Sometimes, You Have to Recommend the Boring Car

I’ve recently reached the conclusion that sometimes, for some people, in some situations, the Toyota Corolla is the right car to recommend.

I know, I know: this is sacrilege. As automotive enthusiasts, it sometimes seems like our sole purpose on this earth is to steer people away from boring automobiles like the Corolla. Sometimes, when I’m sitting around with my friends and we’re playing the “Would You Rather” car game, the discussion turns to the Corolla and the question is always something like: Would you rather drive a Toyota Corolla for a year? Or eat a garage door?

And about half the time, you think really hard, and long, and seriously about what it would be like to walk outside every day and get inside a Corolla, for God’s sake, and drive it to work, or school, or whatever, and you get kind of depressed, so you pause for a while and then you say: Is it a single-car garage?

As car enthusiasts, we tend to recommend sportier, more engaging, more exciting alternative choices, such as the Mazda3. But while the Mazda3 is objectively better than the Corolla in a wide number of areas, and subjectively better for most car enthusiasts, some people just won’t have it.

In fact, I recently had someone come to me looking for a compact car, and before I could even get the words “Mazda3” out of my mouth, he was already on some long tirade about how they would “never buy a Mazda again.” Have you ever met anyone like this? It seems that every single person, no matter how much automotive experience they’ve had, has at least one automaker that they will “never buy again.” And they always have some severe reason, like the fact that it broke down when they were going to a job interview, or it left them stranded on the side of the road, or they had an accident and it crumpled like a Snickers wrapper.

Well, as soon as this person launched into his tirade about Mazda, I knew the car had no chance. His mom had a Mazda 626, and it was always breaking down, and it depreciated like crazy, and it never ran right, and it killed his father, and it would sometimes sneak around to sorority houses and peep inside the windows late it night, etc.

So then I recommended the Kia Forte and Hyundai Elantra, which are two excellent compact cars in the sense that they offer such a wide variety of body styles, and engine options, and trim levels, that I hoped it would be enough to shut my friend up. But I was met with the famous Hyundai-Kia response: “A Hyundai? A Kia? Really?”

It was at this point when I realized, horrified, that I was not being asked to recommend an automobile. I was being asked to confirm this person’s own preconceptions of what car he should get. He wasn’t really coming to me for automotive advice: he was coming to me, a bona fide automotive journalist in the sense that I am sometimes served short ribs at automotive press events, solely to justify his own automotive decision. He wanted a pat on the back from someone who “knows.”

So I gave him exactly what he wanted. “The Toyota Corolla is an excellent car,” I said. And you know what? It really is. It isn’t a fun car, and it isn’t a wildly advanced car, but it’s a great car in a lot of objective ways, like the fact that it can run for weeks, months, years, without ever needing any sort of maintenance including a tire rotation or an oil change or a new battery, because those are the kind of items that Toyota people aren’t really very likely to remember to address anyway.

And you know what he said? “Oh, that’s good to hear. I’ve been thinking about the Corolla.” And then I presume he went to the dealer and bought one, because some expert automotive journalist told him to, when in reality the automotive journalist a) tried to suggest practically anything else, and only capitulated to the Corolla when it became clear there was no other option, and b) is only an “expert” in the sense that he sat through an entire presentation about the Lexus NX at an automaker press event in British Columbia.

And this brings me to my point today, which is that sometimes the best automotive option for someone is the most boring one. Oh, sure, you may know there are better cars on the road, and you may be aware the person is making a mistake, and you might understand that certain vehicles would offer more equipment, and more power, and better gas mileage for less money.

But some people have such dramatic automotive preconceptions that you realize you simply won’t be able to change them. And when someone is dead-set on a boring car from a tried-and-true brand name, there are really only two things you can do: compliment their decision. And never, under any circumstances, accept a ride.