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:
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I don’t think these contestants are especially automotively-ignorant; I think I just haven’t realized how niche automotive obsessiveness may actually be! I interact so often with people who give rich, redolent damns about cars that I forget that for most happy, well-adjusted people, cars are just a way to move your body from where you are to where you’d rather be.
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
Watching that guy call the Maverick a Mustang, don’t give Ford any ideas!
I knew Jeopardy had crossed the Rubicon when the answer was “What is burning man?”
That was painful to watch.
I can kind of understand the Tacoma, a lot of people don’t think about Tacoma beyond Washington. But Dodge? Come on, every third card on the road is a charger at this point.
But the Bentley?! Everyone knows what Bentley is, if only as a pop culture icon!
I mean, for the Toyota, your options are Tacoma and Tundra and it’s not Tundra.
I’m sorry but who the fuck doesn’t know what a Tacoma is?
Edit: as an insufferable car nerd, I can even get the rest of them (and was impressed because I didn’t know the Rivian one). But the Tacoma is probably one of the best selling vehicles in America. And has been for a while. They’re everywhere and are on advertisements constantly.
Plenty of people some of who would call us “uncultured” for not knowing Beef-Ovens 3.2th symphony or something like that.
Knowing the car that just did a hit and run seems like a lot more useful skill to me…
But they wouldn’t know the car that just did the hit and run if it was a Tacoma.
I can tell you most people couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the difference between Beethoven and Bach. I’d like to be charitable and say that everyone has their own niche interest, but unfortunately it does seem like there is a large segment of society that just doesn’t give a shit about… anything. At all.
I can’t watch the videos at work, but I remember in the late ’90s or so when a contestant guessed “What is a Grand Caravan” in response to an answer that was clearly (to me, anyway) describing an SUV. The correct answer was Grand Cherokee, so I guess you could see a thought process happening there.
Nerds.
Did he say “Aston Martian”?
To be fair, not everybody can be an expert in everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpWK7kDzsMk
Most of the questions were about trucks and SUVs. Vehicles that absolutely are not on my radar. It’s like asking me what brand of forklift the warehouse down the block uses. Who gives a shit.
Hyster
I won’t use a plumber unless they have a PhD
I think you meant Pb.
Incidentally, I worked in a water research lab in grad school, and since a good chunk of the people studied Pb in drinking water distribution systems we joked they got their PhDs in plumbing. We even had a tab at the local ACE hardware.
Plumbing does get its name from the element since that what we used for it for so long despite knowing it was toxic back to at least Roman times.