I don’t want to be the type of individual who appears on some forum scolding a person because they misstated some bit of car knowledge. Turns out the Carrera Whatever GTS actually wasn’t available with the wing from the GT Whocares Weissach Edition? Big deal, you goofed.
However, I will say that, as an Autopian, I do hear non-car-person normies recite – confidently – some really strange misinformation about cars.
I’ve personally had at least two people tell me that they were considering a GMC product because “it’s professional grade” and “they know trucks.” I tell them that it’s a marketing play and these supposedly “heavy-duty” vehicles are built on the same assembly lines as Chevies and, as such, offer absolutely no benefits over bowtie-branded SUVs. Naturally, they usually go ahead and buy an Acadia instead of a used Highlander, and you know how that ends up.
This is that same kind of “thinking” that gets people to dismiss our S.W. Gossin’s Sebring coupe as “nineties Chrysler junk.” Yeah, it was built on the same assembly line as the Japanese Mitsubishi Eclipse, so it’s as much of a Mopar as one of those Mercedes Crossfires. Wow, I forgot that these were really nice-looking cars:
Has anyone ever talked to you about Austin-Martins? I have, and such a misguidedly convoluted name had me envisioning Bugeye Sprites with machine guns behind the headlights.
Some of these people are the same ones who let a fuel-injected car “warm up” so that it doesn’t stall. That’s not as bad as the person who was irate when the mechanic said that their diesel car needed new “glow worms.” They weren’t going to buy that crap!
You must have heard some real eye-rollers yourself. Let’s hear a few!
Top graphic image: Bring A Trailer; Empty Shell LLC
Premium gasoline is “better” for your car than regular.
I had an ex that liked to “treat” her car to premium every now and then (her car took 87) and CATEGORICALLY REFUSED to believe that she was wasting money in doing so.
She also put this same car in low gear to force the engine to rev up and get warmed up quicker when it was cold outside.
My friend’s ex used to only drive her jelly bean Taurus in 1st gear. We were both in a state of disbelief.
My friend had a Taurus like that with an odd transmission problem. To set off, you had to put it in “1” and then as you accelerated, drop it back down into drive. Otherwise it would stall.
Unfortunately it wasn’t a mechanical issue, it was a driver issue. Although it may have made some mechanical issues in the process…
I remember when I was a kid, my dad’s secretary was complaining that the gas station near her house was out of 87, so she had to drive out of her way to fill up in the morning, but her reasoning was that her car was a 1987 model, so of course it took 87 gas, and she said she always wondered what people who owned other years used, because gas stations usually only had 1989 and 1993 aside from that.
“I wish these EVs all didn’t have different plugs.”
I heard this question at work even more everyone started going to NACS, and had to explain it was basically two plug designs plus a handful of diehard companies using ChaDeMo.
But two plug designs plus ChaDeMo does constitute three different plugs.
“The original Cadillac Seville was a badge-engineered Chevy Nova.”
That statement shows a profound lack of understanding the differences between the two cars (as well as the meaning of “badge engineering”).
People get the concept of badge engineering confused all the damn time. No, the Jaguar S-Type was not a “badge engineered Lincoln LS”, if you insist that it was, then its up to you to demonstrate exactly which body panels interchange between the two, I’ll wait
I have a Canadian-spec 1972 Austin Mini 1000, restored and renewed in 2003. I used to tell people who asked that it was an Austin Mini. After the third, “Oh, like Austin Martin?” I decided to tell people it’s a Mini Cooper. Less accurate but easier to understand, as it turns out.
That they absolutely need AWD because they live on a hill and it occasionally snows.
Along with, Subaru is the best most reliable brand because Consumer Reports says it’s a Top Pick®.
On the flip side the old-timers that were “just fine” driving their RWD boats to work in Western NY snow storms in the 70s.
“We all lived” they proclaim before explaining the most miserable experience involving sand bags, lots of shovels, and 40 minute drives to go 5 miles.
Survivorship bias for sure. They also forget there were also like 1/10th as many cars on the road.
