning.
It’s unpleasant and uncomfortable to realize that pretty much every article you’ve ever enjoyed in a car magazine, from the DeD, Jr. “Turn your hymnals to 2002” puff piece to the latest idiocy from Elana Scherr or Alanis King, was constructed with the active assistance and approval of the manufacturer being covered. Sorry about that. God knows I did my best to sneak the truth into every review I ever wrote — but even my mild criticisms were enough to get me essentially blacklisted from the business.
Well, there was also the fact that, like Fredo Corleone, I was banging the cocktail waitresses two at a time. (That’s a joke. I had a couple of threesomes at press events, but I brought the ladies involved with me — and I had a few hookups with female autowriters/PR people at the events, always just one at a time. In my defense, I must say that I’m a good man / with a good heart / had a tough time / got a rough start.) More than once, I heard that I failed to respect the events, or the people involved. I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to do. When Toyota PR sent me an email complaining that I was “too busy drinking with [my] two friends” to take the December 2011 Las Vegas press event for the Lexus GS450 seriously, I archly pointed out that I won the timed autocross event, by whole seconds, and had my article ready to go at precisely the embargo deadline. “Not the point,” was the response.
You see, there’s an implicit bargain in the autowriter world. You get to live the life of a multi-millionaire for three days at a time — but you also have to do everything you’re told. Most critically, you must adhere to the perks structure handed out by the PR people, because that’s how everybody knows who’s important and who isn’t. The problem with me having two girls at the Scion iQ party, I mean, reveal, at the Omphoy in Palm Beach was that nobody else got to have two girls, including all the people who were more important than I was. They all had to sit there on the patio sipping their free drinks and talking about other press trips while they watched me play tag in the ocean with a 19-year-old and a 29-year-old on the beach, wearing a Zegna Su Misura sportcoat with holes in the elbows. (A complaint lifted more or less straight from the email, minus the sartorial detail.) That’s not how it’s supposed to work. The PR people are supposed to determine how much fun you have, how nice your hotel room is, what you do with your time.
Oh well. Let’s get to the crock, er, Krok.
There’s nothing special, or especially wrong, with Andrew. He was stamped out of a common autowriter mold: no discernible literary talent, no authorial voice besides “rimming the automakers on CNET” and “being faux-edgy about Elon Musk on Twitter”, can’t drive for shit, has never competed at anything, doesn’t suffer from an excess of any particular automotive enthusiasm except the usual inEVitability and hating supercar owners. Apparently he owns a VW Jetta wagon, shared with his wife.
Last week, Honda gave him six laps in the new Civic Type R, over the course of two. That’s about what, nine minutes? Listen, I can tell you a little bit about a car in six laps — if they are on the fly, on a track I know well, and in a car where I already understand everything from the competitive set to the approximate characteristics of the fitted tires. That’s not how things are done nowadays. You get an “out lap”, a “hot lap”, and a “cool-down lap”, usually with a pace car. Most people spend the whole time either forgetting which way the track goes or trying desperately to stay in sight of a pace car running at NASA HPDE 1 pace.
Nine confusing minutes in a confusing situation… but what was the rest of the trip like? A friend sent me Andrew’s Instagram stories about his accommodations. Let’s take a look.
Andrew was impressed with his room. I mean really impressed. And who wouldn’t be, particularly if you’re just scraping by as an entry-level editor for CNET? I have no information as to what this place costs, but it looks pretty similar to other resort-style hotels for which I do know the price, because I’ve personally paid it, so I’ll guess it was a thousand bucks a night or thereabouts. He had it for two nights, maybe three.
You get more than just the room, of course. You get a free business-class round-trip flight, five-star meals, and all the alcohol you can drink, gratis, with just one stipulation: you have to hang out with the PR people and your fellow autowriters. The mandatory socializing with completely worthless and entitled people is the worst part of the events, honestly. In September of 2020, I skipped the dinner at the Rolls-Royce Ghost reveal in Austin to go trail riding on a borrowed BMX bike, snapped my fibula at the Sixth Street Trails, and still enjoyed myself more than I would have had I attended the dinner.
(For the record, I did the whole press drive the next day, plus an off-site dinner with a friend that night, with a broken fib, before flying home and having my usual ortho practice put a couple pins in it. The fibula doesn’t really support weight, so it wasn’t that bad to do. And the fallout from the whole broken-leg thing turned out to be a very happy accident for two other friends of mine — but that’s a story for another time.)
Happily for Andrew, he didn’t break any bones during this trip, but he did scuff his knees a bit:
the Civic Type R beats [the Elantra and the Corolla] in terms of how the car feels and how the Type R makes me feel when I'm driving it. It wants everything I'm willing to give it, and in return, it provides one of the most sublime behind-the-wheel experiences a person can find for less than six figures. It's still the king of the hill in my book.
SLURP SLURP, Andrew. There’s some outright hilarity earlier in the review:
I only have a few laps to suss out the CTR's on-track demeanor, but it feels damn near unflappable, even without the dealer-option Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires. Halfway through a turn, it's easy to tell when I'm reaching the limits of adhesion. As the turn ends, I can lean onto the throttle a little early and let the differential sort out traction while the car hustles its way to the next corner. The steering response is quicker than the old model, making the complicated esses in the back part of the track easier to link together. For tighter radii, a smidge of trail braking brings the front end right where I want it.
None of that shit happened, you fuckin’ moron. Quit making stuff up. “The steering response is quicker than the old model,” how the actual fuck would you know, are you the kind of elite race driver who remembers the rate of response from cars you drove years ago, or even ten minutes ago? You’re embarrassing yourself, Krok.
Ah, but let’s not be too tough on our soy-boy fantasist. He wants to keep going on these trips. Who can blame him? He wants to keep his job, too, and a nasty email from PR is more than enough to cost him a job in the current autowriting game. He’ll write, and do, what he’s told. Know how I know? Let’s compare what he said on Twitter, before he went on a $6,000 vacation at Honda’s expense:
To his bought-and-paid-for review, not to mention what he put on Instagram after he enjoyed his hotel room:
Well, it’s fairly common to people to call someone “daddy” after a night in a thousand-dollar hotel. Sure, it’s normally young “sugar babies” saying it to disgusting, grizzled old shoggoths like your humble author here at Avoidable Contact Forever as we forcibly remove their thongs and they struggle to contain their nausea at the rich scent of “Hoppe’s Number Nine” wafting from our freshly revealed undercarriage, but who am I to judge Andrew Krok for saying it to a Honda on a hot rainy California night, where the alcohol flows and the inhibitions disappear?
After all, in this case Honda is the sugar daddy, and Krok is the sugar baby. There’s just one difference in the arrangement: with this kind of “journalism”, it’s the consumer who is getting fucked. Always, every time. Just remember that. It’s not old news.
you're a sad, sad man.
Exactly why I started the truth about cars - I was fed up with the BS masquerading as legit crit. And why I quit writing for them when I sold it (my first review was pulled at the behest of Ford PR, willing acquiesced by the editor what’s his name).
The only truth about cars you’ll find these days is in the forums. And here of course. And let me say for the record that I’m proud that Jack wrote for us and embarrassed that I launched Lieberman).