A lot of the criticism is valid, I've put a few responses in bold.
Watching the Golf test it seems stable it just has no grip nothing wrong with the car itself there's no bite on turn in at all.
You’ve sort of missed my point a bit i think, I don’t object to testing a cars handling or grip, I just don’t see what purpose this test actually serves, let me try to explain.
The initial post you made was to comment about the grippiness of the tyres the Turanza T005, that was featured in the video with the golf.
Now they could be the best tyres in the world, but the car could handle so badly that the outcome of that test is not fair to the tyres.
Equally you could have the best handling car in the world and but those particular tyres could be terrible. Therefore the tyres make it seem like the car is bad.
There are also two factors with this type of test with the car itself and that is the mechanical parts of the car and how they affect the handling, the “dumb” handling if you like. And there are the more intelligent aspects the stability control system which can greatly affect the handling in this scenario.
In fact with most modern cars its those intelligent features that stop you slamming into the non-existent moose or the sides of the road.
The size of the wheels are also going to have an impact on the handling in this situation. The low spec car with little skinny wheels may never be as good as some top end version of the same car that’s fitted with 19 inch wheels with a much wider tyre.
If you just wanted to test the handling performance of the car then you can throw it round a track and record the results.
If you want to measure the effectiveness of the tyres you fit them to the same car and test them over and over again changing only the tyres.
What does this test actually show? Well if the results are bad it doesn’t tell me if that’s the car or the tyres.
You can make assumptions about a golf v focus and yes the Michellin tyres may be excellent, but then it could also just be the handling of the golf it’s as good as the focus for what ever reason. Or it could be both cars handle brilliantly till you throw it into an unstable state and the stability control kicks in and the stability control of the focus is better.
I could go round and round making hypotheses all day but still not really answer any questions about any one car being any better than any other.
As its called the moose test the idea I suppose is to simulate a moose walking out in front of you, ok, but having had accidents where I have hit dear there are things to consider like “if i swerve am i going to go head to head with another car or am I going to end up off the road” In the accident I had the choice was to hit a dear or a head on with a series two land rover discovery, guess which one I chose?
The car was written off the dear was a bloody mess, at no point did my tyres ability to handle swerving come into play.
So what is this test really for?
Well I can’t quite work out what the website doing these tests is actually for, its either a Spanish version of Car wow or its a Spanish version of compare the market. What ever the goal is seemingly to drive people to the site to get cars or insurance or whatever. So does it really matter what the cars do in the test? Yes, the more dramatic the outcome of the test the more people are likely to watch it. The more high profile the car and the more dramatic the result the more likely it is to be shared and go viral.
I genuinely don’t see any value in these tests, they don’t tell me anything scientific, I certainly couldn’t conclude that one car or one set of tyres is better than any other. Swap the tyres between the golf and the focus and then we can make some conclusions.
Also one final thing is costs.
One set of tyres can cost quite a bit more than another, I dunno what the difference is but bridgestones are not massively expensive. I know that if you start going out of your way to buy the grippiest tyres then the costs can go up massively.