Our nearby city has a small mountain on the main East-West thoroughfare. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s any time the road had much snow or ice there would be an army of tow trucks to pull people up the mountain, for a fee of course. Once front wheel drive and AWD became common you never saw the tow truck army any more.
Pueblo Colorado, which I’m guessing gets significantly less snow than NY, most I ever saw was maybe 8″ in 4 winters there.
Several people – “This Ford will be a quality, reliable vehicle for me and my family”
Narrator: It was in fact, not a good vehicle, every time.
Especially if it had the PowerShift transmission, 3.8L ‘headgasket failure’ V6, the 4.6/5.4L 3-valve V8 engine, 6L/6.4L powerstroke V8 or 1L Ecoboost ‘wet timing belt’ engine
Even my friend with an 00’s Ranger with the “incredible” 4.0 SOHC V6 ended up being a massive POS. Ford cheaped out on the engine design and used a single casting for the cylinder head, flipped one 180 degrees, and used a jack shaft through the block to run the timing chain.
Because of this, when the plastic timing chain guides inevitably fail, replacing the timing chains is an engine out job, and a messy 4-part chain. All because Ford was too cheap to have a different cylinder head casting for each side. This is the sort of inexcusable trash that Ford does that makes me swear off every model they’ve ever built.
Oh yeah… I forgot about the engineering kludge that was the 4L SOHC.
And the annoying thing was, if they wanted a V6 with more power than the old 4L OHV V6, they already had the 3L Duratech V6 that they could have stroked to at least 3.5L and had an engine that was more reliable and made more power than the 4L SOHC did.
Probably the silliest thing I ever heard was a kid in college tell me I should have bought a Ford instead of my Chevy, because my 2500HD was only heavy-duty, while the Fords are super-duty. He was dead serious.
That’s Brawndo levels of hilarious.
That’s some “Super Intelligence” / SI level of intelligence right there.
I think the one that really annoys me—and I hear it from enthusiasts who ought to know better as much as laypeople—is the idea that automakers are deliberately engineering components in cars to break at specific times, in hopes you’ll buy another.
As anyone in the engineering disciplines could tell you, it is exceedingly difficult to get something in an environment as complex as a car to fail at the right moment. If they were building components to break post-warranty, they’d be just as likely to get it wrong and then have stuff breaking in-warranty. What *really* happens is that they engineer a component to last *at least* to a specific lifespan, which might be lower than you’d like. And sometimes, they get that wrong, too….and the part breaks early in the real world. But that’s very different than “making it break on purpose.”
Automakers are also beholden to their suppliers. They don’t build all or even most of what goes into their cars. They have methods to do QC checks after the fact and even to pursue monetary damages if they receive—say—ABS valve blocks with improper metallurgy that corrode over time. But they can’t always know ahead of time when a supplier (or a supplier’s supplier) has sent them substandard parts that fail early or that don’t work as intended.
I can agree that “automakers deliberately design their cars to break after the warranty is up” is definitely not true, everything fails on a bell curve. If a part was designed to fail early a bunch of parts would break even earlier than that causing warranty repairs.
However we can’t ignore there are cost cutting measures like “lifetime” transmission fluid that are there to save the automaker money but end up causing the premature replacement of the car. I would not blame someone who sees that and thinks they design cars to fail early because in a way they are, just not for that reason.
The only way to really know if a part will last for 10 years is to use a bunch of parts for 10 years, but for some reason the project launch schedules don’t allow for this.
Dave Larkin wrote an article here about how designing something to fail after a given lifespan would be an absolute engineering marvel.
Designed for deliberate failure is certainly not true, and I can’t think of any examples of that.
That said, when things do fail, automakers are quick to avoid responsibility…for example I jsut replaced a delaminating Uconnect screen in my 5 year old grand cherokee. The dealer is happy to charge you $1500 for it, but thousands and thousands of folks have had to do it themselves for $200 and an hour of time after getting a big middle finger from the dealer. Same with the hemi tick, pentastar oil coolers, etc. IMO your comment and sentiment tends to point to a general frustration of manufacturer acceptance of poor quality, which then gets misconstrued a bit to planned obsolescence. My examples are with jeep but you get it.
Whenever I tell people what you just said, the most common response I get is “It’s the same thing as making it break on purpose”
You can’t road trip with an EV.
