Now, the above interaction takes place on YouTube so keep that in mind. Also, the person could be trolling, in which case I’ve taken the bait. However, it could also be an example of blind ignorance on the part of the poster. That person may truly believe their Honda S2000 can zip to 100 mph in less than ten seconds (It can’t) and that it wouldn’t need more than seven seconds to climb from there to 140 (It would).
That got me thinking, as everyone coming here also filters out to other corners of the Automotive Internet. Where have you seen other examples of folks blinded by their own A) ignorance or B) adherence to brand loyalty over actual facts?
You get zero points for any answers containing the word “Tesla”.
Hooniverse Asks: What's the most inane example of brain-dead automotive fanboyism you've witnessed?
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65 responses to “Hooniverse Asks: What's the most inane example of brain-dead automotive fanboyism you've witnessed?”
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As someone who drove a 1977 Corvette from 1990-1996 while in high school and college, all the people that told me that their: dad/uncle/cousin/etc. had a 1983 Corvette. The only 1983 corvettes were pilot production models for the new C4. that was an immediate BS flag. There was one girl that said here dad drove a 1983 Corvette for a while, her dad was a manager at the Bowling Green plant.
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Strange. Everyone’s dad/uncle/cousin etc. had a Trans Am with “T-tops and the big eagle on the hood just like that” too. GM had 200% market share in the late 70’s.
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The technical forums on VW Vortex and LegacyGT.com come to mind. On the other hand, the forum participants at Alfabb tend to be the kind of knowledgeable and erudite folks you would expect to be capable of keeping decades old Italian cars on the road.
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Throw in the Ford ST twin forums… made me swear off forums.
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Yeah, but try suggest to European Alfisti that the 156/159 was a bit “meh” and sit back with your flame-suit and popcorn.
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Does attempting to corner the market count?
http://i640.photobucket.com/albums/uu125/mharrell_photographs/KVMini1x2.jpg-
The Hunt brothers approve this message.
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Weeell, it is stockpiling metal.
But is it precious metal?
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Objection your Honor! We have not seen any evidence to support the existence of a market!
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Me buying a project car was pretty inane.
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Anyone paying 5 figures for an unremarkable IH Scout.
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For whatever reason, I found myself reading a standalone blog that some guy made for a Taurus SHO community that modified them, I think he homebrewed a supercharger setup or something. The great part was a section he set up under the heading “Counterpoint” where he posted an unsolicited email/comment that he received from someone evidently offended by the existence of modified Tauruses and was very proud of his Buick Grand National. If you had a drunken high school sophomore write a mad lib for hate and then inserted the particulars, that’s how it would have read. The Taurus guy memorializing it as he did was pretty cool.
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I’ll have to see if I still have a copy of the original ad, but the owner of the 1982 Buick Grand National takes the win: http://www.beforeblack.net/CantTouch.htm
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I believe the classic example is the “my front-wheel-drive car is faster off the line because the weight of the engine is over the front wheels.”
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Maybe if he’s going in reverse…
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Guy V. Coulombe and his Internet exploits to save the K Cars.
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A coworker once tried to tell me his new 1997 Ford Expedition was averaging 27 miles per gallon. I told him “Bullshit”.
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I had a coworker with an Explorer that thought he had a button to turn the odometer off. “The button says “O/D off.” He was Romanian, which is apparently the West Virginia/Mississippi/Florida of Europe.
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Hey, I’ve lived in Florida for 50 years. Shaduppa your face. 🙂
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Just seems “Florida Man” and “Romanian Man” might be related. https://floridaman.com/
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Edsel people. They’re the worst. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1b733be11d43206a569a27b4fd1a039456ee56c05ee7e1d7cbde1fdc2decc5f9.jpg
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Saddened to learn that there are more than one of these.
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It is better than the Panther based Packard.
https://i2.wp.com/hooniverse.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/7931323-700-0.jpg?w=700-
That’s painful on so many levels, not only does it make a Mitsuoka look like Pininfarina, it desecrates Packard’s legacy and screws up a perfectly good Town Car.
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Wow… agreed. That’s truly awful.
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Actually it’s a Ford Crown Vic. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8150ab0447d36faf5e254a2a289bed55ca6c4ebbfbad5c218a83ec0636e9c1fd.jpg
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great, fugly and too cheap to spring for the Lincoln
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Who in their right mind builds this and does not conclude that destruction trumps publicity?
