Who’s Doug DeMuro?

This article is assuming you know of Doug’s YouTube content, and if you don’t know who he is, check out his website and his YouTube channel. Now that’s out of the way, let’s dive in as we have so much to cover.

What is the goal of this article?

Doug has been reviewing vehicles and has been ranking them since 2017 with a system he calls the DougScore. The DougScore ranks vehicles across 10 categories split across two groups called “Weekend” and “Daily”. Adding up all of the scores of each category across both groups gives us what the car-world knows as the infamous DougScore. Doug logs all of his car reviews and ranking on a Google SpreadSheet that is open to the world to review.

The goal of this article is to first analyze all of Doug’s car reviews, which are over 300 vehicles as of Jan 2020, and uncover patterns and insights that cannot be seen simply by viewing his spreadsheet. Second, with all of the information presented, we will determine if any bias can be concluded. Bias as defined going forward would be if Doug’s own subjective preferences or scoring methodology comes out in his objective DougScore rankings. Even though DougScore has “Doug” in the name, the ranking methodology appears to have a sound and objective approach. Let’s see if this holds true.

Alright, Let’s go. Hold on to your seat, this ̶c̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ will be bumpy!

Quick note

In this article, I will be including screenshots from a spreadsheet I created to analyze Doug’s vehicle review scores. Don’t like to read? Skip directly to the spreadsheet now.

Overview

Before we jump into analysis, let’s first get a summary of the vehicles that Doug has reviewed. This data is automatically calculated from Doug’s spreadsheet and I’ll put in screenshots below with a brief summary of what we are looking at.

Overview of Doug’s car views (as of Jan 2020)

Graph to show Doug’s love of Mercedes-Benz and German cars

Doug has reviewed many years of cars, but many are what we would consider new(ish)

What do we learn from the overview?

Doug has reviewed over 300 vehicles from a wide range of years, but most of his reviews are modern cars. He also reviewed many different vehicles makes, but the most common vehicle make is Mercedes-Benz. Is that because he owns a German AMG Wagon or are Mercedes-Benz more available for reviews? Hmmm. More on that later.

We also learn that his car review videos are about 21 minutes long, but that’s not very interesting, so let’s move on.

ALERT! MATH AHEAD. I repeat MATH AHEAD

Now that we have a general sense of scale and scope of Doug’s car reviews, let’s dig deeper and review some statistics about his reviews. First, let’s look at some simple statistics on Doug’s Weekend, Daily, and DougScore rankings for all of the vehicles he’s reviewed.

What do we learn with the above category data?

First, we can see he has scored vehicles across the entire potential values (1 through 10), except for styling. In all of the 300+ vehicles he’s reviewed, not a single car has deserved a style of 1. Maybe that will change when the Tesla Cybertruck is released. Nothing else is interesting with the minimum and maximum values other than ensuring he’s using all potential values when he ranks vehicles.

Second, let’s talk about mean and mode. Mean, or often called the average, is calculated by adding up all of the scores in a specific category and dividing by the the number of vehicles reviewed. Mode, on the other hand, is the score that appears most often in Doug’s rankings.

Let’s start with analysis on the mean (average). What we see in all of the categories but one, is that all of the means are above the midpoint. Since Doug ranks vehicles on a scale of 1 through 10, 5.5 is the midpoint of the scale. Since most of the mean values are above 5.5, this can be interpreted that Doug generally ranks vehicles further up the scale than down the scale.

Most of the mean values are pretty close to 5.5, so this isn’t a big deal other than to note that Doug appears to be more liberal with his scoring on the higher end of the scale. This is true for all categories except for practicality. Could this mean that Doug really likes practical cars and that he penalizes cars that don’t live up to this standard? Another hmmm. Again, more on that later.

Now, let’s talk about mode as this is where it starts to get quirky (Yes Doug, I chose that word on purpose for you). We can see for most categories that the mode is very close to the mean, which is good because it is telling us Doug ranks vehicles closer to the midpoint on average and frequency. This is true for all categories except for acceleration. The mean for acceleration is 5.2, while the mode is 1.0! This means that Doug is reviewing lots of VERY slow cars. But, what we all know from watching Doug is that he also reviews many fast cars. This dichotomy of many above-average speed cars AND lots of very slow vehicles could explain about why the mode and the mean are so far apart with acceleration.

