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AJAC Test Fest
Most of you viewers must think I have the best job in the world. Well, it's pretty hard to argue when you look at the array of cars they brought out to the Shannonville Motor Sport Park just so that people like me, Graeme and some other people from Motoring can drive. Well, the purpose of this; it's the Automotive Journalist Association Car and Truck of the Year. We've been running this program for as long as Motoring as been on the air. What's makes our program any different from those other car of the year programs is that we actually test the cars.
That doesn't seem like such a radical concept perhaps, but most of these programs you hear about: European car of the year, Japanese car of the year; these things are done by ballot. They send the ballots to the jurors, they check off their favorite cars and they sent the ballots in. Who knows if they've even driven the car? There are no checks. On this program, we bring the cars to this location, every journalist gets into every car or truck, drives them on the track, drives them on the road, gets in and out of the back seat and so on. We find out what the best cars are because we drive them back-to-back, on the same surface on the same day.
Now, there are some magazines that have car of the year, you've seen thousands of ads for those. But if only one magazine is involved who's to say that maybe it's the ad pages that are being evaluated, not the caliber of the car? I'm not saying it happens, but for the Canadian car of the year, we've got writers from Halifax, TV guys from Vancouver, radio guys from Ottawa. We got people from coast to coast, every media possible, and the ballots are all secret. We don't even know who wins until the winners are announced at the Montreal Auto Show for each category and then later on at the Canadian Auto show in Toronto in February. Canadian Car of The Year, Canadian Truck of The Year, when you see these things announced you know that they were chosen by the best process in the world.
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