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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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