Do you have any visuals to reinforce the analysis above?

Why yes, I created many graphs that illustrate the same concepts that the table of data above shows.

Chart of the number of times Doug has ranked the style of a vehicle from a scale of 1 through 10

A few things to notice about the styling chart above is that first he has never ranked any style as a “1” and the graph is shifted slightly above the midpoint of 5.5. Other than being shifted higher, the distribution looks good.

Now, let’s look at another graph of the acceleration scores to see the strange number of very slow vehicles Doug has reviewed.

Chart showing the number of times Doug has scored a vehicle’s acceleration on the scale of 1 through 10

We can see in the chart above just how many 1 acceleration scores he has given to vehicles he has reviewed. From reviewing all of the 60+ vehicles he has given an acceleration score of 1, there is still quite a bit of variability. A Ferret Tank and 2020 Jeep Gladiator both have a score of 1! Given the distribution of acceleration scores seen above, it is possible that Doug reviewed slower cars earlier on in his YouTube channel and has access to faster cars now. If we pulled in the date of review, we could probably answer that, but that is probably for another day.

There is one final way to look at the distribution of scoring among all 10 categories. It is called over-indexing or under-indexing, which means when a sub-set of values are over or under-represented among the total population of values. In terms of Doug’s scores, when scores are shifted higher to the right, that would be over-indexing in this specific definition. Let’s see how that plays out with the same category scores that we’ve seen above and viewing their index values.

Doug’s category indexes values

Above are the indexes of each of the category scores, Weekend and Daily totals, and finally the DougScore. The indexes calculated by dividing the mean or mode of one of the categories (what we previously discussed) by the expected midpoint of a scale. For specific categories, the midpoint is 5.5. For Weekend or Daily totals, the midpoint is 27.5 and the midpoint for the DougScore is 55. The cells highlighted in green are over-indexed and the red cells are under-indexed. A 1.0 for an index would be defined as when the mean or mode of the scores fall exactly on the midpoint of a range.

For the mean or average, the categories that are over-indexed are:

Styling

Quality

Value

For the mode or most common score, the categories over-indexed are:

Comfort

Quality

For under-indexing, we only see practicality for the mean and acceleration for the mode. We’ve previously discussed acceleration as Doug reviewing many odd slow vehicles, which deserve a 1. As for practicality being under-indexed, this is likely due to Doug reviewing many super and hypercars, which are often not practical for daily use.

Ok, enough math. Sorry if I went a bit too deep, but if you discover more interesting insights, share it with me on Twitter or leave comments below. Let’s get on to the more “fun” aspects of the DougScore analysis!

The “Best” (and “Worst”) of DougScores

Now that we have covered statistical analysis on Doug’s vehicle scoring methods, let’s look into what cool rankings can be uncovered by aggregating, filtering, and sorting all of Doug’s scores. I won’t cover all of the rankings as people can visit the spreadsheet directly to review themselves with a bag of popcorn (and a stiff drink).

Most of the rankings below won’t need an explanation other than a small caption.

Top 20 makes by Weekend, Daily and DougScore

Top 20 makes by styling, acceleration, and handling

Top 20 makes for features, comfort, and Quality

Best vehicle countries for Weekend, Daily, and DougScore values

The above charts are simply straight up rankings, and you can see more by checking out the spreadsheet at the bottom of the article. Let’s move on to some even more interesting analysis.

Combos and Rivals

Thus far in this analysis, we’ve looked at statistics and trends using expected aggregations like year, make and country. But, what if we took Doug’s 10 categories for ranking and combined them in new ways? For example, are the fast cars with poor handling? What are the good handling slow cars? While I didn’t do exhaustive analysis on every combination of category or categories, the results were still very entertaining. If you have other combos you would like to see, please feel free to contact me and ask.

