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
Manual transmissions suck to drive. Almost anything people say about manual transmissions honestly.
This has been said a few times but I didn’t see it explained in detail… people’s misunderstanding of fuel economy.
Ask someone if their vehicle is “good on gas?” and they’ll answer, “oh it’s great, only $60 to fill it up”. My eye must twitch every time because how little sense this makes.
Common things related to this that I’ve heard, and I fully understand a lot of these overlap:
If they refuel less often, it must be fuel efficient.A longer range must be more efficient.If a vehicle has a bigger tank than another, it is less efficient than one with a smaller tank.Referring to fuel tank size by the cost to “fill” it.
Cost to fill is strongly correlated with fuel efficiency, because cost to fill is just a proxy for size of tank. Fuel efficient cars (eg. hybrids) generally have much smaller tanks. This also offers additional efficiency in not having to carry around that much gas weight all the time.
If your F-350 Supercab gets 8mpg around town, it needs a big-ass tank.
So you’re technically correct, but also missing the intuitive correctness of their correlation. Also, most people measure gas in how often they have to stop and how much it costs when they do fill it up, so it’s reasonable that the key metric they use for comparison is cost.
My car will go 140MPH because that’s what the speedometer goes up to.
“Loud pipes save lives!”
Yes, I noticed you, but I have an urge to run you over to shut up your damn nuisance!
If that is your worry, then instead of shooting a loud noise out your rear end, create a decent noise aimed toward vehicles next to you. Like a reverse blind-spot monitor. (Okay, it would be annoying in stop-and-go traffic. Let’s face it, tall vehicles with distracted drivers are a nuisance.)
“Loud pipes save lives!”
I have personally witnessed the exact opposite- motorcycle splitting lanes in traffic (I’m not in CA, illegal here), revved the engine to get some lady to move over, and it startled her enough to jerk the wheel over right into him. He was pretty badly messed up, taken away on an ambulance. Ended up giving statements to the cops and both sets of insurance adjusters and lawyers, so my impression is there was a pretty vicious legal fight going on. Not sure who wins in that- yes the lady cut over into his path, but he was illegally splitting lanes at the time, and didn’t have the right of way.
Sounds messy. Perhaps the rider should just wait for an open spot.
And yeah, loud noises mess with me enough that I could see myself doing that.
I have personally tested all of these.
Need / want all the same.
Maybe I haven’t found the right car yet.
Well they do hold their breath and turn blue.
My tickets are evenly distributed across red, silver, blue, and green. So far no tickets for the yellow Fiat 500 but it only goes 45.
Surprisingly “Buick” is the right car for the 2nd bullet point.
My neighbor, a Viet Nam veteran told me he never changes the oil in his vehicles because he worked on helicopter engines and they never changed the oil in them.
After a particularly long oil change interval on a beater I had just bought, I had a mechanic jokingly warn me that the sludge was clogging the leaks and I should not put new oil in. He was kind of right, but it was an engine that was very old, high mileage and was probably already leaking sludge.
Lol, yes, because most Hueys never came remotely close to their service intervals. Brief googling suggests average lifespan of a Lycoming T53 in the jungle was 30-40 flight hours before getting pulled due to damage where they got a full teardown or were just scrapped.
This is true for most engines used in most wars since internal combustion became a thing- the duty cycle for a combat engine is intense enough you won’t have to worry about changing the oil.
Yeah, I understand the concept. Too bad my neighbor doesn’t. I kind of figured some aircraft engines are rebuilt long before the oil wears out.
The vast amount of people who think a Porsche 356 has a VW Beetle engine, because they look roughly the same way…
It took a very long time to convince my grandmother that her Opala 400 had a 4.00L engine and not 400 horsepower.
I’ve seen people say they couldn’t get a RWD car because they need to get to work in rain.
The amount of people who get talked out of buying a sedan/hatch because “what if it snows” or “what if you go on a dirt road” makes me really sad.
The idea that cars are less safe/reliable than they used to be, they’ve definitely gotten harder to fix, but you have to fix them WAY less often. Also the idea that cars have gotten slower/less powerful for the sake of fuel efficiency. That hasn’t been true since fuel injection was invented.