The Alleged Car: Difference between revisions

|''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'', "Mr. Plow"}}

 

 

New drivers' first cars tend to be like this, due to not knowing any better, or—since most newbie drivers are in their teens or early twenties—they don't have enough money to buy a [[Cool Car]]. But even then, logic kicks them in the rear when they realize that the money spent on repairs could have been saved up for a nicer car in the first place.

{{quote|I insist, though, that when in Transbelvia, the truly discriminating tourist is obligated to drive the national automobile, the one and only Belv. The Belv is the quintessential East European car, a tiny tin box with a two-stroke motor that sounds like a mimeograph machine on Self-Destruct and smells like a burning blackwall tire. This particular one had a four-speed manual gearbox that liked to crunch and jitter on shifts, brakes operated by cables, and no gauges that worked. }}

* Non-car example: [[Midnight Green]]'s dilapidated cart that he quite happily smashes into a tree.

 

== Films -- Animated ==

* The ''[[The Blues Brothers|BluesMobile]]''.

* The minivan at the end of ''[[Project X]]'', which is missing two doors and has had most of its paint scorched off. Thomas' parents force him to drive it to school as punishment, though his friends think it looks [[Badass]].

 

== Jokes ==

* [[Bob Rivers]] does this at least a couple of times; ''My Toyota'' (parody of The Knack's ''My Sharona'') to mock the 2010 Toyota recalls, and ''The Day My Lemon Died'' (parody of Don McLean's ''American Pie'') describing abandoning a broken, smoking vehicle at roadside.

* Diesel's ''[[wikipedia:Sausalito Summernight|Sausalito Summernight]]'' (1981) starts with "We left for Frisco in your Rambler / The radiator running dry / I've never been much of a gambler / And had a preference to fly..." and goes downhill from there, with "The engine's stomping like a disco / We ought to dump it in the bay" as the approximate low point.

 

== Newspaper Comics ==

== Tabletop Games ==

* In the unlikely event that a vehicle from ''[[Paranoia]]'' (especially one from [[Mad Scientist|R&D]]) isn't one of these to begin with, then carrying around a handful of mildly unhinged Troubleshooters with secret society missions to waste each other will probably seriously damage the systems before long. The second edition sample adventure, for example, featured a six-legged [[Spider Tank]] submarine built by taking a ''van'' and bolting on legs; the bot brain is going senile, and there's a bewildering array of unlabeled and/or mixed-up controls and gauges (pushing down the gas pedal fires a torpedo, for example, and some of the levers snap off as soon as you try to pull them, and as usual the operating manual is above your security clearance).

** All that above said, it is not totally unreasonable when you consider that it is a real-life ''World War II'' era design. Go look it up, we'll wait.

* Subverted in ''[[Warhammer 40,000]]'': anything the Orks build or salvage will be the alleged buggy, but thanks to the crude-but-effective nature of Ork tech [[Clap Your Hands If You Believe|combined with the fact]] that [[Xtreme Kool Letterz|red wunz go fasta]] means that they're surprisingly serviceable.

"Still too expensive. The computer will only authorize up to spitwads." }}

:: Sam and Helix did manage to get it off the ground by themselves, an act they're very proud of. Unfortunately, the parade committee forced them to return the balloons shortly thereafter.

{{quote|'''Esther:''' "I have a surprise for you," says my dad. "You know [[wikipedia:Volkswagen Beetle|that car Hitler liked so much]]? I made you one out of rust."}}

* In ''[[Girl Genius]]'', one strip involves Agatha receiving [http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20050328 a...rather poorly maintained] walking house.

*** "Lucas invented the three position switch -- dim, flicker, and off."

** Another notable example was the Triumph TR7, and not necessarily for reliability reasons. Auto designer Giorgetto Giugiaro — who created the bodywork for iconic cars like the Lotus Esprit, De Lorean DMC-12, Maserati Ghibli and Volkswagen Golf — had a memorable reaction upon seeing Triumph's notoriously ugly TR7 during the 1975 Geneva Motor Show. After viewing the profile of the car, with the sculpted curve running along the side, he took on a puzzled expression, slowly walked around the car and exclaimed in startlement: "My God! They've done it to the other side as well!"

** How bad was British Leyland? Rover's [https://web.archive.org/web/20130909041639/http://www.carlustblog.com/2008/07/car-lust--sterl.html Sterling 827 SLi] was essentially a license-built version of a mid-80s Honda (Accura) Legend, one of he best-engineered cars of its day—but even Honda engineering was no match for British assembly quality!

** To top it off, BMW purchased British Leyland (by then known as the Rover Group) and reputedly ended up losing billions of dollars in the six years it owned them. Inverted with the Land Rover (sold for a profit) and MINI (kept by BMW and now bigger than ever) divisions, but still played straight with the rest of the Rover Group which was effectively given away for next to nothing.

