So, this brand new Everest gets – 7.7/10 (incl. Ride 7.4 / Performance 7.8)
Isuzu MU-X – 8.1/10 (Ride 8.1 / Performance 8.1) – So… the current MU-X rides better / performs better? Not what they’re saying in the Everest review, nor does anyone else about the Isuzu compared to Everest (even old one), yet DRIVE’s scoring does.
On top of this, here’s what they said they didn’t like about the MU-X –
“-Engine feels like it could use more grunt
-Price has climbed and isn’t as affordable as it once was
-Engine refinement not as good as best in class”
Yet it’s still easily outscoring the engines of the Everest? Even the biturbo 2.0/10sp kicks anything the Isuzu has. Yet they then scored it 8.1 for performance??? Poor…
In Feb this year they gave the OLD Everest Sport – 8.2/10 lol! So… the new model, though infinitely improved (as DRIVE tells us in the review here) is .5 less the vehicle the old one is? If someone was to pull up both reviews to compare, that’s what they’ll see, right?
DRIVE / Sam Purcell, explain please. Or you can just tell that us you put any ol’ numbers down, you clearly see your own scoring system as insignificant, should your readers too?
Hi all – yes, you will have noticed that from 1-Sept our ratings have commenced a recalibration of sorts.
For background, as new generation cars are largely an improvement on the last, we found ourselves falling into the trap of scoring a new launch higher than the old car, just because it was new and contextually better. What this did was compare a new vehicle to an old vehicle and saw pretty much everything skew to 8+ in terms of scoring. And when everything is an 8.5 then the ratings lose their value.
So, we have started to realign our scoring, where 7 is the mark given to how something ‘should’ perform in any one area in both the context of a new 2022 car, but also in the context of the car’s peers.
This means a car that scores in the high 7’s, as the Everest does, is above what is considered ‘good’ for this segment. While this means that cross-competitor scoring will be out of whack for a while, as we re-drive MY23 variants we’ll re-baseline their scoring to where they sit in the peer set.
There are some other changes coming too, some as simple as referring to SAFETY as SAFETY TECHNOLOGY as its a far more honest reference to the elements we can assess, but with some requiring backend tweaks, we’re still a few weeks away from rolling this out.
| Pricing | 2023 Ford Everest |
| Ambiente 4×2 2.0L | $52,990 (up $2900) |
| Ambiente 4×4 2.0L | $57,990 (up $2900) |
| Trend 4×2 2.0L | $60,290 (up $3200) |
| Trend 4×4 2.0L | $65,290 (up $2900) |
| Sport 4×4 3.0L | $69,090 |
| Platinum 4×4 3.0L | $77,690 |
When we do, we’ll publish a detailed explainer.
So in the interim – know that a score of 7 means a car is good for what you should expect in 2022. An 8 makes it very very good, where anything starting with a 9 (if it ever happens) is largely unbeatable!
