People love theirs cars, but some love showing them off even more. Jamie Lincoln Kitman breaks down the loudest, glitziest, and most pointless rides to ever vulgarize the road
Cars can tell us a lot about the people who own and drive them, though in all fairness, it's not always clear what someone's car is saying. Few cars will mean the same thing to all who clap eyes on them. But some do, and in this select group are the ones that unmistakably, incontrovertibly cry douchebag.
Pardon our French, but the D-word is only the latest overused, off-color term to describe the phenomena of universal hate-ability that accompanies some people, and, as it happens, some cars. Not long ago, "asshole" was one such all-purpose term. The sad historical fact is that D-bags, assholes, jackasses, et al have always been loose amongst us, walking the planet since homo became erectus. For the last hundred years or so, they've been driving on it, too, often like jerks. Hence the phrase "douchebag car": It's a concept as old as motoring itself.
Mind you, not every douchebag drives a douchebag car. Time marches on, too. One era's douchebag car may be today's treasured classic. And, a la different strokes for different folks, there are different types of douchebag cars for different types of douchebags. But before going further, it is critical to draw the distinction between douchebag cars as a group and other unique categories of automotive derision, like clown cars, (AMC Pacer, Suzuki X90) loser-mobiles (Austin Marina, Yugo, Ford Tempo), and other such serial misadventures in ironic motoring as I've known in my life (too numerous to list.) Such cars and their owners are to be pitied, not hated.
The hate-able hallmarks of the classical D-bag ride may include excessive aggression, vulgarity in all its forms, over-the-top profligacy, and supercharged pretense. To make our list, a car needs these, plus, crucially, it must reflect its owners' oblivion to his or her own bad taste, and consequent celebration of it. The fact that he found this car, and that it found him and others like him, says it all.
Touché? No, sir, Douché!
The Pick-up Douche
Lincoln Blackwood
Sorry, folks, not the African-American porn star, but Lincoln's first truck: The Blackwood was a cynical attempt by the then-extra un-green Ford Motor Company to grow the oxymoronical (and highly profitable) luxury truck category to include not just SUVs, like its seminally vulgar Navigator, but large pickups, too. Replete with designer plastic, fake wood, and stainless steel real and imagined, the four-door Blackwood came one way, finished in black and ridiculous all over, with sales hobbled by a weensy, almost vestigial cargo bed. Largely useless by real truck standards, the Lincoln's eye-popping price tag was just a bonus. All of which explains why they pulled the plug on it in 2002, just one year after they started (trying) to sell it. Even today, it takes a special kind of...you know...to drive one.
