Forgive the preposition dangling at the end of the title. I really wanted it to read: “The Top 4 Cars People Would Not Want to be Caught Dead In,” but that might have eliminated the prospect of publication for more than a grammatical impropriety.
The point I wish to get across is the notion of embarrassment as caused by a car. Not only do some people wish not to own embarrassing vehicles, they don’t want to be seen in anybody else’s either. Some seriously flawed characteristic of the following automobiles make them so undesirable as to be seriously shunned, cause uncontrollable chuckle, eye-rolling, finger pointing, or worse.
I must say that the list was generated by a survey of friends, neighbors, relatives, and car-dealer acquaintances in my Southern California neighborhood, a place where every other car on the road is a Porsche. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but not a big one. Californians love their cars. The pretty, powerful, and beautifully un-embarrassing ones are abundant, because nobody wants to be seen in a car that practically everybody around can’t stand.
I must also say that my neighborhood survey which ranked the top four cars not-to-be-caught-dead-in exactly matched the first three cars reported in CNBC’s survey. This is not a coincidence. Besides standing out like sore thumbs, something must really be wrong with them.
Smart fortwo
This is the epitome of the modern day smart car. Smart, a subsidiary of Mercedes Benz, ought to know better than to make a smart car look dumb, imparting in its design such an unfortunate anthropomorphic characteristic. It gets an “F” in my grade book for Funny-looking. In my neighborhood, the “F” stands for the rude diminutive of Flatulence Car. I suppose its genius-level mileage makes up for it. All participants in both the CNBC survey and mine were in 100 percent agreement on the silly look of such a smart vehicle.
Nissan Cube
This automobile looks like — you’ve got it — a cube. In white, it looks like a Good Humor ice cream truck. In beige, it looks like a big brown bag. In black, its presence strikes fear that aliens will emerge. The name, Cube, must have originated in Nissan’s focus group sessions as “cute,” with a typo imparting a more accurate descriptor. Keeping with the theme, our survey respondents believe all Cube owners are “squares” and down one dimension from a cube.
Hummer 2
This automobile is too politically incorrect to warrant a presence on any American road, street, or highway. It’s simply too too: too big to fit down narrow city streets, too wide to slide into micron-sized parking places, too lumbering to do the required zero to 60 in 5 seconds flat onto the freeway, too much of a gasoline guzzler to leave money for food, and a terrible waste of a boulder-balking, four-wheel-drive behemoth on a flat sandy beach, where they aren’t allowed anyway.
Chevy Volt
The Volt jolts the unwary owner with a peculiar, if not utterly dangerous, hybrid power system. EV batteries can set a Chevy Volt ablaze, along with the garage it’s housed in or cars nearby. Being seen in a Volt suggests its occupants care nothing about their own safety nor their assets at home. Notice how nobody parks close to a Chevy Volt.
There you have it: The four biggest eyesores on the road as determined by unpopular opinion. My friends and neighbors have spoken, and they said they would rather be caught dead in their Porsches than to be seen alive in those four ridiculous vehicles.