Post by Kasey Kagawa

I have nothing but respect for spy photographers. Putting an image to the rumors that the automotive community hears from the manufacturers is a massively time-consuming job, no matter how you do it. But the overwhelmingly negative reactions from the spy photographer community and the automotive enthusiast community as a whole over the Winding Road Blue Devil hoax can do nothing but harm the reputation of the community as a whole. There are three very good reasons why the Winding Road article is only a minor issue for spy photographers, but is a big dose of something that automotive journalism desperately needs more of: guts.

The most common claim that I’ve read is that the hoax reflects badly on the profession of spy photography, making it seem like they’ll photograph anything that comes down the road with black plastic and electrical tape on it. And you know what? That’s exactly what I think that they should be doing. That’s the point of spy photography, to capture the prototypes and the mules on film so the enthusiasts can see what the automakers are doing. If they ignored every car that they thought looked a little fishy, how many would they miss? And so what if they make a mistake every once in a while? They’re human, and even though they have contacts and fans within the industry, they’re still trying to reveal secrets that the manufacturers are trying to keep under wraps, and that means that they need to make assumptions based on very little information, a process that will generate a few mistakes every now and again. Assuming that every single spy photograph is suspect because one or two occasional mistakes is not only fallacious, it’s stupid. By that reasoning, you should be petrified of ever stepping into a car, based on the fact that a few models each year have to be recalled for engineering or manufacturing defects. Most importantly, it wasn’t just the photographers who were tricked, everyone was. This was a hoax, and a well thought-out one at that. No one spoke up and said that they even thought that the photos of the Winding Road Corvette were fake, so there’s no shame in falling victim to it along with everyone else. If they had seen it and not photographed it without a damn good reason, they wouldn’t be doing their jobs.

As for the rest of the enthusiast community, I understand what you’re going through. We were tricked. Those sneaky bastards at Winding Road fooled us all, and did it with 400 bucks worth of stuff they bought from the arts and crafts store down the street. No one likes to be made the fool, and it’s all too easy to think that they did it out of sheer spite, just to fuck with our heads or even worse, just for unique hits. But if you read the article, it wasn’t about making their name on the Internet. They state their goals in the article: “More significant than seeing our car published in another magazine was the reaction we received from the public at large. People want to believe in it. People want to buy it. Listen to them, Chevrolet. Build the Blue Devil.” The real reason for the hoax was to prove to GM that public demand for the Blue Devil is enormous, and they did so in spectacular fashion, and for that they should be applauded, not scorned.

However you feel about what this hoax says about spy photography or the auto enthusiast community, there is a more important lesson to be learned from all this. American automotive journalism is boring these days. The magazines are bought and paid for by the manufacturers, so they’re not even close to unbiased when it comes to reviews, and they’re too damn slow to be relevant when it comes to news. I have the January issues of Car and Driver and Road & Track in front of me. The best thing in the issue of R&T is The R&T 50, a thinly veiled attempt at cramming even more ads into the already bumf-heavy R&T frame (An orchestral music CD and a crepes recipe? The fact that they actually include the prices for a few of the items doesn’t help their cause, either), while C/D gets by with their 10 Best collection of articles, which is amusing, but nowhere near the quality that C/D has shown in its glorious history. The fact of the matter is that the Internet is where automotive journalism is at in the US, and it needs to start acting like it. We need a few strong online publications driven by great ideas and brilliant writing that are willing to take risks, do outrageous things and piss people off. Instead of another luxury sedan comparison or another discussion over which engine layout is the best, let’s write stuff that people who aren’t car bores are interested in, stuff that shakes things up. Otherwise, we’ll be just another corporate mouthpiece, trying to hide our disgust behind phrases like “interesting styling choices,” “reluctant handling,” and “leisurely acceleration.”