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The Alleged Car: Difference between revisions
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|''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'', "Mr. Plow"}}
It was cheap. It was easy to buy. Charitably, it can be called a car. Unfortunately, it tops out at about 40 miles per hour (45 if you're going downhill, 65 kilometres if you're not in America), [[Plot-Driven Breakdown|it breaks down a lot]], you get parking tickets for it ''[[Driving Stick|while it's in drive]]'', and you probably have to special-order replacement parts from overseas, since you're the only one in your time zone who was enough of a sucker to buy one (and cars like this are inevitably foreign, often from countries that [[The Great Politics Mess-Up|no longer exist]] due to civil wars and political turmoil). The only reason it hasn't fallen apart yet is because the rust holds everything in place. Often it has some kind of cute or derogatory nickname. Sometimes a car like this is referred to as a Rolls-Canardley: rolls down one hill, can 'ardly get up the next.
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.
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{{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.
* Brian "Grue" Laborn's car in the ''[[Worm]]'' [[Alternate Universe Fic]] ''[[Mauling Snarks]]'', bought from a Nazi-owned used car lot and deliberately sabotaged, is actually described using the trope name. Fortunately for him, Taylor's Tinker power notices its ''many'' problems before the car kills him, and it gets repaired ''and'' improved by Wrench Wraith (the former Squealer).
== Films -- Animated ==
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== 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).
* ''[[BattleTech]]'' players may be familiar with the Hetzer Wheeled Assault Gun, basically an alleged ''[[Tank Goodness|tank]]''. Among its "virtues" are a fairly slow wheeled chassis that prevents it from traversing many types of terrain compounded by lack of a turret for its only weapon, a battery weak enough that its engine needs to keep running pretty much nonstop to keep it charged, and a tendency to reach the customer not quite fully assembled at times. (If you're lucky, somebody thought to include the bolts to fix the last components in place.) It arguably ''is'' one of the cheapest ways available to field an [[
** 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.
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* 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.
* Harley-Davidsons developed a dubious reputation for being Alleged Motorcycles due to their supposed lack of reliability, though this was more due to haphazard modifications by smart-aleck enthusiasts who customise their bikes without accounting for whether the two-wheeled Frankenstein's monster they created would take them places in one piece. To the detractors' credit however, the MoCo did suffer a decline in quality during their [[Dork Age]] when they were part of American Machine and Foundry, a [[Mega Corp]] known for producing nuclear facilities, yachts and [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|tennis rackets]]. Such was the AMF era's notoriety that their factory lines had sections dedicated to rectifying any defects that showed up in their bikes during production, leading to the "Harley-Davidson" name to be mocked as "Hardly Ableson", "Hardly Driveable", and "Hogly Ferguson".
* The ill-fated ''Titan'' submersible by OceanGate was widely criticised and ridiculed as an Alleged Sub after it imploded under the Atlantic Ocean during an attempt to explore the wreck of the RMS ''Titanic''. Despite assurances by the late CEO Stockton Rush — who died in the implosion — that the sub was safe and that excessive safety regulations hamper innovation, many have pointed out the jury-rigged construction which led to the tragedy. While some have also mocked OceanGate's use of an off-the-shelf Logitech Xbox 360 controller (various news outlets [[Media Research Failure|described]] said controller as a "knockoff [[PlayStation]] controller"; the device was designed for Windows PCs in mind using an Xbox 360 control scheme as per the XInput standard) this practice of using commodity game controllers is nothing new as various industries and the military have made use of game interface devices due to their familiarity and low cost.
{{reflist}}
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