You know, we’ve been around for over a year now, and we haven’t received a single complaint. But luckily for us, we received one just today!
Now normally, this isn’t something anyone wants to publicize. However, I thought our plaintiff, Mr. Jason Parry, deserved an explanation. Observe his well-written e-mail below:
Subject: DONT COPY TOP GEAR
From: Jason Parry
Date: Sun, Nov 14, 2010 12:54 pm
To: contactus@theblogofcars.com
your slogan is a total rip off of top gear please remove it.
Well first off, I’d really advise Mr. Parry to brush up on his grammar. The e-mail client put this straight into the “Spam” bin, and I nearly threw it out.
However, he does make a valid point. Indeed, the “Ambitious but Rubbish” slogan was inspired quite directly by the Top Gear trio, and it’s stuck around ever since September 19, 2009, the day this blog came to be. It was chosen partially because it sounded nice but mostly because I lacked the creativity to come up with something better.
However, it also represents something you should all keep in mind when reading this blog: Despite our best efforts, we are not professionals. Sure, we know quite a lot more about automobiles than The Average Joe, but only one of us (Tom) even has an education in journalism, and even though we have advertisements up on the website, we actually lose a lot more money than we earn running this website. Let me let you in on a bit of a statistic: for every $1 we’ve made so far, we’ve lost roughly $50. For us, this is a hobby. I’m sure we’d all like this blog to one day grow comparable to the likes of Autoblog and Jalopnik, but realistically, we haven’t got the resources to get there. We will almost inevitably reach a “ceiling”, at which point we won’t have enough spare time or money to grow the blog further.
So, the point is, that slogan’s here to stay, whether you like it or not. Feel free to continue complaining Mr. Parry, but it represents who we are: A group of car buffs with some spare time and a sense of humour.
And a fondness for Top Gear, of course.