Great Car Faceoff: Round 2 Begins

The first round of the first annual Great Car Faceoff has ended and before we move on, we have to look back at how the voting went yesterday.

The toughest contest was between the Chevy Corvette and the Mazda MX-5. Who knew the little roadster could take on an American icon? The ‘Vette still won out. Speaking of American icons, the Ford Mustang had a tough time fending off the Porsche Cayman. It seems a German amphibian reptile can tackle an American equine.

Today begins round two of our faceoff, and we return to the passenger car bracket where the spotlight shines on the Cinderella Ford Crown Victoria matching up against the popular and cute Mini Cooper. Now that the voting system has stabilized, we’ll see if the Crown Vic fans can rally the troops and push it past the Mini.

The Great Car Faceoff

Comments

A cayman is a reptile similar to crocodiles, not amphibians like frogs.

Thanks for the pickup Loch.
Fixed.
I need to watch more Discovery channel.

Dave,
Just go wiki, it does the same job, and doesn't consume as much time.

I had to vote for the Police car again,,, last round was too funny.

Just to let everyone know that the contest is rigged, I looked at the Java code they have setup for the contest and it is impossible for the Crown Vic to win. Nice going cars.com, I never thought you would scoop that low. I will make sure to bring this to media attention to bury this site.

Should SS be correct in that the contest is rigged, then THAT removes all credibility from the Cars.com site. It's one thing if the readers and consumers do it, it's quite another when any entry is sabotaged from the outset.

SS, if that IS true, you need to post the proof.... crownvic.net would probably be a good place...

Every car has the same chance of winning, nothing is rigged. The one vote per user restriction is making this round be as fair as possible.

The Crown Victoria has 49% and the Mini Cooper has 51% of 844 votes. That means around 20 votes is the difference between winning and losing right now.

As the Cars.com programmer responsible for the software that processes the votes in this contest, I can assure you all--not to put too fine a point on it--that SecretSquirrel is a liar. Not only is it extremely unlikely he/she has seen any of our Java code at all, the alleged anti-Crown Vic code doesn't exist. We've written our software to ensure that the voting be as fair as possible to everybody.

It's a little odd, to say the least, to hear a Crown Vic fan complain about Cars.com rigging the vote. The efforts of the Crown Vic contingent to game this thing (going so far as to write programs to automate the vote-rigging process) and defeat the one-vote-per-user rule we put in place are really pretty staggering. Don't think we can't see what's going on. If we weren't aggressively policing things at this point, you'd have hundreds of extra, illegitimate Crown Vic votes skewing the totals tonight. Healthy fandom is one thing, but some of you Crown Vic guys just have no shame.

I still think its hilarious that people are tossing around words like "credibility" and "illegitimate" all in regards to something that amounts to a just for fun popularity contest. It's like claiming that Fox has lost credibility because your favorite contestant in American Idol loses. Don't get me wrong, I think it's all hilarious, but I hope for some peoples sake they are just trolling for a good laugh and not seriously claiming they are going to bury a great web site because of a fictional belief that java code can be seen by viewing an html pages source.

I think it's great that the cars.com people finally put an end to the CrownVic'ers trolling and vote-macroing. Let the Mini win fare and square as it should. Just as the Camry should have.

While you few nuts are on here, millions of Camry owners are out enjoying their sedate, problem-free cars while you all are paying for quick-depreciating, fuel-leaking, out-dated, gas-sucking behemoths. Join the 21st Century already.

Camry is a problem free car? Just because the guy on a TV commerical said so, don't make it true. I will make sure to honk when I see a Camry on the side of the road with it's hood up.

Ok, I'll kick off the whining on behalf of the CV people. Crown Vic vs. MINI Cooper got 40% more votes than any other matchup. I have to believe some people were voting multiple times (I've verified that it's possible). If only some people know how to vote more than once then you no longer have a level playing field.

Also, I check out the Crown Vic forum. I don't think too many of those people are capable of writing a macro.

