Question of the Day: What Makes A Car Boring?
As many of you know I manage Autofiends.com . Our unofficial motto (can’t get the tech guys to change the site…) is “No Boring Cars.” Which means as the news of the day rolls in (grist to the mill) I need to parse it to determine what is and what isn’t “boring.” For instance there’s those pics of the new Prius that Jalopnik has whipped itself into its daily frenzy over (). And through the magic of search engine optimization Autofiends could probably get some decent traffic out of the post. More traffic makes the boss happy and (maybe) gets me more money! Only problem: the Prius is dull. Like, rock in sand dull. And not fancy Japanese rocks in Zen sand, but regular Texas Hill Country rocks in Great Plains dust. There’s a lady I know and I think she’s massively boring. She falls asleep at parties, says perhaps one sentence over the course of a night out and at restaurants has the tastes of a six-year-old. I mean really, what adult says, “I hate tomatoes?” To further solidify my view I saw her driving away in a white 1998 Toyota Camry. Which makes perfect sense, as I can’t think of a more boring car. Before you accuse me of Toyota bashing, let me state up front that I think the AE86 Corolla is one the most exciting cars ever built. Especially certain nitrous powered Formula D AE86s that pull away from Vipers on the track. Some of them 1,000 hp Supras are pretty damn thrilling, too. So I ask you: what makes boring?
Cleanup driver for Team Black Metal V8olvo.
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electric powertrains, even in a Porsche (yawn)
What Makes A Car Boring? Oh, I'd call it "small-minded auto journalists." There are actually stories to be told regarding issues like safety, fuel economy, ride quality, reliability, dependability, interior comfort and quietness, control ergonomics, advanced automatic transmissions, vehicle stability controls, resale values, and all sorts of other things, but I suppose it just must take a few more minutes of research to write about these than just quoting some big horsepower number in the publication's 700th report on some new Corvette or similar. You'd think that automotive publications might look around every now and then, and notice that only a veritable handful of potential readers actually drive the "non-boring" cars they write about ad naseum, whereas there appears to be a virtually unlimited number of potential readers who might want to learn more about the technologies built into the cars they drive, but these publications have decided that their cars just aren't worthy of writing about. Ahh, well, what publication wants more readers, anyway? Must not be very important to them. People buy the cars they want for what they believe to be very good reasons. It's too bad that the automotive journalism industry chooses to ignore the vast majority of automobiles, and the people who drive them. I guess it's just way too much easier to just keep on grabbing the low-hanging fruit of "no boring cars."