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Hovering tantalizingly near so-bad-it’s-good, this would be a fine base for layering on even more baroque hideousness to hurtle right over the edge. Superfly headlights! Dagmars! Curb feelers! And, it’s just a Crown Vic, so how hard could it be to fix? I’ll give you a couple thousand for it if the whitewalls are still good!
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I had to Google that to be convinced it wasn’t a Photoshop.
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I have a Mr. Zimmer on line two, he sounds quite excited.
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After all these years, that front end still looks like a…yep.
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I cut my automotive teeth modifying AMCs. We don’t brag about jack shit.
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I’ll call out myself. First car was a ’65 Mustang. Next two were Ford trucks. Then 25 years ago I switched to Chevy. Now my kids are Chevy fan-boys and we all make fun of Mustangs. I am now that blind fan-boy, loyal to Corvettes, while secretly loving the new Mustangs. Please don’t reveal my secret.
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So, I’m an old guy who has owned an ’07 Civic Si ( Fiji Blue Pearl ) since new. So young 20-something husband of a woman I worked with would drop by in his beat-to-absolute crap CRX. And he would proceed to tell me about my car. (First thing that I did was purchase both volumes of the Honda Factory Service Manual). “Young man”, I would remind him, “I own the car…I knew exactly what I was buying.” No avail. Then he proceeded to tell me that it would go 155. “No, Manny, I’ve driven it 123. Maybe on a cold day, slightly downhill with a tailwind it might hit 140.” He insisted that it would go 155.All I could do was look at him, shake my head and sigh.
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Odds are he’s got a friend who was screwing with him and switched the speedo to KM/H.
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I had a Ford Contour SVT at one point (blind to the fact that I hated FWDs), and the advertised top speed was 143 mph. I managed 141, but didn’t care for the experience at all. I realized at that point that while I appreciated acceleration and handling, I could care less how far my car could exceed the speed limit.
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For ultimate levels of blind optimism and divorce from reality, this thread on the UK “Retro Rides” forum takes some beating. The dude might have the worlds best CA18DE powered Nissan ZX Coupe, but there’s no way on earth it’s going to hit 160mph without JATO or freefall.
http://retrorides.proboards.com/thread/129901-
He says it’s JDM spec, so the speedo is in km/h. That car may go a ton o’mph, sure!
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Get on any motorcycle facebook page and ask which oil is the best oil.
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Nearly any mention of oil on a forum brings out two things, equally annoying. First will be those trying to prove themselves the most virtuous by explaining to everyone how his exacting specifications are really only met by certain production batches of ultra-tech synthetic Swedish market Castrol and that it MUST be changed on some very short interval along with the filters from a source that he won’t divulge. Second will be the Amsoil rep, incentivized such as he is by the Amway meets Mary Kay meets door-to-door magazine salesman marketing structure they have adopted to tout his products’ superior performance in a lab test that showed a bowling ball coated in his product surviving a free fall from 10,000 feet in better condition than one treated with Mobil 1. Eventually someone wanders in and asks when the last time a modern engine failed from a lubrication related issue and the thread dies.
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I knew an engineer who used a different brand of oil every time he changed it. His theory was that each brand of oil used a different formulation of detergents and additives. By using the different brands in rotation he was cleaning deposits that some oils might miss. He figured it would maximize engine life. True his wife made him trade cars every 3 or 4 years but he always insisted on giving the notebook to the salesman at trade in so he could pass it to the next owner.
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Yeah, that’s the guy.
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This is why it’s more fun on motorcycle forums – once you think the thread is over, someone will then invariably mention clutch slippage and/or wear rates and blame a particular brand of oil, and it’s on all over again.
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What is this clutch slippage of which you speak? (I ride a BMW with a dry clutch, that said clutch spline grease is a good thread starter)
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hehe You mean that’s a discussion on a BMW forum? Admittedly, I’ve never been on a Beemer forum myself, I imagine that nearly every thread is ended by the first person who quotes the correct BMW Motorrad or Touratech part number.
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I used to follow the owners club fora and threads were more likely to end with a link to a snowbum or Oak Okleshen article. Also the specific issue of spline grease was complicated by BMW recommending different products at different times.
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There was one guy that came to mind from the earlier days of the net who apparently had a car that defied the laws of physics and thermodynamics, but on searching him it seems he has an actual intellectual disability so I don’t think it is right to name him.
