I’ve been charged a few times with being biased against domestic cars simply based on the cars depicted in the header: an Acura TL, a Kia Sportage, and a Honda Odyssey. I suppose an explanation of how these cars were selected is long overdue.
I created the original site design. No one cared for it. My wife hated it. So I hired a freelancer to create a better look for the site. Robert Staddon’s a very talented designer, but he knows next to nothing about cars. Usually he asked for my input. But in this case he did not. Instead, he noted two things:
- These three vehicles were at or near the top in the list of the most popular price comparisons at the time
- Only Honda/Acura and Hyundai/Kia granted unlimited rights to reuse their stock photos, and it was not clear whether the use of others’ photos in the header (rather than within editorial content) might violate restrictions against non-journalistic use
When he sent me the proposed header, I instantly realized that some people would notice and take issue with the all-Asian array of vehicles. But Robert had already put so much work into making them look pretty I didn’t have the heart to make him redo the image. Also, I didn’t care to deal with a potentially troublesome process of securing rights to other photos.
So, there you have it. The use of these three vehicles in the header is not in any way an endorsement of them or an indication of any bias on my part, or even on my designer’s part.