I just did a 900-mile road trip in my new Rivian R2. Fast charging only added about 1.5 hours to a 14-hour drive.
It’s not for everyone, but I enjoy it. And the R2 isn’t even especially efficient, thanks to its boxy shape and the all-terrain tires my spec has. A Model Y or a Lyriq or a Macan EV would last even longer between charges, and charge about as quickly.
My wife did 600 miles solo in her EV a couple of weeks ago. It was easy and the hardest part was finding the level 3 charger hidden behind all the level 2 chargers at a dealership.
As a family, we regularly do multi-day EV road trips. Children are the limiting factor, not the car or charging infrastructure. And this is in the middle of the country where DC fast charging is sparse compared to the coasts.
A friend did a round trip from San Francisco Bay Area to Dallas area and back in his Tesla, no problem. There is, of course, an app to help with finding charging. If it would have been a cheaper rental, I would have considered an electric vehicle for a similar trip (Austin to see Mom and eclipse chasing). But the minivan rental was much cheaper and held all the camping gear that was needed for the eclipse chasing part of the trip.
People that will die on the hill that speed has no relationship to fuel efficiency.
Yea! I get way better efficiently at 35mph than at 5mph and way less people honking at me.
Ironically the people most likely to literally die on a hill, due to speed.
Yes, I lose like 15-20% fuel efficiency between 55 and 75 mph.
I knew someone who was convinced that Lexus vehicles were identical to comparable Toyotas. Like literally 100% identical – same features, same materials, same colors, etc. – but with a different badge slapped on. Like the factory could flip a coin and randomly assigned a completed but unbadged vehicle as a Lexus or Toyota. Or maybe leave the badge off to create some kind of Schrodinger’s Import pun vehicle.
This came up because he wanted to buy a Lexus but the nearest dealer was 100 miles away. He planned to buy the car at the out-of-town dealer and have it serviced at the local Toyota dealer. He became very upset when he found out the local Toyota dealer would not service Lexus vehicles (at least, this was the case at the time) and decided he would never again consider either a Lexus or Toyota because of their “scam.”
I never understood why he was willing to pay a 20% premium to get a vehicle he believed was 100% identical to a Toyota. I even pointed out that he could switch the badges and have (at least in his mind) the “Lexus” he wanted. Somehow this was not persuasive.
Strange.
The local Toyota dealer near my parents might have talked themselves out of a sale that way, my dad was buying a new vehicle as a retirement present to himself, a lot of his friends have Corvettes and were trying to get him to buy one, but he has a deep bias against GM, and saw the new Supra in the showroom at a decent sticker price and got all excited, because he didn’t know Toyota was making a sports car again – the salesman told him that it was “really just a BMW” and that he probably wouldn’t he happy with it because of that. He got all disappointed and called me afterward to see if I knew that Toyota was selling BMWs now
A turbo is only to be used in case of emergency.
While this is true, it’s also the case as demonstrated in the documentary series “Knight Rider” that the turbo will allow the car to fly.
Huh. Did this person think cars had a big red Turbo button behind a glass protective shield on the dashboard? Did they think drivers carried a small hammer to break this glass to turbo their way out of perilous situations??
I’m genuinely curious.
This was a friend’s mom who was proudly showing off her shiny new 300ZX. I have no idea where she got that idea other than maybe TV or the salesperson.
Got it from Knight Rider for sure
In fairness, don’t supercharged cars all have a switch for extra oomph when dealing with marauding biker gangs?
Only the ones down under. And even then only on the last of the V8 interceptors.
You’re thinking of the Nitro button.
Are they a really old pilot from WWII? Fighters of that era did have a “War Emergency Power” setting which would enable some combination of methanol/water injection and absolutely throwing out any limits on the turbochargers. In exchange for quite a lot more power for like 4 minutes, the engine was completely trashed if you managed to make it back to base. But given the average lifespan of a WWII fighter engine was like 4 missions anyway, not that big of a deal.
No, she just a suburban mom. I’m sure she was knowledgeable about many things but turbos was not one of those things.
