It’s an infantile “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” reaction to “enviroweenies.”
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Basically. Also overlaps with the “more money than brains” crowd.
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I had to look it up.
Heavens to Murgatroyd, don’t we have anything better to do, anymore?
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Most of them don’t appear to be even upper middle class. That doesn’t make you wrong though.
I owned a FIAT 127 (basis for the Yugo 45 in @anon61221983’s gif). Mine had the middle engine, which meant that with a good tailwind I could (and often did) cruise at 90mph down the M1 into London. It was a great car for me, but finally met an untimely end when it was run over (while parked) by a Volvo. The 127 was in tiny bits on the road, the Volvo was able to drive away.
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Seriously, you don’t get rich wasting money.
Bill Gates still drives a Honda Civic. Maybe he’s upgraded to an Accord, but a few years ago my brother valeted his car for him, and it was a FORD TAURUS.
My dad was the foreman for the fire alarms in his Lake Washington estate’s renovation, and while Gates has a garage full of cars rivaling Jay Leno’s, he doesn’t drive anything expensive in the city where he’s more likely to get in an accident or get his car scratched or dinged. He likes Porsches, but he drives beaters when he’s in town.
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Seriously, if I ever get that kind of crazy unimaginably, seriously like so rich it’s incomprehensible, I hope I end up like Bill Gates:
The key isn’t that he talks a big game, he backs it up by dumping so much money into so many good causes I can’t conceive of a better thing he could possibly do with his money.
(seriously, try to imagine a billion dollars in stuff. You’re probably way low by a lot.)
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Not in tRump’s ameica.
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(I had to google to figure out whether you were joking. 
)
It’s the same where I live. Every drive is like the Australian trucker dash cam videos but with fewer actual wrecks.
A childhood friend moved here and when he and I met up we had a long rant about how terrible the drivers are here.
No one in my family has ever owned a new car. We probably could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble if we’d splurged for 10 year old luxury cars instead of 10 year old GM vehicles.
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I miss my 85 GT. One of my favorite cars I’ve owned.
Sadly it needed a bunch of work when I had neither time or money for it, so it went to a new home.
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Seriously. The Tacoma and Frontier of today are freaking huge - and they are, so far as I know, the smallest trucks available in the US. If the Colorado and Canyon are “compact” trucks, I say we need a “subcompact truck” class.
I drove an early '90s Mazda B-series truck for many years and loved it. My neighbor has an ('80s?) Toyota truck that is immaculately kept, and I envy it every time I go past. A few years ago, there was a rumor that Mahindra was going to bring a small, bare-bones, diesel truck to the US, and I was ready with my checkbook.
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Vancouver and environs is overall pretty good, but has enough extreme outliers (driving on sidewalks, spinouts in busy intersections, races, gangsters, etc) to keep a steady stream of horror stories going.
Did you know: a standard Ford F-150 is wider than an original military spec Hummer?
Also: an original Hummer is 4.57 meters long.
A current Toyota Camry is 4.85 meters long.
True story.
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The lack of small trucks in the US is an interesting phenomenon.
Part of it is due to the Chicken Tax, lack of profit margins (larger trucks often have gigantic profit margins), and of course #murica.
Jalopnik explains:
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I think I’ll trust my data gathering skills on this one. I didn’t even notice it till I was cut off/tailgated/stopped in my tracks/ a dozen times. And it’s happened a lot since. Drivers of other cars can also be terrible, but I haven’t noticed any other particular correlation with car model or type.
I know TaTa was going to before the great recession. I was on their mailing list and had swung by where the dealership was going to be in DFW.
Then they emailed their mail list saying “the economy blah blah blah”
I was sad. I really wanted that ugly-ass Indian truck in central Texas,
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Yes, that’s the very basis for confirmation bias.
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Arguably, that depends on whether you consider the transportation that you get from it a “return.” If you compare the cost of ownership to renting, leasing, ubering, taxiing, or bus fare, you might come out ahead, if you buy cheap and hold it for a long period. Of course, like a house, where you consume the “housing” in its entirety, buying a fancier car mostly means paying more.
Although the SU carburetors on them are less so…
