Independent used-car scores · No sponsorships
We buy used performance cars the way most people actually buy them: on a budget, with one car to live with afterwards. The Board is the research we wanted and could not find — every car put through the same seven questions, with the money worked out the same way each time, so the numbers can be compared instead of just admired.
Most car reviews answer “is this good?” That is a question about the machine. The question we could never get answered was “should I buy this one, with this money, to actually own” — and that is a question about the whole picture: what you pay, what it costs every month, what breaks and what the bill looks like, and whether you can live with it on a Tuesday.
So the Board ranks the best buy rather than the best car. Three of the seven categories are about driving and four are about ownership, and a car has to be good at both to finish high. When a modest car beats a fast one here, that is the system working rather than a claim that it is the better machine.
There are 22 cars on the Board today, each scored out of 70 across the same seven categories: Deal, Drive, Upkeep, Risk, Daily, Limit, Mods. The newest scoring run was 18 August 2026.
The full method, including every assumption behind every dollar figure, is on How We Score.
This is the part we care most about. Research runs out, and the honest thing to do when it does is say so on the page rather than borrow a number from somewhere it does not belong.
One worked example: we publish no 0 to 60 time for the WRX. The only figure we found was a European-market estimate on a site our own source audit lists as unverifiable, and laundering a number we cannot open would make the whole Board worth less. So it reads “Not captured” until somebody runs an instrumented test.
We also do not rank cars against each other in prose. You will not read that something is the cheapest, the fastest or the only car that does anything — a claim like that is true until the next car lands, and then it is quietly wrong on eight pages nobody revisits. Instead we state the figure and name the rival: “$2,430 more than the Fiesta ST” cannot go stale. A check refuses the commit if one slips in.
The YouTube channel and this site are the same work in two forms. Each video is a buy-or-skip verdict on one car; the page is the same research written down, with the figures, the sources and the reasoning that do not fit into a few minutes of video. The channel started in April 2023 and publishes about one video a week.
Everything is on the Torque Brothers channel. Same people, same scores, same assumptions.
