The Alleged Car: Difference between revisions

[[File:1-weekend-magazine-233793.jpg|link=Gaston Lagaffe|right|<small>Look on the bright side: [[Comically Missing the Point|it's convenient for boiling eggs]].</small> ]]

 

'''Homer''': [[Made in Country X|What country is this car from?]]<br />

'''Crazy Vaclav''': [[Balkanize Me|It no longer exists.]]|''[[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.

 

 

The extent to which this is [[Truth in Television]], like many car-related tropes, is largely the [[Trope Breaker|ghost of tropes past]]: it plays off of pre-1980s notions of notoriously unreliable foreign and used cars which tend not to be true today. Also of note, cars that degrade to the state of disrepair often depicted on television would simply not be street-legal in any modern industrial country with an established vehicle safety code. Of course, that doesn't mean [[Who Would Be Stupid Enough|there aren't people who still drive them]], [[Eagleland Osmosis|or that such cars are not in use outside the US...]].

If it's a horse that gets this treatment, then you're dealing with [[The Alleged Steed]]. If the car looks like this, but is secretly a [[Cool Car]], see [[What a Piece of Junk]]. A [[Chronically Crashed Car]] may become one of these if it gets repaired one too many times.

 

 

== Anime & Manga ==

I must confess one more dusty road would be just a road too long... (crunch)<br />

'''Chorus''': Worthless... }}

{{quote| '''Pink Car''': I just can't- I just can't- I just can't seem to get started<br />

Don't have the heart to live in the fast lane all that is past and gone... (crunch) }}

* "The Loaner" from ''[[The Mask (Film)|The Mask]]'', given to Stanley as a replacement for his Honda Civic by some unscrupulous mechanics while the latter is being repaired.

* The "Wagon Queen Family Truckster" from ''[[National Lampoon's Vacation]]''. "You think you hate it now -- but wait til you drive it!"

* The car that the title character drives in ''Mr. Hulot's Holiday'' is so underpowered and rickety, duct-tape and bailing wire could be considered luxury extras.

* The [[James Bond]] movies have a few examples.

** The entire series seems to revel in this trope. Xander and Oz have both confessed their own personal off-screen road-trip-gone-wrong stories that begin with their vehicles breaking down.

* Zap Rowsdower's truck in the [[MST3K]] episode ''[[The Final Sacrifice]]'' does this. Mike and the bots waste no time in bashing the Rowsdower-mobile.

* [[Mr. Bean|Mr Bean's]] 1977 Mini, complete with latch and padlock door system and non-working handbrake, is constantly "The Alleged Car" in its repeated collisions with a certain Reliant Supervan.

* ''[[Columbo (TV)|Columbo]]'' drives a beat-up [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peugeot_403 Peugot 403] convertible. He seems pleased to own a foreign car. In one episode, he drives it to a junkyard where a body has been found. A policeman tells him he'll have to dump his car there another day. Columbo is shocked at the idea that anyone could think his car was junk.<br /><br />Oh... just one other thing... Peter Falk allegedly picked it out himself one day after having been picked as Columbo. He saw the car in a mechanic's shop where they were apparently using it as a test-bed/oversized paperweight, and thought that given Columbo's otherwise disheveled appearance, the car would be perfect. He bought it from the mechanics and drove it to the lot that day.

* ''[[Saturday Night Live]]'' also gave us the parody ad featuring ''The Adobe''. "The sassy new Mexican import that's made out of clay!"

* One episode of ''[[My Name Is Earl]]'' reveals that Earl and Joy once sold an alleged car to someone. When Earl goes to right this wrong, he discovers that the experience left the man bitter and pessimistic about mankind.

* There's a running gag in the 1980s cop show ''[[Hunter]]'' about the title character's horrible clunkers. [[Da Chief]] loathes him and so sticks him with awful cars, and sometimes it's even had more influence on the plot than just a gag - hard to have a [[Car Chase]] when your ride won't start (or the door won't even open, or ''piles of parts fall out of the bottom''.) However, there were also [[Chronically Crashed Car|so many instances of him]] ''[[Chronically Crashed Car|completely demolishing]]'' cars in chase scenes that it's possibly [[Justified]]: you give this guy a car, it lasts two episodes tops, so you don't give him the best you've got.

* On ''[[The Amazing Race]]'', some of the cars the teams are given turn out to be this, and it's obviously quite deliberate.

 

== Music ==

* The Morris Minor in Madness' "[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQw6y96bJpo Driving In My Car]". One line sums it up: I'm satisfied I got this far. We are also frequently informed that it is "not quite a Jag-u-ar".

* Sir Mix-a-Lot (he who cannot lie about liking big butts) has a track called "[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkvq-20sC0U My Hooptie]."

* Subverted in ''[[Warhammer 40000|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.

* ''[[Chez Geek]]'' from Steve Jackson Games includes, as one of the things you can spend your money on, a card representing "Harold the Hoopty Car". It's worth a lot of Slack (points), but it's very expensive, reduces your effective Income for each turn by 1, and every turn it has a one-in-six chance of breaking down beyond repair.

 

 

 

== Web Comics ==

* In ''[[Freefall (Webcomic)|Freefall]]'', the Savage Chicken starts out as an Alleged Spaceship. Florence actually manages to make it spaceworthy. How terrible is it? Well, let's let [http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff300/fv00298.htm the spaceport air traffic controllers explain]:

{{quote| "Why aren't we shooting at them?"<br />

** There are two camps of modern-day Trabant owners: one that chooses to keep the original engine in mint condition due to that German cultural phenomenon known as "Ostalgie", "nostalgia for the East"; and a more pragmatic camp that replaces the engine with modern L4 or Japanese superbike engines (a popular choice being the "Trabusa", a Trabant with a Suzuki Hayabusa engine).

** The Trabant, needless to say, met its rapid demise when the Wall fell and Communist Germany's Trabant was put to compete against Capitalist Germany's Audi, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen and Porsche. What was funny was that a couple of German motoring journalists took the 'Trabbi' through the notorious 'moose test' - where a car is swerved very sharply to avoid an obstacle - and passed with flying colours. Even funnier still? The 1997 Mercedes A-Class, with engineering among the world's best - didn't.

** Recently, it seems Škoda vehicles are becoming too good, with parent company Volkswagen forcing Škoda to limit the quality of new models for fear of them competing with Volkswagen!

** Rather amusing, since these days, most Škodas are built on last generation [[V Ws]]. The Fabia, for example, is a Mark IV Golf underneath the skin.

[[Category:Truth in Television]]

[[Category:The Alleged Car]]