There's no such thing as "independent research." Any article like that is always paid for by the company that ends up "leading" in it; that's how these research companies make their money.

I worked for this lovely company once where we paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a consulting company to "research" how we were the dopest, only to have pretty much written the entire document for them. Go figure...

ps. From that TC article: "Ford has already responded to their position in the study, with a Medium post from CTO Raj Nair expressing their satisfaction at being ranked number one. " -- if this doesn't read like a pre-plan PR, I don't know what does.