LT
i think the difference in votes was actually new MINI voters just interested in making sure the mini won

Who cares, the drama is over. I am sure Crown Vic fans are used to this by now. Although they proved quite loyal to their cars and it seems they like what they drive a lot. By looking at that forum, it seems the Crown Vic is a very popular car. Personally, I voted for the Crown Vic as well because I prefer a comfy ride which Mini won't offer.

Unfortunately a level playing field isn't possible on the Web when it comes to anonymous voting, but we can do the best we can. At the beginning of the Faceoff voting was wide-open, because it was thought that was the most level possible...every man for himself. But when it became clear that one person can skew the results singlehandedly, it's no longer one camp versus another, it's one person against everyone else.

Sure it's possible to vote more than once, someone posted in another thread that you just need to clear your cookies. But that only gets you so far as people who tried it saw. In fact, at least 38 people tried to vote for the Crown Vic more than once, while only 9 people at least tried to vote for the Mini more than once.

It is nice to see how the Vette vs 350Z seems to have some pretty one side votes.... just look at the amount of votes are in those two compared to the other cars. So much for people playing fair.

If people think that a Nissan is better then a Vette, they are freaking stupid!

Hay SS maybe you are freaking stupid for liking the vette, the Z is much more fun then the vette.
the 350Z is one of the best sports cars out there.

FP,
It is totally fair. Some Nissan 350Z message board out there got the word out about the contest and showed up to vote. That's what we want. They probably skipped the other categories because of the placement of that matchup near the bottom. There isn't a conspiracy here.

Fair?

350Z forums:
"its ok guys...i have the key to victory!...my school has about 60 computers in the library"

"i voted 4 more times, two diff computers and both ie and fox."

"Oh yeah.. must vote from all work computers on my floor tomorrow!"

And it goes on...
http://www.my350z.com/forum/showthread.php?t=259070

Remind me never to trust anything from the sort coming from cars.com this is beyond rediculous.

all those IPs are blocked FP. Like we've said countless times, its very hard to "fix" the competition.

What do you mean the IP's are blocked off? I would look into some better solutions in the future when it comes to making polls. People voting countless times from 50+ computers at work or at school should not be possible. I wouldn't be surprised if after the CV thing you didn't allow the IP to vote more than once. Still doesn't stop people from school/work to do it however.

Looking through the compressed javascript, sure it does a hell of a good job, but I really can't tell what happens to the jsp script it is sent off to, but matching IP ranges or hostnames should be looked into, don't you think?

FP,
Trust me if all those guys actually had gotten their faked votes counted it would've equaled a lot more than what it ended up at. We've gone over this too many times for me to go over it again. There are MULTIPLE safety measures in place, you can't just look at the code and figure it out. Our guys took it as a challenge and we're running a very tight ship on this contest. A few hundred 350Z fans equaled the few hundred extra votes it got compared to everything else. That's it.
if it were 10K more than it would be a different matter.
This is the way its supposed to go.
There's no conspiracy and our guys know what they're doing on the programming side.

Never said there was... you just misread my posts. Never doubted what you guys have in place. I was just asking.

This contest is heavily import biased. Even the staff is wanting imports to win. Just look at all the fuss they made about Crown Vic beating their precious Camry. They even went out of their way to go to a Crown Vic forum and copy/paste the comments that were made and display it on here. They even took it as far as altering the voting so make sure that a domestic manufacturer doesn't win.

Yet here we have a Nissan beating a Corvette and they are aware that the poll was heavily altered by Nissan forum and they do nothing about it.

I see real "professionalism" showing on their part.

This entire contest became void the minute the polls were altered when the voting already began. If you setup a poll to allow multiple votes, live with it and let it go till the end.

You guys should setup the 2008 elections and see how far that would get.

I dont know what the big deal is, this is just a simple poll, just becasue there is a lot of people on it dose not that the results are true. I happen to love the Z, but i also Love the Z06, and same for the Cayman S. This is just a auto enthusiasts poll, no need to be pointing finger acusing fourms of cheating.

Sorry FP I thought you were more like SS there.

You just keep proving my point Dave.

Man, SecretSquirrel is such a sore loser. Like they said, this was just for fun.