I wish I didn’t have to see one almost every time I drive somewhere. They are such a standout eyesore that it feels like I see them constantly.
I think they are very impressive looking iconic cars in a vacuum, like DeLoreans. Everything else is really unfortunate about then, but imo the eyesore part largely comes from the -very justified- cultural baggage and pretty much that only.
Without the cultural baggage, yeah, they are interesting looking from the side and front quarter angles. But the back side undeniably looks like a trash can or dumpster. I was behind one yesterday with a pink/green hueshift wrap. When I was in traffic behind it, it just looked like I had a green dumpster in front of me lol.
Nah they’re ugly af.
If you wrap them (like you should), then you can make them look cool though. Some of my favorites that I’ve seen are bright pink, yellow, and various wraps covered in decals.
Without wrapping them, they look like scrap metal on wheels.
Even a paint job makes them look passable, ironically enough, and I’m what should be the target demo for cyberpunk murder wagons.
I maintain part of the scam was always trying to push the cost of painting the things on the consumers. It’s not like it’s new information that steel rusts…
Maybe because it can’t survive a trip to the carwash
What’s that? OTA software update couldn’t fix that?!
It’s bad… But the Pontiac Aztek was a thing.
But the Aztek was the first crossover. Part car, part SUV. The world didn’t know they wanted it yet. Now almost every vehicle is either a truck or a CUV. I can’t see what is going to be redeemable about the CT. Maybe electric pickups will take off among the Tradies, but CT wasn’t even first there.
Didn’t it get a redemption ark with Breaking Bad?
I don’t know if being given to a character to prove how shitty his life is can qualify as a redemption ark.
Yeah good point. I was mainly talking from the perspective of the car though. Prior to that show, no show would have dared to write that car into a story, that’s how bad the Aztek reception was to my recollection. The fact that it was in the show at all made it a redemption. And the effect of it being in the show, despite it being discontinued, caused a jump in sales on the used market.
I know I shouldn’t judge people without getting to know them but every time I see a cyber truck, I immediately think that the owner must be a gigantic douche canoe.
Never been able to be sold outside of the US, including Europe or Asia because it would never pass the safety test, says it all.
It also says something about the American safety tests and laws. Americans are so afraid of Chinese cars that pass all safety tests but this unsafe monstrosity roams the streets?
Not only does it fail to pass basic safety tests it’s also too heavy to drive on a normal licence in pretty much all the countries of the world. It weighs so much that it qualifies as a truck, not a pickup truck, a six wheeler. It’s so heavy it has to take alternate routes around old bridges.
Even if it was legal in Europe, it’d be such an inconvenience to drive that no one would want one.
Eh, they sold them in Canada too, I’ve seen many of these garbage containers wobbling around on the roads here.
America only cares about the people buying cars.
Those pedestrians can either buy Canyoneros of their own or go die with the poor.
I just came back from a country full of Chinese cars…I gotta say there were some sexy ass solid feeling automobiles… Saw some tiny ones too, but I feel like I saw more busted rebadged tiny Chevys.
I saw a swasticar in Stavanger the other day.
Capitalism turning electric vehicles into a horrible, unproductive, ugly symbol of right wing fascism is wild as shit to see in my lifetime.
Car manufacturers promoting fascism are sadly a thing though. Ford loved Nazi ideology and let’s not even mention German brands.
… oh … oh dear, oh no.
That’s… no. No, don’t say that, VW, dear god.
Tbf it wasn’t VW, it was a Top Gear joke
Also Berlin to Warsaw in one tank is trivial so it wouldn’t be something to advertise anyway
Ok, thats… that makes more sense. I’ve not seen too much of Top Gear, but… that makes sense.
It kinda makes a lot of sense I feel that they’d fit together. You have a form of transportation that is dangerous enough that requiring government licensing is generally agreed to be desirable, meaning that if its the primary option, a government can effectively take away a person’s ability to participate in public life or make a living, and easily justify it on safety grounds. Cars are expensive, so a government can both funnel money to its partners in private industry by promoting them, and subsidize them for the populations it considers “desirable” as a means to seem like it has created abundance and luxury (see how how the VW bug came to be for example). And, a society built around cars is one that tends towards physical separation and isolation between people (because of space inefficient infrastructure and relatively quick travel outside of densely built areas), which promotes distrust of others. Thats not to say that cars are inherently fascist or that most people that promote them do so to benefit that sort of ideology, but that if I was some kind of fascist dictator seeking to control a population, Id probably want to push them into buying and relying on cars.
Wouldn’t fascists, to the definition, want a cohesive nationalistic society and identity? Fascists want a strong nation.
The Nazis promoted cars because nobody really had a car and they were coming out of a depression, they wanted to pump up their manufacturing industry for economic benefit and it was also a good excuse to build manufacturing capability for war. Cars were therefore very nationalistic, owning a car was good for Germany and German jobs.
Pushing for cars in most places does not benefit national industry, and pushes money and jobs offshore.
I feel like cars could only be potentially seen as a fascist tool if one were to ramp up national production of cars and tariff or ban imports of cars from other countries
Seems to me that it’s much easier to create a single cohesive nationalistic identity by destroying every other place where people can find identity. Which often involves groups of people interacting and finding ways to work together.
Bit like how people with few real life social connections are much more likely to fall into parasocial relationships.
Also a bit like the isolation step before the abuse starts.
Nice writeup!
Wouldn’t it be too late for that today because everyone already has access to cars? I mean more than the “brand” thing (they could probably do fascist sneakers and handbags for example).
Unless the transition to EVs is capitalised on and ICE cars are quickly phased out
Yeah, thats true.
