Measuring the unmeasureable.
A measurement system for context?
This ad that Suzuki have been running comparing the SX4 to a Mini got me thinking a bit more about yesterday’s post on context. Suzuki claim that the SX4 is a better car than the Mini Cooper because it beats it on a certain set of measures. Now I haven’t driven either car, but I am pretty certain that the Mini delivers a much better drive than the Suzuki. It may be beaten on internal space, but there’s almost no likelihood of it being beaten when it comes to performance.
Unfortunately, there’s very little way of being able to prove (or determine) that by simply comparing the numbers. I pulled these stats from Edmunds and Suzuki aren’t lying, they’ve definitely got a number of clear advantages. However, looking more closely at the data, there are some fairly telling ratios that start to paint a different story.
For example, while the Suzuki is over 5″ taller than the Mini, it’s only 1.8″ wider and, more tellingly, has a wheelbase that’s only 1.3″ wider. As a result, the Mini has to be more stable simply due to its lower center of gravity. Similarly, while the Suzuki offers more horsepower and torque, it’s also 199lb heavier than the Mini. While this may not swing the advantage in the Mini’s favour, it definitely reduces the real impact of the Suzuki’s additional power.
So, a different story can be told by looking at the ratios of measurements or by providing more context to those measurements. However, it’s probably still only part of what makes the Mini special. Its specialness also comes from how it was put together, the decisions that were made about engine placement and weight distribution and so on. Having worked with BMW, I’m pretty sure their engineers obsessed endlessly over these small but extremely significant details in a way that Suzuki’s engineers probably didn’t.
This is more evidence of what I was talking about yesterday. The real value is not always in the things themselves but rather it’s in the relationships between things. In the case of the cars, the numbers tell us very little, but the ratios between the numbers reveal more. The fact that each car has 4 wheels, an engine and doors tells us absolutely nothing. It’s how these things are put together that reveals all.
For me, this raises the fairly obvious question of why we’re continuing to measure what’s not important and why we haven’t started to measure what is important? I don’t think it’s because the data don’t exist. As I’ve said before, we’re rapidly entering an era where everything is measureable. I don’t have a great answer other than it feels like creating new measurements would be a difficult thing to do. But isn’t that exactly what would make it worth doing for some people?