Honest John is No More

Car_54

"After 25 years of helping people choose, buy, own and run their cars, HonestJohn.co.uk is now part of drive.co.uk."

drive.co.uk is owned by Volkswagen Financial Services, so perhaps not the first place to look for independent advice.

westv

NotquitesoHonestJohn then?

TooManyPoints

I believe it bit the dust some months ago.

Car_54

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82099517#Comment_82099517

Possibly. But it/they/them only sent out an email today.

MyRealNameToo

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6679477/honest-john-is-no-more

And this site is owned by MoneySupermarket so would you say the same?

Ectophile

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82100158#Comment_82100158

It seems that if you follow the link to honestjohn.co.uk, it now redirects to drive.co.uk. So Honest John no longer exists. Not like this web site then, where there's a change of owner, but the site is still pretty much the same.

WellKnownSid

I used to be a mod many moons ago and knew some of the original team. Honest John himself departed the business I think almost ten years ago and aside from sacking the team that remained I don’t believe the new owners could ever quite figure out what to do with it.

As an exercise in buying traffic it feels a bit one-off with zero lasting impact for Drive but then again custom site maintenance isn’t for free so I guess it depends what their CAC spend is.

lordmountararat

The Honest John column in the Saturday Daily Telegraph ceased some years ago. It contained useful advice and it was a shame it went. It was replaced by a column by Alex Robbins, which is OK, but not nearly as comprehensive.

HonestJohn

I remember when the original Honest John used to appear on news programs sometimes. The website image was a caricature of him. The original site didn't make money and was bought out. Honest John moved to Thailand, I think.

Are there any similar websites now?

saver2000

So a car company that owns at least a dozen other car brands has bought an independent consumer information website thats been around for 25 years and where most of the useful content (realmpg, reviews, mot testing results) is crowd sourced.

That seems like a massive editorial independence issue especially when the the new site has stuff like:

“we only list vehicles from Volkswagen Group aligned retailers"

surreyman_2

What a shame. It was good while it lasted but, as they say, all good things come to an end. I don't think I'll be using Drive for independent car info. Does anyone know of any other publication or website that has the same breadth and depth of impartial, unbiased automotive data and journalism? I can't think of one. Or should we now head to You Tube for that sort of content?