The average car manual is longer than The Da Vinci Code

Thursday, 10 March 2022

The Audi R8 has a manual that would take you nearly two full days to read cover-to-cover.

A new study, which apparently involved someone actually reading and counting the words of nearly 100 different car manuals, has found that the average handbook requires longer reading times than the likes of the Da Vinci Code.

The analysis was done by Scrap Car Comparison, which looked at 90 manuals to calculate the average to reveal the word count and readability of each document, as well as calculating how long it would take to read each one, based on an average reading time of 238 words per minute.

Audi is generally a bit of a shocker when it comes to long manuals...

Audi likes to ramble on in its manuals, with the R8 notching 616,064 words and the e-tron SUV coming in at 603,649 words. At the 238 words per minute rate, it would take someone just over 43 hours and 42 hours to read those manuals, respectively.

Audi actually featured four times in the top 20 longest manuals, with the R8, e-tron, A3 and Q2 each having above-average reading times of over 10 hours. On average, a car manual stands at 109,106 words, taking about 10 hours to get through.

* The world's most popular sports cars according to Google

The Nissan Leaf has a nice short manual, taking just an hour and a half to get through.

* Is your car worth a hashtag?

When compared to popular fictional texts, the Audi R8 manual is over 28,000 words and 2 hours of reading longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and requires just under three hours more reading time the entire Lord of the Rings book series.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, two-wheeled machines had smaller manuals. The electric Vmoto Super Soco CPX scooter has a manual with just 2834, taking just 11 minutes to get through.

The Honda NSC 110 Vision and Honda VB125F motorcycles follow to make up the top three vehicles with the most succinct manuals, taking around an hour each to read.

Honda motorcycles rank four times in the top ten, each with manuals of under 23,500 words - taking less than two hours to read. Only three of the top ten vehicles were cars, with the Range Rover Evoque, Nissan Leaf and VW Polo all having particularly breezy manuals to read through.

In addition to length, the study looked at how hard to read the manuals were, using the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease Score. The most complicated manual was the McLaren 765LT, followed by the Vauxhall Crossland X, BMW 2 Series, Ferrari 812 Superfast and Vauxhall Grandland X. All needed a university-level reading age to comprehend, according to the research.

At the other end of the spectrum was the Tesla Model Y, which has a manual that a 12-year-old can read and understand. Two Toyota models (Tacoma and Tundra), the Chevrolet Bolt EV, and the Fiat 500 ranked in the top five.

“Though most car manuals do not have the same appeal of a good beach read, it’s been fascinating to reveal from our research just how long these manuals take to read from cover to cover and while some seem to get it right in terms of reading length and accessibility, other manufactures may need to think about whether they’re making their manuals overly complex,” said Dan Gick, Managing Director at Scrap Car Comparison.

Thankfully, every manual we’ve had to look through has had an index so you don’t need to actually read the whole thing.