As an indication, he apparently created his own forum which was described as “its a forum for his many personalities to meet and discuss issues that concern them”
I’m sure there’s more than a few people that bought a VW Routan for it’s “German Engineering.”
Though, that could be credited to VW’s good advertising.
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Kudos to whoever in VW’s market research shop identified the lack of Venn diagram overlap between “people who buy VW’s for the European sophistication” and “people who recognize a Chrysler minivan”. Fish in a barrel!
So you’re gonna sit there, all smug, and try to convince me that the B stands for “German”? Now who’s the idiot?
No, the B stands for “Bavarian”, everyone knows that D stands for “German.”
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That’s why it’s spelled “Djerman”, you eediot!
Also, it’s clearly Bundesrepublik Motoren Werke. 😉-
if you want to confuse the issue further bring up EMW and DMW.
EMW was Eisenacher Motorenwerke, the 1950s East German continuation of BMW using a red and white roundel until it was reorged and made Wartburgs
DMW was Dawson’s Motors Wolverhampton and made motorcycles from the 50s to the 70s.-
Don’t forget ZMW!
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2002-05-05/travel/0205050275_1_yugo-america-malcolm-bricklin-zastava-motor-works
(Yes, BMW quickly sent Mr. Bricklin a firmly worded cease-and-desist letter).
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It’s brand agnostic, but a lot of the luddite-ism over small boosted four cylinders gets me. Sure, in a vacuum, a lazy V8 will probably outlast a turbo four, but we’re assuming the small turbo four won’t outlast the entire car surrounding it (because automatic transmissions or bad electrics, or rust! have never been the death of a car), or that it won’t at least last on a typical car’s lifecycle.
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I’m pretty optimistic about turbo fours, but sincerely wished they sounded more like NA V8s.
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Conversely, the irrelevant obsession with specific output. 300 horsepower is 300 horsepower whether you get it out of 2 liters or 5. There is nothing inherently more efficient about getting it out of a boosted four cylinder instead of a V8. More impressive, sure, but not any better in a practical sense.
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The 2L engine will normally be more efficient in the 90+% of the time when you are not using 300 horsepower. But I agree there aren’t any production engines and very few modified ones where the power output is impressive on a ‘how did they do that’ level.
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Especially when the manufacturers seem to define ‘lifecycle’ as 5 years or 100,000 miles…
https://jalopnik.com/ultimate-level-bmw-douche-double-parks-takes-bat-to-pi-1713911021
conclude thread.
the biggest bummer is that you have to be logged in to read the actual thread. pretty sure that was not the case when i first saw that story – i recall, and my memory may be faulty but you can forgive me for imagining this if it isn’t real, that kid talking about how the truck owner shouldn’t be mad because his truck was a piece of shit, not a quality motor vehicle like a BMW.
i don’t know if they make enough kool-aid powder in a day to fill the swimming pool this guy drank. to their credit, the other forum members recognized what a douche the kid was, even though they were BMW drivers.
Every now and then someone talks about their 60s T’bird being faster than some “rice burner”. I think my 300 HP 1960 hits 60 in 9 or 10 seconds. My wife’s Accord Hybrid will run rings around it in acceleration. Actually, I think all of my other cars, with the possible exception of the Prius and Protege accelerate faster.
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Even the fastest muscle cars are now outdone by the fastest hot hatches
It’s the TDI crowd, bar none.
Most of the time, brand loyalty divorced from facts involves performance or reliability claims, and that absolutely happens on TDIClub, too, but that’s not the most inane.
The most inane would be the arguments that popped up in the wake of Dieselgate.
The second most inane argument was that the EPA had no authority to regulate any emissions whatsoever, because a contractor to the EPA trying to investigate a gold mine full of toxic waste accidentally damaged the plug keeping that toxic waste from spilling into the Animas River, and therefore the EPA causes pollution and has no moral basis for regulating anyone else’s pollution.
Yes.
That was the second most inane argument.
The most inane argument is a real doozy. It’s that the Dieselgate accusations were a fabrication made by the EPA and CARB, in service of Agenda 21, a UN conspiracy to enslave American people in urban ghettos, by preventing them from using any motorized transportation other than short-range electric cars (that can be stopped by the government if people are moving around too much) and mass transit (that doesn’t let people move around too much). (Agenda 21 exists, but it’s nothing of the sort. It’s basically just voluntary suggestions for making more sustainable cities.)
Yes.
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Inane doesn’t come close to describing that!
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