I did have an unfair advantage though. My dad designed jet and rocket engines including the turbopumps for the latter so I got an earful from an early age.
Yeah, you gotta shift into turbo! There was a whole tv show about it!
I have a couple acquaintances who insist that the different grades of gas are a complete cash-grab scan and there’s no difference between 87-94 octane. I refuse to engage.
They’re mostly right. Putting premium in a car designed for regular is a complete waste of money and putting regular in a car designed for premium is unlikely to do anything than save you some money:
If you drive a newer car that doesn’t specifically require premium, buying the more expensive gasoline is usually a waste of money.
With a few exceptions, most modern vehicles are designed to run on regular gas.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/fuel-economy-efficiency/why-you-might-not-actually-need-premium-gas-a6382185831/
Car and Driver put this to the test and reached the same conclusion:
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a28565486/honda-cr-v-vs-bmw-m5-ford-f-150-dodge-charger/
“putting regular in a car designed for premium is unlikely to do anything than save you some money”
I’d be careful with that. “Requires” premium and “recommends” premium can be two different things, it’s not always easy to tell the difference and it can cause problems with the engine if done long term, which C&D didn’t test.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/fuel-economy-efficiency/cars-that-require-premium-fuel-do-not-always-benefit-from-it-a1099718013/
Even in those vanishingly few cases the argument for premium is sketchy:
Only a few of these are sports cars, such as the Chevrolet Corvette, which often require premium fuel to handle the stress and heat of high-performance driving. The rest are luxury SUVs from Audi, Volvo, and others that are more likely to be driven around town, not around a track.
“A handful of high-performance vehicles truly benefit from premium, but some automakers are using premium fuel to squeeze extra horsepower out of family haulers,” says Fisher. “It’s often for bragging rights rather than any consumer benefit.”
I don’t disagree that it’s ambiguous and part of me is skeptical that the 2GR V6 in my Lexus GS350 really needs premium when every 2GR with a Toyota sombrero can have midgrade. But…if the only way I know for sure is to hope I notice any knocking or detonation or pulled timing, then I’m not risking long term engine problems to save a nominal amount by skimping on one octane grade.
I would’ve bought the Toyota if I was that sensitive to fueling costs.
I’m sure there are plenty of Lexus owners who use regular you can ask.
I could do that. And I would if I valued their anecdotal experience more than the clearly stated manufacturer’s recommendation. Who I should talk to are a set if experienced Lexus mechanics.
Sure, if you can believe a Lexus mechanic will do more than parrot the company line.
Better to ask an independent mechanic with no dog in that fight.
Well yeah, I meant the scenario where a manufacturer states a required minimum octane and they ignore it. Putting in anything higher than recommended is a waste, and a modern car will protect itself in most cases. But, there is an objective difference between different octane ratings.
Even then any modern car will detect knock and simply re tune itself to run on the lower grade fuel. You’ll lose a couple of HP which chances are you’ll never notice.
Eh, depending on the compression ratio you will take an efficiency hit too, and it can be noticable. If I run regular in my Mk7 Golf R, it drops from 28ish highway mpg to like 24-25.
My ’73 TR6 sure runs better, and doesn’t diesel when I turn it off, if I use the 93 octane the specs call for. I’ll be finishing rebuilding the carbs this winter, so I hope to get rid of that dieseling after that.
Well of course it diesels. It was built for leaded gas, which is much thicker than the gas we have now. 93 octane, being the higher octane, is almost as thick as leaded gas.
What?
I haven’t had issues with dieseling, but my air-cooled Beetle and especially my two-stroke equipment seem to run better on premium.
I think rebuilding my carbs will help, as I suspect fuel is leaking past a few places where it shouldn’t. It did not start dieseling until a year or so ago, and I’ve had it for 12 years. Also, the anti-running on valve isn’t working as it should, though I have a temporary fix for that.
A dude back in college would drive around all day with his GrandAm in D because OD was only for racing and he didn’t want to waste gas. No amount of logic and evidence could persuade him. Same dude thought that the chorus in a certain Beck song that was popular at the time was “soar over parador” and no amount of pointing out that “soy un perdedor” quite literally means “I’m a loser” could convince him. He ended every argument with “What makes you right and me wrong?” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And that dude is now President of the United States.
