From the July 2017 issue

The mainstream is an easy place to drown in cow pies. Just look at the news, or a TED Talk. And few things are more mainstream than cars. There are more than 240 million light vehicles registered in America, and lately we’ve been buying some 17 million new ones per year. While that churn provides enthusiasts our very own 24-hour news cycle of product intel, it also enables a high-flow fire hose of crap—from marketers, from indifferent consumers who see the wonder that is a modern car as a mere commodity, and from the media. Media other than us, of course. What follows is our field guide to automotive bullshit, because awareness is the first step in an effective defense. At least, we hope so. Because if there’s no point to this, it would just be whining. And that’d be bullshit.

“Consumer.” • 24-hour news cycles. • Roadkill. Some chimpanzees have learned to look both ways before crossing busy streets. Time to up your game, raccoons. • States without mandatory helmet laws. • Automakers rebranding themselves as “mobility providers.” • Not knowing how to drive a manual transmission. It’s really not that hard. And in most cases, if a manual wouldn’t improve your experience, you’re driving the wrong vehicle. Preferring that a computer control your shifting is one symptom of a handicapped ability to love. • Sports-car manufacturers too chickenshit to send their cars to Lightning Lap. • Convertibles with their tops up on nice days.

Sports cars without shredded tires. • Pickups with pristine beds. • The Instagramification of vanning. • Formula E’s #FanBoost. Prior to the race and during the first six minutes, whichever three drivers get the most tweets get an extra 40 horsepower for five seconds. If they’re going to do power-ups, it should include Mario Kart–style upgrades for as long as it takes to chase down and destroy the #FanCurse driver. • Imperial measurements. C’mon, America, let’s join the rest of the world. Here at C/D, we’re already on metric time and will be transitioning to a metric alphabet in the coming months. • Massaging seats—except for the Ford/Lincoln ones that really dig into your rear end.

Autonomy: The Trolley Problem Is Not the Problem A common discussion around autonomous cars ties into an old hypothetical scenario in ethics called “the trolley problem.” In this thought experiment, a trolley is barreling out of control toward five people, whom it will surely kill. You could flip a switch and divert the trolley onto a sidetrack, where it will kill only one person. Do you flip the switch, thereby taking an active role in one death, or do nothing, allowing five deaths without any responsibility?



The autonomous equivalent is a self-driving car making decisions about hitting people in a crosswalk versus at an outdoor café, hitting pedestrians versus hitting solid objects and endangering its own driver and occupants, plowing over Earth’s last western lowland gorilla rather than running through the rest of the zoo, etc. The hand-wringers wonder how we can possibly program a car to make these decisions. They wonder if this isn’t our Ian Malcolm could/should moment. But the flaw in these scenarios is the assumption that a human driver makes a decision at all. It’s proved daily that we just hit whatever we’re pointed at when we panic. A machine couldn’t possibly do worse.

The Irrational Hatred of: Minivans. Moderately sized wheels. Head-up displays. Station wagons. The Prius. Lewis Hamilton. Formula 1. Stability control. Bicycles. Turn signals.

Your tired jokes about Subarus being driven by lesbians. • “Pedal misapplication.” An inexplicably gentle euphemism for unforgivable stupidity. • Bumper stickers that are already implied by the vehicle: “Go vegan!” on a Prius, or promoting gun rights on a pickup. Not Bullshit: “Driving a hybrid leaves me more money for ammo.” • How little karting we and you do. Everybody could use more. • Gesture control. • Masking turbo- or supercharger noise. To thine own self be true, engines. If you’re employing forced induction, be honest about it. • We’re not even going to mention synthesized engine noise. • The panic button on key fobs. • That GM vehicles illuminate their reverse lights when remotely unlocked. “He’s backing up! Oh, wait. He’s 100 yards over there and can’t find his Tahoe.” • Driver vanity mirrors. I like them—Ed. • The presumed link between liking cars and liking watches. • Damage-off mode. • Cannonball rip-offs. • Smart. That it soon will sell only EVs in the U.S. and Canada is an admission of failure, which is in itself not bullshit. • Hating the modifications someone else made to their car when your own car is factory stock.

Relatives Versus Absolutes: The Difference Matters Most “Eco” modes are bullshit, but then there’s the platinum-plated bullshit of vehicles that encourage a light foot by illuminating a little green “eco” or some equivalent in the instrument panel whenever the driver isn’t flooring it. It’s like having Bluetooth-enabled sensors on your teeth and contact lenses so that “skinny” flashes in your peripheral vision any time you’re not chewing. At the most, it should say, “not actively getting fatter.”

Balance of Performance. If a Nissan Altima is competitive against a Porsche Cayman, something’s wrong. • But also, spec racing. To an extent, isn’t it just a contest of who can be more anal? • Capacitive touch. • Any secondary controls other than knobs and buttons. • Carbon-fiber trim. Trim is by nature superfluous. This is not what Colin Chapman had in mind when he said to “add lightness.” • “Midnight,” “Blackout,” or any other “special” edition that just adds black stuff. • MSRP. Not included is destination and delivery, which is added no matter what price you end up negotiating. • Not negotiating a new-car price. • Just about every aspect of the dealership experience. • Mid-grade gas. • Commuting in a truck. • Internet-cool cars. If it’s mostly cool because it’s not cool, then it’s not really cool, is it? • Non-PRNDL shifters [see Ezra Dyer’s column]. • But also: That a person would buy a vehicle with a novel interpretation of such a fundamental control and then not pay attention when using it. Surely you can spare this a few seconds out of your day. • Bike lanes in cities where it snows more than six months of the year.

