I’ll be lying if I tell you that I read every manual that comes into my hands, especially the one that explains how I must use my car. And like me, I’m sure there are plenty of people who have barely taken a look at their car’s manual.
Nevertheless, these booklets appear in every glove compartment, waiting for them to be opened when a light on the board comes on. However, you have to keep in mind that car manuals don’t just tell us how to use various functions of our new drive, but also how to maintain and take full advantage of our car.
But, believe it or not, these manuals can be as long as the whole trilogy of the Lord of the Rings! All compressed to fit in a very tiny space inside your car.
British company Scrap Car Comparison took the task to analyze 90 manuals of some of the world’s best-selling vehicles to reveal how long it would take us to read them and how difficult they are to read.
To do so, they used some help of word counters, readability tools to assess which is the longest and more difficult car manual.
Which is the longest car manual?
According to the company, the longest vehicle manual was that of the Audi R8 with 616,063 words spread over 308 pages. Compared with a reading speed of 238 words per minute, it would take you 43 hours and 9 minutes to read the entire user manual!
But you want to know a more shocking fact? The Audi R8 manual is 28,77 words longer than Tolstoy’s War and peace or even the complete J.R.R Tolkien’s trilogy of the Lord of the Rings! Plus, it will take you 2 more hours to finish the manual than reading these enormous novels.
On the opposite side, the shortest manual belongs to the Nissan Leaf with just 21,541 words; while on the supercars category, the shortest belongs to the Porsche 911 Turbo S, which has 45,184 words.
What about difficulty
As we said before, the study divided the manuals into the longest and shortest, but also the easiest and toughest to read.
It concluded that the easiest manual available belongs to the Tesla Model Y, considering it to be suitable for even a 7th grader and is no more difficult to read than Twilight or The Great Gatsby.
“As a result, owners of these vehicles can look forward to quickly finding resolutions to any of their issues, without trying to decode the contents of their manual.”
On the contrary, the most difficult one belongs to the McLaren 756LT, with a score of 44.3 at the Flesch-Kincaid scale which positions it into a college-level difficulty.