Hah! We return to Jason’s Overdrive cold start- the industry is wrong!
That old cars are all unreliable. My 90s cars have been far more reliable than most of the newer cars I’ve owned.
There are times when my early 70’s Land Rover is the only car in the fleet that runs. The others are all from ’10 – ’14.
You’ll now have all the “Land Rovers are unreliable piles” crowd out to fight you. 😛
I daily-drove a 94 Discovery all through the early 2000s into 20011 or so. If something went wrong, it tended to be cheaper and easier to fix than similar problems everyone around me was complaining about on their late-model cars. The biggest issue I ran into was poor-quality rebuilds for things like the alternator. Went through three in in four years before I finally got a good one. That’s not the car, that’s the parts supply chain. There were a few other things like that. Anything fixed with parts that lived up to the quality claims stayed fixed.
Survivor bias.
Probably, but I have only had 1 90s car that ever gave me serious issues, and it was a highly modified Celica GT-Four, the others have all been bullet proof, and still serve as my dailies, while my 2013 Toyota is constanstly needing some minor work. Never anything major, but it’s nevertheless consistent enough to be annoying.
I believe all surviving trouble free 80s and 90s cars are ones where every component was build mid-week when that one guy happened to be on vacation. I expect your 2013 was build exclusively on Mondays and Fridays.
haha probably
My and my family’s 90’s era cars had issues. In general those issues were more severe than the issues of our more modern cars.
You have to get the right ones, not all 90s cars are gold, but nor are they all trash, and I get people telling me all the time that I’m dumb for DDing a 96 because it’s going to break down on me.
No car lasts forever. But you can point out that yours has lasted longer than theirs.
Also the ’90s are the most reliable “old cars” in general compared to their predecessors.
Yeah agreed. And while they are definitely getting old now, I think 90s through like 2008ish are the most reliable cars in general. Modern tech is amazing in many ways, but the reliability has taken a hit in many situations which is unfortunate.
Agreed, by the ’90s most cars got everything that makes modern cars nicer and safer to drive, such as EFI, rack and pinion steering, ABS, airbags, etc. but without the extra infotainment stuff which often seems to be unreliable or frustrating.
“That old cars are all unreliable. “
Depends on how old you go and what you’re comparing it to.
90s Mazda compared to modern Ford with a wet timing belt?
Yeah that would be one of the exceptions of an older car being more reliable than a new/newer one.
Now let’s compare that modern Ford with the wet timing belt to a rotary engine Mazda from the early to mid 1970s… LOL
70s yeah that’s probably about even reliability there, but the 80s and early 90s (FC model) rotaries are actually surprisingly robust given their reputation. Not sure what went wrong with the FD and RX-8 though
“Not sure what went wrong with the FD and RX-8 though”
I read up on that because I was considering buying an RX-8 for myself at one point.
The first problem is by design, the rotary burns some oil. In a perfect world, you’d have your lubricating oil separate from the oil that needs to get injected into the combustion chamber.
But the Mazda rotories don’t have that… which is fine IF the owner is religious about keeping the oil topped up and changing the oil on time or even early. They are sensitive to dirty oil.. as well as using the correct oil.
A lot of owners were not religious about this.
And in the case of the FD RX7, the complexity of the turbocharging/intake system causes issues.
And in the case of the RX8, they apparently have a weak ignition system/coils… but that can be upgraded.
Also in in both cases, it’s highly advisable to only use super unleaded as detonation can be the cause or a factor in the apex seals having a bad day. Nothing less than 91 octane is advisable.
And in both cases, it’s pushing Mazda’s design to the very limits.
Also in both cases to keep the engine healthy and avoiding carbon buildup (especially on the Apex seals), every time you take it out, drive it so it warms up fully and do at least one run to the redline.
And I’m sure there were at least a few other things I’m forgetting. I didn’t end up buying an RX-8. But I have driven both the RX7 and the RX-8 and I was seriously tempted to get one in spite of all the special considerations you have to take if you want it to stay reliable.