First, let’s look at a few combinations that would be perceived as “good combos”:

Fast cars that are comfortable

Slower cars with better handling

Second, let’s look at the opposite or what I am calling “poor combos”. While some of these poor combos may be outright undesirable, for some people, those combinations may be just what they like.

Low quality and not a good value

The big fast vehicles that don’t handle as well

In addition to looking at category combos, I added a few additional lists that look at typical “rivals” that exist in the marketplace now. For example, American muscle cars and Japanese sports cars. Here are a few to share and if you have more ideas, please let me know.

OMG MERC! This could be Doug’s favorite list

Fun Japanese weekend cars (I’ve owned 2)

Ok, that should be enough rankings to share in this article as you can view more yourself in the spreadsheet below.

Scoring Trends

One thing I hear in the car community over and over is that while cars are getting better with technology and engineering for daily use, the “driver’s cars” (fun engaging vehicles), are less common today. Let’s review the trends for Weekend, Daily, and DougScores by vehicle decade to see if there is anything to learn.

Weekend scores by decade

What we see here is that Doug’s weekend scores continue to increase until the early 2000s and now have plateaued and are on a decline. While cars have been getting faster and more capable, due to technology, are we losing what we would define as a good “weekend” car? Let’s look at Daily now.

Daily scores by decade

The above graph is likely what everyone expected to see. With the increase in technology over time and the cost of that technology going down, more cars available today are more efficient, have more features, increased quality, and are just better all-around to use on a daily basis. Now, let’s look at the DougScore over time to see if this same trend is true.

DougScore by decade

In the above chart, DougScore has been going up over time, but like Weekend scores, we have hit a plateau. Given the rise of the Daily scores and the decrease in weekend scores, I will assume the DougScore trend will increase as the Daily scores continue on their march to “up and the right”. I did an overlay of the three decades below to illustrate this easier.

Daily, Weekend, and DougScore overlaid by decade

What you can see above when we overlay the scores is that while all scores have been increasing over time, Weekend scores have been higher than Daily up until recently. We can also see that the growth of Weekend appears to be stalled and that Daily continues on a steady increase. If this trend holds up, we should continue to see record-high Daily and DougScores.

Conclusion

We started off this article asking if I thought Doug DeMuro was biased in how he scores the vehicles he reviews. Before we come to a conclusion here, let’s just cover a few of the interesting trends that have popped up.

Most of Doug’s scoring has increased over time, which the increase in the past few years being influenced by the Daily category growth. Doug reviews Mercedes-Benz, or more generally German vehicles, more than any other kind. Doug also owned a few very unique Mercedes-Benz vehicles. With most of Doug’s categories, he scores vehicles on above the midpoint of the scale. Especially on the Daily categories. Doug over-indexes scores for style, quality, and value, but under-indexes for practicality. He also has a habit of giving vehicles that are on the slower side a “1”.

We also know that Doug has very unique vehicle interests, which is seen in his 11 “absolutely certain” cars he desires to own from a recent More Doug DeMuro video. Those vehicles Doug mentions in the video are:

Audi RS2 Avant

BMW E30 M3

Ferrari F40

Ford GT (2005–2006)

Lancia Delta Integrale Evo 2

Land Rover Defender 90 (1999)

Mercedes-Benz C43 AMG Wagon (1998–2001)

Mercedes-Benz CLK63 AMG Black Series

Mercedes-Benz G500 Cabriolet

Porsche 993 Turbo

Porsche Carrera GT

Of the 11 vehicles above, Doug has reviewed 6 of them. If you look at the super and hypercars from the list, I was able to capture the 4 supercars with this simple query of all DougScores.

Styling >= 9

Acceleration >= 7

Handling >= 8

Fun >= 9

Cool >= 7

Practicality <= 3

Value >= 7

What does this mean?

While Doug’s “absolutely certain” favorite vehicles may seem a bit random, most are not. They are good looking, fast, amazing handling, fun, cool, NOT practical, and good valued vehicles. They basically hit all of the parts in the weekend category and of a value that Doug would love to have if he doesn’t already now. Sorry, Doug, an algorithm is able to predict your interests in fast cars. I have the query coded so that if in the future he scores a car that falls into this category, it will show up on the “Fast Doug Models” list.