* The [https://web.archive.org/web/20130808215655/http://www.carlustblog.com/2009/02/edsel.html Edsel's] gotten a [[Shout-Out]] in everything from ''[[Garfield]]'' to ''[[Destroy All Humans!]]'' as one of the worst cars ever made. Ironically, it apparently wasn't that bad a car (it is said to have roughly the same level of reliability as other American cars of its day), it just was [https://web.archive.org/web/20130808215655/http://www.carlustblog.com/2009/02/edsel.html marketed wrong, priced wrong, named wrong and, most of all, just plain ugly] [[Your Mileage May Vary|to most people]]. (''The Book of Heroic Failures'' quotes [[Time (magazine)|''Time'' magazine]] as calling it "a classic case of the wrong car for the wrong market at the wrong time." It had its own dealer network (instead of using Ford's existing dealers), it was priced above the stock Ford, it was introduced during a recession, given a stupid-sounding name and marketed as "America's space car" - complete with huge tail fins at a time that these were going out of style. The book claims that half the Edsels sold were defective in some way: doors that wouldn't open, trunks that wouldn't shut, push-buttons that wouldn't do anything, etc.)

* In the early 1970s, when the oil crisis forced American manufacturers to crank out small cars or die, the [https://web.archive.org/web/20130809080510/http://www.carlustblog.com/2010/12/the-chevrolet-vega-what-went-wrong.html Chevy Vega,] AMC Gremlin and [[Every Car Is a Pinto|Ford Pinto]] gave American small cars this reputation: having absolutely ''zero'' experience in building small cars, the American manufacturers, to put it lightly, stumbled ''quite a bit'' in their attempts at building small vehicles, to the extent that the Ford Pinto ''[[Every Car Is a Pinto|would actually explode]] [[Trope Namer|when crashed!]]''. In fact, Ford officials [http://motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness knew perfectly well] that the Pinto's gas tank tended to explode, could have rectified the situation, and ''chose not to'' on the basis of a "cost-benefit analysis" (basically saying "It's cheaper to let people burn to death, wrongful death lawsuits and all, than to change the car"). It's often held up as an example of why punitive damages should be legal in lawsuits. This is why Toyota, Honda and Datsun (now Nissan) became popular in the States—being manufacturers from fuel-deprived Japan, they had ''way'' more know-how on subcompact design, and the Toyota Corolla, Datsun B-210 and Honda Civic ended up ruling the day.

* In China, the worst are the Xiali (based on a Toyota design) and Suzuki Alto, two of the first to enter market. The latter is often joked to have been designed to drive on sidewalks. The former is joked for its design's 2-decade production without major change.

* The Lancia Beta, which rusted to point of scrap, ruined the reputation of Lancia (a manufacturer of otherwise decent cars) in the United Kingdom, forcing the company to pull out of the UK entirely, much to the chagrin of ''[[Top Gear]]'''s presenters years later.

** The 1920 Briggs and Stratton<ref>Yes, the lawn mower people</ref> Flyer: "...A motorized park bench on bicycle wheels."

** The 1956 Renault Dauphine: an ultra-cheap rust magnet that went from 0-60 in ''32 seconds.''

* The early '80's Cadillacs were saddled with the 8-6-4 engine which used a crude cylinder deactivation system, or the [[Genre Killer]] Diesel 350, which left buyers with a choice of buying a car that would leap and shake or one that wouldn't start if it was near freezing temperatures.

* The Reliant Robin can't be easily considered an [[Alleged Car]], because it's hard to classify it ''as'' a car. It has two defining features, one being the fact that it only has three wheels, the single wheel is in the front. The other? Rolling over. One takes a sharp turn in a Reliant Robin at their own risk. It may be the only car in history to roll over 360 degrees from cornering to hard. In the UK, especially [[Oop North]], the Robin became popular as it only required a motorcycle license to operate and thus avoided many taxes that car owners were saddled with. In spite of—or because of—this, the Robin has become something of an icon of British popular culture. The yellow van in ''[[Only Fools and Horses]]'' was a Robin, as was the light blue van that was [[Running Gag|always getting tipped over]]. ''[[Top Gear]]'' has done several segments on the Robin (and it's [[Running Gag|tipping over]]) and the Robin even has a racing circuit where [[Running Gag|tipping over]] is so common there are established techniques for righting oneself right there on the track.

* The G-Wiz is a very tiny electric car. Ok, technically it is legally a "Heavy Quadbike" in Britain for it's extreme lack of power. It has extremely poor acceleration, you can't use any of the electronics such as the radio, since it will kill the G-Wiz's very small battery life, and basically disintegrates in a crash.

* And then there was the [[Great Depression]], in which motorists couldn't afford to maintain (or, in some cases, even fuel) cars they'd acquired as luxuries in the [[Roaring Twenties]]. More than a few broken-down vehicles were abandoned during the [[Grapes of Wrath]]-like trek westward out of the [[Dust Bowl]]. The most infamous vehicle in Hoovertown was the Bennett Buggy (aka the Hoover Wagon), a Model T Ford pulled by a horse for want of fuel. Only [[Sarcasm Mode|the wealthy]] could afford the two-horsepower model.

 

{{reflist}}