How to mislead the public

The German motoring organization ADAC has just published its annual Emergency Road Service statistics. In a bout of misguided patriotism, the association interpreted the results as a huge success for German cars. Even a superficial glance on the making of the report shows that this is only true by omitting a very important fact.

Until a few years ago, there was mainly one organization in Germany you called for help when your car broke down: The ADAC, short for Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobilklub. For members the service was and is free, and when you’re not a member you just sign up with the helpful mechanic. In those times, the emergency road service statistics actually was significant. Some time ago the big car manufacturers BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi and even Volkswagen started their own road services. That made sense up to a point since the automotive electronification makes it rather difficult to use ‘generic’ tools. An advantage for the automotive companies is that many of their cars don’t show up in the ADAC statistics and they themselves usually don’t publish any figures.

In many parts of the world a Mercedes, a BMW or maybe even an Audi is the symbol for economic success. The Road Service statistics could act as an additional selling point. The fact that the emergency road service statistics doesn’t include services provided by car manufacturers and hardly any ‘foreign’ producers offer those in Germany (with the exception of French ones which also have a very good ranking) could explain why German cars are all of a sudden top of the list.

Very interesting is the ranking for ultrasmall cars. In this class, road services are not included in the buying price and the owners don’t (can’t) spend the money easily. Call it coincidence: The only German car that made it in the top ten (of the ones with least calls for help), Volkswagen’s »Fox«, takes a proud eighth place :-)

Comments

[Gordon Scott]

The chart would be more interesting if it were large enough to read properly.