5 Reasons Why We Hate Top 10 Car Lists
1. It's lazy journalism. You don't have to write a coherent thesis. Just pick a topic, choose ten cars that fit the remit and, perhaps, come up with a formula upon which to base your selections. 2. It's always wrong. There is always at least one car that doesn't belong on the list. Newsday's "10 new fuel-friendly cars the coming year may bring" offers patient readers the option of waiting for a hydrogen-powered BMW 7-Series. 3. The captions are uninformed, poorly written and condescending. In this case, the tasteless McNuggets are prepared with the help of Edmunds' road test editor Brian Moody. "The good news is that VW is going to put diesels into the hands of the average person who may just want good fuel economy in a normal car." Huh. 4. There's always a whiff of whore's perfume to the choices. "Brian Moody makes a valid point [about the Cadillac Escalade Hybrid]: 'GM was shrewd to put out a vehicle that basically helps luxury SUV owners feel better about driving a big SUV.'" All that said, these lists are ridiculously popular with the mainstream press. So… help us choose "The Top Ten Cars for People Who Don't Care About Top Ten Car Lists," based on the best cars not currently on a popular top ten list.
More by Robert Farago
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This is a good story. These lists have never really helped me and the one you linked to is really one of the worst.
Reading that linked top-10 lists has just taken a few minutes off of my life that I'll never get back. What kind of hellish worthless list was that? Aspen hybrid? Models that aren't available yet and might not be for sale for over a year? ASPEN HYBRID? Here's my top 5 list - "The top 5 guesses on where that article was written in under 10 minutes." 5. Back seat of a taxi 4. Port-o-potty at a music festival 3. At a bar where car pictures were on a dartboard. 2. Proctologist's office 1. Men's room in a 3rd world country where the local food has torn through your system in under three minutes and you swear that you are so close to death... If people in major magazines and papers are going to publish a list or car opinions, can I ask that they actually know something about the topic?
Top five vehicles you should drive but can't because the greenheads will lynch you: 1. Range Rover Supercharged - it's big, luxurious, can offroad with the best, and now drinks fuel at an even greater rate with the addition of a blower which allows the RR to get out of its own way but still get blown off by a hot hatch. This is the epitome of style, luxury and function blended into a beauty of an offroader, made useless by countless wealthy soccer moms hauling three bags of groceries and two bottles of gin for the afternoon. 2. Any Cadillac Escalade model - Because you have to get in on the (now passed) hype, and dammit all, it feels good to drive a multiton black behemoth on giant chrome wheels in the city, no matter what Al Gore says. 3. A W140 Mercedes Benz SEL/SEC/S model - these are dinosaurs of the greatest luxury era (except they came out 10 years too late and MB couldn't give them away) when Mercedes built rolling bank vaults of the highest quality and a piddling 4.2L quad cam V8 powered the entry level model. If you have to ask about fuel economy, you can't afford to fill it. 4. Any V8 Bentley built in the last 20 years - "Blenheim Palace" on wheels, the tyre-smoking fuel-chugging British gentleman's club with power steering. Bonus points if it has a turbocharger on the antiquated 6-and-three-quarter-litre-vee-eight, because it's the only way you could possibly make these cars any less fuel efficient. 5. Any Lamborghini with a mid-mounted V12 - these are made to pound your senses into a blubbering mess, and not in the good way. Single digit fuel "economy", blistering speed, goofy handling, priced above most luxury condos, useless for anything but masochistic exercises in self abuse... Sheer lunacy with a heaping helping of unfathomable excess.
1. Kia Rondo 2. Mazda 5 3. Toyota Rav4L 4x2 Cars that stupid mothers should be using to do the carpool if they don't want a typical minivan. Every time I see a mom and three small kids in a Yukon XL I want to vomit with rage