The Imminent Arrival of: The car-sharing economy. Chinese cars. Autonomy. Fuel-cell cars. Flying cars. An attractive Subaru. An effective voice-control system.

Behavioral Bullshit: ⊳ Not stopping behind the white line. Why do you think it’s there?! Do you even bowl? ⊳ Excessive braking. ⊳ Cornering at walking speed. ⊳ Not driving at least the speed limit. The purpose of driving is to get somewhere quicker than walking. Do that. ⊳ Left-lane squatting. The left lane is for passing and nothing else. ⊳ Leaving your brights on instead of politely flashing to communicate to the driver of an oncoming car that theirs are on. ⊳ Not understanding roundabouts. ⊳ Not understanding the zipper merge. ⊳ Driving on all-season tires and complaining that your car can’t handle snow. ⊳ Shitty parking. ⊳ Violating the on-ramp merge-lane rule and passing the cars ahead when a bunch of you are merging behind a semi. ⊳ Not accelerating aggressively at the first opportunity when you’re the first car in that line. ⊳ Not accelerating aggressively away from a light when you’re first in line. ⊳ Not accelerating aggressively out of construction zones. ⊳ Not accelerating aggressively at every opportunity. Getting out of everyone else’s way helps all of us get where we’re going. ⊳ Not accelerating aggressively at every opportunity. Getting out of everyone else’s way helps all of us get where we’re going.

Any function locked out while a vehicle is in motion. • The J.D. Power Initial Quality Study. It doesn’t measure initial quality, it measures the amount of stuff people can’t figure out about their new cars. • Any system that warns the driver with a beep, chime, or flashing light. • In-car PA systems, as found in the optioned-up Range Rovers. Do we really want the offspring of the hyper-privileged learning how to bark orders from the rear seat?

Really, We’ve Got This Vehicles today do more for us than they ever have. But some go beyond accommodating to fussy overthinking. In modern BMWs, the first push of the power button doesn’t turn the car all the way off, and the first pull of the door handle merely unlocks the door. So you arrive at your destination, throw the car in park, then turn it off twice and pull the door handle twice to get out. It’s the slightest of intrusions, but what was so hard about the process of turning a car off that it needed to be improved on by adding steps?



And Jaguar Land Rover’s stop-start system tries to anticipate when it should do its normal thing and when it should shut the car down entirely. Sometimes when you shift into park, it turns the car off, relieving you of the burden of pushing the off button. Sometimes. Other times, it’ll turn the engine off before you shift into park, then restart it when you shift into park. Still other times, the engine will still be running when you shift into park and then shut itself off a split second before you press the button, so that when you try to turn the car off, you turn it on again. You know, machines, you can probably just leave this one to us.

Nissan basically giving up on the 370Z. • Diesel passenger cars. • “Coupe” SUVs and sedans. • Self-steering timers. Either steer for me or don’t, but don’t fight me on the line through a corner. And if you are going to steer for me, do better than I would were I drunk—which you don’t. • Mazda not being among the best-selling brands in the world. • Travis Kalanick. • Magnus Walker’s beard. • The ’95 Mitsubishi Eclipse GS-X a reader gave us a decade ago, asking us to “do something cool” with it. The coolest things we’ve done so far are let the gas go bad and drop some lumber on it. But hey, we brought it with us when we moved from Hogback. • Our country’s lax driver-­licensing procedures. • That Car and Driver doesn’t have a party bus.

Regulatory Bullshit: ⊳ Unrestrained-occupant crash tests. ⊳ That there’s not a nation-wide standard duration for yellow lights. ⊳ That crash-test regulations push cars to get heavier while fuel-economy regulations drive them to get lighter, but subsidies keep our gas among the cheapest in the world so that nobody here wants the cars that meet fuel-economy requirements, and still we resist the fuel tax desperately needed to fund infrastructure improvements.

Luxury cars charging for basic features, such as any color other than black or white. It’s like expensive hotels charging for Wi-Fi when it’s free at the Holiday Inn Express. • Most of our speed limits. • Series-built hot rods and other efforts to commoditize originality. • Texting while driving. • Traffic schools. Though at least now most everyone knows that they’re just revenue-generating schemes. • That the Cadillac ATS-V doesn’t have an LT1—or 4. • Import restrictions. • Vanity plates that aren’t funny. So, very nearly all of them. • License-plate scanners. • CGI-enhanced car chases in movies. • Gulf livery on new cars. • Gulf livery on any non-car goods. • Fieros without Italian-­supercar body kits. • Paddle shifters affixed to the steering wheel rather than the steering column. You’re really going to grab that downshift at full steering lock? • Living one’s life a quarter-mile at a time. • The Mitsubishi Mirage. • Drift mode. If you need a special mode to do it, you can’t really do it. • Focus groups. • Target buyers.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io