Straight-piped: Is it still about the car?

Tuhin Guha Published: December 29, 2025, 12:53 PM IST

The Tata Sierra was easily the biggest launch of the past year, and the quite rare event of a car being actually quite new. Now factor in the master stroke that Tata Motors has played of cashing into 90s nostalgia, and you have a car that blew up the internet.

As is part of the job of a journalist these days, you need to be riding this wave of interest or risk being forgotten. Or even worse, becoming irrelevant. So for the past couple of months, I've found new ways to talk about the Sierra over and over again. In 30s reels, on video and in the written word.

As I have been doing this, and gorging on what my peers have been doing, I can't help but think that we have come to a kind of content glut. To start with, there now seems to be an infinite supply of content on a subject on social media, and since you are desperate to not miss out as a creator, your priorities shift. It is about being the first out of the gates with your content, or ideating a smart hook to stand out from the others who have beaten you on time.

The only real differentiator is now who you see on your feed first and who connects with you the most. Since this is quite difficult to do, sensationalism and false narratives have crept in. Everyone is so busy trying to not miss out on views and on feeding the algorithm that the car itself seems to have taken a back seat. Yes, the car is the subject, but not given as much time or attention it deserves for a fair picture.

Ironically, it's the carmakers who seem to be coming out on top in this current situation. They can now control the narrative and information you see to quite a high degree of precision. With the homogeneity I spoke of earlier, as a small, independent creator hungry for opportunities and success, it's also in your best interest to not rock the boat.

This needs to change. We should be spending a lot more time than we do with the cars we talk about. A three to four hour window, that is the current norm for media drive junkets, will only give you a fleeting idea of a car. That time should easily be doubled, so that we can put in the 200 km you need to get to the nuances of a car, before you go about creating any kind of content around it.

Information too needs to be fully and readily available, a drip feed is good for marketing, not for your impression of what the car actually is like. Another help would be a blanketed embargo on content during these drive events, so that you can go back home, let your thoughts form and then add nuance and perspective to whatever you put out.

We've seen this cyclic theme of content a few times in the last decade, through websites, long-form videos and now short content. Viewers eventually tire of the glut and will look elsewhere. We are already seeing glimpses of this, where more meaningful and mature perspectives are being found and attached more value. Porsche's new animated ad for the holidays is the most recent example of this.

So as someone who is genuinely interested in the clearest picture of a car, and not looking at a flood of dopamine every time you look at a screen with the car you are thinking of spending your hard earned money on, what can you do starting now? Start asking the right questions, do your research and be very clear in what you choose to give your time to online.