I feel like there’s a bell curve distribution of automotive reliability vs time, and the 90s sit right at the top: they had enough modern electronics to fix all of the issues that plagued older mechanical and crude electronic designs, but things hadn’t yet gotten sophisticated enough to start putting tiny, easy to break electronics everywhere.
Ages ago I caught a ride with a guy who was convinced that you NEED to saw at the steering wheel while cornering. I asked why, and he explained that all race car drivers that you can see on TV never hold the wheel steady, they all turn it all over the place. So, that must be good and proper, right? I tried to explain that they were attempting to hold the wheel steady, but were up against certain forces. He didn’t hear me over the whiff whiff of his Member’s Only jacket’s satin sleeves as his elbows motored around.
Coworker swore Miatas have rotary engines and could not be convinced otherwise
It is a relatively straight forward swap for the NC, and man that would be a lot of fun but yeah…
Would this person be able to spot a rotary engine if one was in front of them?
I didn’t test with flash cards, but I assume not
Try a flash card with a washing machine motor and see where you go with that.
I know someone who fancies themselves an “Expert” that insists the 80’s Cadillac V8/6/4 could also run on just 2 cylinders. No need for me to go down that rabbit hole.
From what I remember, some of them were running on just 2 cylinders, but that’s cuz they were broken.
I mean… GM products are known to run poorly longer than most cars run at all, so I would not be surprised at all to see a few of these running around on 2, but not intentionally.
Many people I talked to when the Chevy Volt came out didn’t understand it at all: “why would I want a car that can only go 40 miles on a charge?”
No amount of me trying to explain that it has a gas generator that will kick on and keep the car going for hundreds of miles made them understand what it actually did, they were just hung up on the 40 miles thinking that was all you got and you’d have to find a plug and charge it again.
We owned one for 6 years and still could not get people to understand how it worked. No wonder it failed.
That repairing your own car requires some mix of magic and miracles, thus ALWAYS requiring professional service, even for things like air filter replacement.
To be fair, there are some shops that have perpetrated that myth
Honestly, anyone who has this kind of attitude I’m kind of happy they get their cars serviced professionally. God help us if they start trying to repair something important on their own- “I bled the brakes until it stopped dripping, there was a lot of fluid in there, good thing I checked!”
I detailed a 2016ish Corolla, and there was a receipt from a local dealer in the backseat. They charged him $85 to change the air filter.
Numerous people I’ve met are under the impression that revving your engine too high will damage or destroy it. I’m not talking about pegging it at redline. Just anything after 3k or so on the tach.
While you can over rev an engine, that advice was directed at stick shift drivers, especially before RPM governors. It’s pretty useless advice in an automatic. Maybe that’s why some people merge onto the highway at 40. They’re afraid that if the tach goes past 3,500 RPM, they will damage or blow up their engine.
My old roommate back in the ’90s had a girlfriend with a stickshift Mustang with the 4 cylinder engine.
She refused to rev this poor engine past 1000 rpms! Everywhere she went, she went very slowly while lugging the engine in this poor car.
She let me drive it once and I thought she was going to stroke out when she saw me rev it all the way to 2,500.
The real irony being that for cars that used hydraulically actuated, non-continuous VVT systems would actually develop issues if you never got into the cam changeover due to actuators seizing up.
This is honestly something I’m curious about that maybe some of the older folks here can elaborate on for me-
I assumed that back in the day when people were trying to get into a highway in a 70hp 4spd Geo that they revved the piss out of it so as to have a glimmer of hope that they could achieve the miraculous feat of reaching 55mph. Is that correct, or were people just casually merging at 30?
Because I seriously can’t understand why, in a world of nearly 300hp v6 family sedans, people won’t give a car more than a 1/4 throttle.
When I was building my Promaster camper and on the forums/Facebook groups there monthly discussions about engine braking down big grades and getting scared because RPMs were going above 3000 or even 4000 rpm!!!! Like as if it didn’t have a minivan engine that made peak power at 6k.
I can tell you there’s nothing more infuriating than driving my 50hp Beetle and being held up on the merging ramp by a car with 4x the power.
