QOTD: What's the Most Generic, Forgettable Car On Sale Today?
It happens every day on the road. Vehicle-shaped appliances pass by in the other lanes, or perhaps cross an intersection in front of you. You don’t take notice, because they’re the same ovoid or trapezoidal shape as the rest of the Frost Beige blobs on your thrilling commute to the cubicle farm.
But focus your eyes and clear the fog for a moment, because I want to ask you something.
The average driver is surrounded by hundreds of other cars during their commute, or really any journey of any length through a populated area. But which among those vehicles do you never seem to notice, or forget exist? It’s easy to direct your gaze to the single bright yellow Aventador, which may or may not be on fire. It’s much harder to notice eight copies of a bland four-cylinder sedan. It’s the latter that I want you to ponder. What car do you always fail to notice because it’s that generic?
There’s more than one way to approach today’s inquiry. Perhaps forgettable means you never specifically notice your pick on the road, as it’s just too boring, too anonymous. Or perhaps it means you do notice it but forget it almost immediately as it makes no mental/visual/emotional impact whatsoever. Maybe it’s forgettable in that it’s still on sale today, but you never consider it and thought it died years ago.
I’ll leave you with no specific answer from me, all anonymous-like, and just one rule: Make your pick something that’s sold new in 2017. There are plenty of Millennium Green Vulcan Taurii running around being all oval-y and bland, but none of those are made today.
Show me how generic we can be.
Interested in lots of cars and their various historical contexts. Started writing articles for TTAC in late 2016, when my first posts were QOTDs. From there I started a few new series like Rare Rides, Buy/Drive/Burn, Abandoned History, and most recently Rare Rides Icons. Operating from a home base in Cincinnati, Ohio, a relative auto journalist dead zone. Many of my articles are prompted by something I'll see on social media that sparks my interest and causes me to research. Finding articles and information from the early days of the internet and beyond that covers the little details lost to time: trim packages, color and wheel choices, interior fabrics. Beyond those, I'm fascinated by automotive industry experiments, both failures and successes. Lately I've taken an interest in AI, and generating "what if" type images for car models long dead. Reincarnating a modern Toyota Paseo, Lincoln Mark IX, or Isuzu Trooper through a text prompt is fun. Fun to post them on Twitter too, and watch people overreact. To that end, the social media I use most is Twitter, @CoreyLewis86. I also contribute pieces for Forbes Wheels and Forbes Home.
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The obvious answer are the Corolla, Sonata, Camry, 200 crop of sedans. But I have to say it's the Subaru Legacy because they seem to have attempted to make it an even more boring amalgamation of every other mainstream sedan on the market.
Fusion. Taurus. Fiesta. Mustang.
In today's topic: Cars I do not like.
The Kia K900. Just a rip off of actual luxury cars like Lexus, BMW, Audi etc. Looks like something you would find on the Chinese grey market like a knock off designer hand bag. The Kia Amati was worse. That thing looked like a grey market Jaguar S-type, but with more atrocious styling and lack of any proportion.