QOTD: What Popular Vehicles Do You Loathe?
In last week’s QOTD, we made a big list of cars that were considered the oddball choice among their market segment, but which you loved anyway.
This week we head in the opposite direction. We’re talking about the popular vehicles you loathe.
This time around, there’s a rule against vehicles in the oddball or outcast category — it’s easy to hate on the outcasts. The vehicles we’re seeking today are those which are presently popular, or which were so when they were new. And you can’t stand them.
Maybe it’s because they have styling that grates on your nerves. Perhaps your chosen vehicle was so popular that you saw it daily, and simply grew sick of looking at it. Or maybe there’s some other obscure reason, psychological or otherwise, for this loathing. Let me give you an example of a single car which fits all the characteristics above.
Here it is, the New Beetle. The moment Volkswagen released its New Beetle, it was everywhere: television shows and movies, around town, school parking lots, and of course in the copious cutesy advertising. I never liked the styling, and I didn’t like how it was marketed. It annoyed me how excited everyone was for the flower vase. It didn’t seem like a particularly good car, per the report I heard from a relative about the bulb change procedure for the headlamps. I loathed it at the time, and still do. The New Beetle 2.0 is better in that it lost some cartoonish features, but not by much. The whole thing makes me shake my head.
But what about you? Which popular cars present or past do you loathe?
H/t to JohnTaurus for this QOTD suggestion.
[Image: Volkswagen, FCA]
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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d-i The Box. By Honda. (Element). Not pretty, but its box shape makes it more useful than its brother, the CR-V.
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