I don’t know what exactly causes that behavior though. I think a lot of people just aren’t paying attention. And others think it’s everyone else’s job to get out of their way when they’re merging (I see this a lot). I try to let people in when I can, but it’s really the responsibility of the merging vehicle to, well, merge.
Some people are just slow drivers, but I think the biggest issue is that many many people are completely unable to multitask.
They will be accelerating perfectly normally down a ramp, but as soon as it’s time to start looking for oncoming cars they just completely stop accelerating. Then they’ll merge at 50 and then accelerate right up to 5-10mph over.
Which, as you mentioned, makes it very hard to try to get up to merging speed when you are in a car that is exceptionally slow and now you don’t have a hill helping you.
I had an underpowered land yacht which really needed to build momentum continuously to merge. People creeping along the ramp and then accelerating to highway speed in the traffic lane definitely caused some dicey situations.
There’s numerous reasons. I’ve had people put their seat too far up and back and they can barely touch the pedals; I’ve had people who feared the acceleration forces; and I’ve had people who can’t see very well and their anxiety crippled them from accelerating at a meaningful pace on an on ramp.
Being a car salesman had led to some interesting test drives.
I was driving my mom in her ’87 Tempo when I was a relatively new driver in the very early ’90s and I went to pass someone and the transmission kicked down into a lower gear and she freaked – “It never makes that sound for me!” Yeah mom, because you never step on the gas at all.
Had a friend like this, where he would never go above 65 mph in his FR-S beacuse he was “afraid to wear out the engine”
Now he owns a BMW i4 m50i and I think he actually drives that thing properly because it doesn’t have an “engine” to “wear out”
One of my dad’s friends showing us his new car and that he was proud to have ‘bought British’. All Ford Granadas were in fact made in Germany, and had been for some time by then.
The first and second generations were even available with the Taunus V4, giving that particular car some relationship with SAAB 95, 96 and Sonnett, but I see the UK bottom-tier models didn’t get the V4 but Pinto engines.
That’s always a fun one. I’m in the USA and have a very jingoistic acquaintance who proudly drives his German/Korean Buick Encore.
‘Murica!
Buy American!
Ok bud, this Camry was built in the US and your pickup wasn’t, sooooo…..
I have a coworker who still doesn’t fully understand the difference between plug-in hybrids, hybrids, and ICE cars. But I did point out to him that while he’s getting much better fuel economy in his Ranger than he did in his old F-150, if he had gotten the Maverick hybrid it would have been better still. He has since driven one.
“And you don’t have to plug it in?”
“Not that one, no. And if you got a plug-in and never ever remembered to plug it in, it wouldn’t be a big deal. You’d be leaving a tremendous amount of potential fuel savings on the table, but that’s all.”
“But how’s it work?”
Knowing that just getting to this point had been a bit of a hike, I punted: “It works great.”
For as long as hybrids have been on the market, its kind of crazy how many people still have no idea what they are. I owned an Ioniq hybrid for a few years and had quite a few conversations that went like “is that electric?” No, its a hybrid. “What’s that?”
I have a variation on your GMC/Chevy and Chrysler/Mitsubishi examples. Years ago, I told a co-worker to consider buying a Pontiac Vibe instead of a Toyota Matrix because they were the same car, built at the same factory, and Pontiac dealers might offer better deals (yes, resale values could be different, but whatever). He seemed receptive. However, after talking to his father-in-law, he decided to buy the Toyota. His FIL convinced him that quality-control inspectors selected the units with fewer flaws to be badged as Toyotas, while the lemons became Pontiacs. Of course! Why had I not realized that?
The Vibe and Matrix were not built in the same plant. The Vibe was built at NUMMI in California, whereas the Matrix was built at a Canadian Toyota plant. There may be some validity to what he said.
I remember when The Fast and the Furious first came out. One of my son’s friends said quite confidently that his first car was going ro be a Honda Civic, and he was going to put a Viper V10 in it.
I let that one go, as he was only 10 or so.
Now there’s a kid who’s going places!
At speed, straight into a wall.
He’s going place!
Hey, given time, materials, and money you can do anything!
Someone swapped a viper V10 into an S2000, and it only took them 9 years, so a Civic should only be another 6 years worth of work.