I wish to say that while electric cars are better than ICE cars for the environment, their lifetime emissions especially if required infrastructure is taken into account is really high, and they aren’t as “green” as car manufacturers make them seem. It’s just an inefficient use of energy and space that requires massive amounts of polluting asphalt per person using that mode of transport.
This bullshit has been thoroughly debunked many many times.
Did you even read the article, because no.
Interestingly, the specific article cited is more making the case that all passenger cars are bad, and we’d be better off with e-bikes, transit, and walkable cities. i.e.: I don’t think hes saying 'EVs are worse than ICE," which is where the ‘lifetime emissions’ line usually goes. He’s saying “fuck cars, EVs not excepted.”
This is the reality many don’t accept.
We can’t everyone gets a private vehicle our way out of climate change.
Fiero wins again!
It might sometimes be on fire, but unlike a cybertruck you can put it out!
Man I LOVE the fiero… And I hate that I do.
I daily one, I know just what you are going though.
Man what a wonderful pile of pontiac shit it is.
At least the Cybertruck makes sure you don’t need to buy a new car, by locking its doors. /s
Had to look up the Edsel to see what a shifter in the middle of the steering wheel would look like.
On the next car I design, the shifter will be located in the trunk. Just to keep things interesting.
The only thing nuttier might be door release handles under the floor mats.
So you own a Tesla, I see.
Nah, but the crash after which four people burned to death while talking to the 911 dispatcher because they couldn’t open the doors happened just outside my city.
I’ve been in cars with electronic doors and the emergency latch is always super obvious, brightly coloured, and in one case glowed in the dark. For some reason Tesla feel the need to hide it.
I wish we had more variation in car designs but I suppose it would make licencing difficult. I’d like it if we could drive with foot pedals, push down to accelerate and twist left and right to turn like how it works on an aircraft. Then you could drive hands-free.
How about sticking it somewhere between the engine and transmission? When operating it in the winter, your fingers would stay nice and warm.
I mean … I don’t hate it…
Half of cars today have push-button shifters anyway, and the steering wheel is kind of a fun and novel place to put them.
It’s definitely more intriguing than my boring airbag steering wheel.
Dude, the Edsel didn’t even have seatbelts.
I’ve been driving for years and I’ve never used my airbag even once. What a waste of money.
Well now I get to laugh even harder at the suckers who bought them.
More dangerous than the Pinto, too
The thing the Pinto was famous for, its fuel tank being in the rear and exploring, only killed 27 people according to the NHTSA. So pretty low bar.
Ford also voluntarily recalled 1.5 million of them and addressed the fuel tank issue that caused the problem.
“Fixing” the cybertruck would involve offering refunds scrapping them.
All that lithium sitting in storage lots, wasted. Tesla could save the CT with some sort of body kit conversion that tears it down to the frame and rebuilds it as a more traditional truck. It’ll still not be a great truck, but better than letting all those batteries rot.
If my fuel tank went exploring I’d be worried too
We used to have standards for our vehicles
This is actually really funny, because Ralph Nader literally started his activist career pointing out that they didn’t in 1965.
The book, critical of the automotive industry, argued that many American automobiles were generally unsafe to operate.
Auto manufacturers were eventually forced to add seatbelts and protection for roll-overs.
Nader’s book was cited as the reason to create what became the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
When the original bill was passed,
Speaker of the United States House of Representatives John William McCormack said the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act was brought about by the "crusading spirit of one individual who believed he could do something: Ralph Nader.”
He also had to modify the corvair he claimed was unsafe to cause it to do unsafe things… Nader is a piece of shit.
Oh totally, Nader is the piece of shit here…
In response to Nader’s criticisms, GM attempted to sabotage Nader’s reputation. It “(1) conducted a series of interviews with acquaintances of the plaintiff, ‘questioning them about, and casting aspersions upon [his] political, social, racial and religious views; his integrity; his sexual proclivities and inclinations; and his personal habits’; (2) kept him under surveillance in public places for an unreasonable length of time; (3) caused him to be accosted by girls for the purpose of entrapping him into illicit relationships; (4) made threatening, harassing and obnoxious telephone calls to him; (5) tapped his telephone and eavesdropped, by means of mechanical and electronic equipment, on his private conversations with others; and (6) conducted a ‘continuing’ and harassing investigation of him.”
Nader, on the other hand, literally took the money he won for GM’s harassment and intimidation and put it into a consumer protection organization.
Then
He went on to lobby for consumer rights, helping drive the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air Act, among others
You’re fucking delusional to pretend he was the bad guy in this situation.
Whoa, dude, personal attack much?
Two things can be true. The car manufacturers are massive pieces of shit as most corporations are, but also Nader is a piece of shit…
He picked a target and fudged the data until it said what he wanted. Just because he was doing it to promote something good doesn’t make it right.
Like so much over the past decade or so, I really thought it was a joke when I first saw one.
Idiots with too much money generate this kind of bs IMO.
Probably because the are so noticeable, but I see 2 or 3 of them on my way to/from work. Hard to tell them apart, but that is a lot in the 20 miles I go.
They tend to be concentrated in my experience. Big tech hubs have a higher concentration. I see a lot of them around Seattle for example.
Meta and Amazon employees on their way to build ICE databases and creeper glasses
Mmmhmmm. And Microsoft
See way too many of these ugly shit-boxes in Vancouver.
Who could have possibly foreseen this?
Shhh!
What about datacenters in space??!! 😮😛!!!
They’ve moved on to mirrors in space now, after briefly experimenting with advertising on the moon which they gave up on when they realised no one would be able to see it.
Solar Roadways!!!
Also: !bulgroZ liah llA
