10 cars I dislike. and reasons why, of course.

So, I felt like writing a blog, and I can’t think of much that happened other than a slightly changed repeat of the tree fiasco of yesterday and you don’t want to read about that, so i thought I’d just make a pointless list of cars that I don’t like and why I ddon’t like them. Yay.

1) Porsches that are painted pink. I saw one the other day and thought ‘why ruin a perfectly good car with a dreadful colour?’ Surely the only reason you paint a car a dreadful colour is to get noticed and with a Porsche you’ve got that anyway, rendering the whole exercise kind of pointless.

2) Porsches that are painted yellow. Ditto. Do people not think of the depreciation on these things???

3) the Daewoo/Chevrolet Matiz. Branding it a chevrolet is not going to make it cool, it’s just going to bring Chevvys image down.  It is cheap, but looks it and lots of the ones I’ve seen seem to be painted ‘Burnt Sienna’ (a.k.a urrrrgh-ish orange)

4) The Mini. I may be alone in this one, but I dislike it (this is referring to the new one. The old one was fine) because it is an obvious fashion statement, and I dislike obvious fashion statement cars especially ones with a ‘retro image’ like this one. It is also not that mini any more, so defeats the purpose of the name, and you are paying so much for the styling, as a decent one costs about the same as a decent Ford Focus and that is a much more practical car, that in my opinion looks better. It’s not even like the mini is rare. I see so many that its just nto head turning at all. If you want a mini get an old one. They might be more expensive to run, smaller and secondhand but noone buys a new mini on practicality anyway…

5) The Beetle. Ditto the mini. The only exception to this retro styling thing is probably the Fiat 500. I quite like that actually, however I can see I’ll like this car much less when  a few more get sold, although at least it is fairly cheap compared to the Beetle and MIni.

6) The Maybach. It is ostentatious, an outrageous display of wealth, from what I’ve heard not even that great unless you’ve got  a chauffeur, hideously expensive and you might as well buy an S-class mercedes. Or just go for the obvious choice of the Rolls Phantom if you really want to spend over 300 grand on a car. At least thats imposing and scary not just showy-off.

7) The Subaru Impreza WRX. I am not a fan of normal-ish cars with massive spoilers on the back and this is probably the worst. I also don’t like racing stripes on non-powerful cars but this is nto the worst culprit for people painting those on. Yes, I know this car has over 200 brake horsepower so its not exactly slow, but does it really need such over-the-top race styling?  I prefer things like understated hot hatches that look the same as the normal version, unless you’re going to go for the full-on supercars, which can of course get away with showy because that’s msot of their reason for being.

8) The Perodua Kelisa. If you’ve only got £5000 to spend on a car then don’t buy a new one or you’ll end up with this. Be sensible and get a nice used polo or something…

9) Any Hummer. They are just too big. End of.

10) The Toyota Prius. Unfortuneately I must end on a classic target for people to criticise but it must make this list sheerly for it’s so called environmental statistics that don’t seem to add up. Fristly, the quoted figures are 65mpg. The new Polo Bluemotion can do 74.5mpg and that is a diesel and is significantyl cheaper. I know that the Prius is much bigger, but a lot of people don’t need a bigger car and if you do you could get the greenline focus which does over 60mpg.  On a road test I read recently, the Prius was out-mpg’d by a BMW 5 series, which is a much bigger car with efficient driving stuff enabled, so it shows you don’t even get the stated figure. Also, think how much of a carbon footprint the Prius must have had to be made. It is from an international company so all of the materials and labour will have been sourced from wherever is cheapest meaning high carbon from shipping, and from what I’ve heard, the Prius is worse than a lot of cars for this. The really green thing would just be to keep your old car for a few more years until it is no longer economical to run. You may be able to look down on all the ‘un-green’ people in thier old bangers that only do 30mpg, but they’re not having the carbon footprint of importing a new car. If you’re going to buy a new car anyway, you might as well get something you like, not just something that you think will make you look green. Rant over now, sorry.

 

So, there it is, my bottom 10 list of my least favourite cars. I’ll probably think of one I’ve forgotten then… I hope you stayed with me and didn’t get bored (which you probably did as I realize I’ve moaned about the prius rather a lot, and one of these days I’ll get round to writing a less moany car blog, with the cars I do like. Until then, adios amigos…