Boy, People On Jeopardy Don’t Know Squat About Cars

I’ll be honest: my world, this car-saturated world I exist in, is something of a bubble. Even the people around me that I know don’t really care about cars do sort of care about cars a bit, or at least seem to know a decent bit about cars, perhaps via osmosis or my miserable habit of talking about the damn things all the time. Whatever is going on, I think I may have misjudged the general level of automotive knowledge of normies. I say this mostly because of a shocking wake-up call I got in the form of a clip from the popular televisor-based quiz show Jeopardy that has been making the rounds on the social mediums.

The clip is simple enough; it’s just a small bit of the show showing the three contestants attempting to answer the questions from the Cars & Trucks category. Some of the questions involve a video component; there’s the text of the question, and then an accompanying video, and I think it’s these that baffle me the most, because they all essentially just show the answer, right there. But that doesn’t seem to help.

Here, watch for yourself:

If you’d like to see a real-time reaction of mine to this puzzling clip, here you go:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by The Autopian (@theautopian)

None of these questions even seemed particularly challenging; I suppose the Rivian one was the only one I didn’t immediately know, but even that one wasn’t hard to figure out. It has “riv” as in “river” right there in the name, after all.

Looking around for previous Jeopardy car questions, I found that not all of them have been as seemingly easy as this batch making the rounds now. For example, this one about the Corvette badge demands a bit of attention to detail:

Here’s some other samples of Jeopardy car questions –35 minutes worth, ranging from the legendary Trebek-era to whomever that current-day host is. Some of these questions are trickier, some are just as easy, but generally the contestants seemed to do fairly well. Maybe the sample floating around on social media is a bad example – most of these people did pretty well, I think? And some were genuinely tricky, like the ones where fictional characters are combined with cars. For example, while I know a decent amount about the MGB, I did not know Robert B. Parker wrote a series of books about a detective named Spencer who drove a maroon one.

So what’s my overall point here?  Honestly, I’m not sure anymore. Not everyone in the world is a car geek? And, after seeing the larger clip of car questions, I’m thinking that maybe the baseline of car knowledge isn’t so bad? That recent clip aside, of course. I mean, nobody got the Stutz question, but that’s a pretty deep cut.

Here, enjoy Weird Al’s Jeopardy-focused song as a way of apologizing to all the normies out there:

https://youtu.be/BvUZijEuNDQ