I debated long and hard (like several months) about creating this topic. But I concluded that this community is more mature and civilised than most, and I reckon there’s a lot of fun to be had in this.
Be warned, this post contains a lot of douche.
#How Douchebag Is Your Car?
douchebag
An individual who has an over-inflated sense of self worth, compounded by a low level of intellegence, behaving ridiculously in front of colleagues with no sense of how moronic he appears.
Source: UrbanDictionary
From somewhere in the middle of the original Top Gear run came arguably one of the most illuminating segments: The Cool Wall. Verdicts on whether a car was cool, not cool, or ICE COLD shaped population perceptions on the lie of the market. It had the power to make a brand transcend itself, or to be condemned to their accursed archetypal lameness. And the segment itself yielded some hilarious arguments.
The Douche Meter aims to delve into another brand truth in our world of cars: that some cars seem to attract more douchebags than other brands. Yet this too is also controversial, both the status of douchiness and the arguments for and against are unstable, shifting grounds. And, the best part, it’s all subject to our personal bias.
###How it works
The short of it: post a photo of a car, propose a Douche Rating out of 10. 0 is no douche, 10 is max douche.
To explain a little more, 0 means no douchebag would ever drive this car ever, it is the undouchiest thing ever, and possibly also undistinctive and unoffensive in just about every way possible. A car that may fit this kind of profile could include a well maintained Hyundai i20, or a Kia Rio. A rating of 10 means that there is no way that the owner of this car isn’t a total douche. If you’re nice people, you won’t be handing out this rating very often, if at all, but it would be fairly safe to say that some of the early cars my fictional company made may fall into this category (burns more fuel than an oil refinery, more power than a F1 car, completely shits on every other car around the track and styled like Because Fuck You).
To make it more fun: you don’t have to rate an entire trim/model/brand. You can also rate specific examples of cars, because, as we all know, there are many Douche Modifiers. A Daihatsu Charade is a tiny budget runabout and it’s hard to be a Douchebag waving your Douchestick around in a car that would get crushed like an empty can in the slightest fender bender (though I’ve seen some Charade drivers think they can, thus I can’t given the Charade a rating of 0). However, add a completely unnecessary decals, rims, body-kit etc. that you’d see in the Weird Bad and Ugly cars thread, and, well…
Flame decals often boost your douche rating. So does chopping, dropping, stancing and widening. So does superfluous blowoff valves and massive fart cannons that spit flames. You get the idea
Now, this is kind of tricky. It is highly likely that at least one user here owns or drives a car similar to the one you may be rating. Furthermore there is often no correct answer. Keep in mind that it’s all supposed to be in good fun, and if people get upset, I will also be unhappy and the mods will be unhappy with everybody, including me, for creating trouble. Nobody likes to be called a douchebag for real, especially douchebags
###Now I’ve Posted My Car, What Next?
Be prepared for people to agree/disagree with your assessment. Ideally, include reasons why you think the car merits the douche rating it does. The next poster has a choice of a) agreeing with the assessment, posting another car, b) disagreeing with the assessment, offering their own assessment, c) deferring comment if enough users have already commented, posting another car. What I’m aiming for here are collections of views and ranges of ratings to see which cars are more controversial than others, and which trend to being less or more douchey.
All in all, just be a little reasonable and feel the flow of the conversation. If there’s a good going argument on one car feel free to post but if it looks like it’s mostly settled, move on. If you feel strongly enough to return to a car from much earlier in the thread, include a link to the original post with the photo in it. We’d like to keep track.
If this goes really well, I’d possibly be able to create a little graph of cars that have been deemed douchey or not, or are really controversial. Keep in mind that I won’t be keeping track of modified examples, unless it has been well established that the model lends itself to frequent modification and those modifications have been judged as being generally douchey or not (e.g. that Toyobaru 86/BRZ really lends itself to douche mods, just earlier this evening I saw one that had been given the utter full works. However you may wish to argue that this was a manufacturer designed thing, and that the car was envisioned to fit into the motorsports scene, thus mitigating its Douche factor because said mods are therefore not inappropriate for application. Your call.)
###In Summary
- Post photo of car
- Rate it douche 0-10
- Discuss
- Post another car
- Rinse repeat and get messy
#The Douche Consensus
Very approximate, as an aggregate.
Kanye West
Noise pollution @ 3am in the morning
Slammed
Cab + Flatbeds, Utes actually used not for work but with balding steelies on the back to do burnouts on suburban streets
Fake bull testicles on your towbar
Ghetto builds that spit oil out after one TRACK DAY BRO
Badly applied matte paint
Fake CF vinyls
Donks
##[rainbow]OVER 9000 [1]
When your rebadging is misleading or confusing
Chopped, dropped and widened
Completely superfluous exhaust adornments (like diesel blower stacks on a petrol model)
Hummer Stretch
Stickers that say “TRACK DAY BRO”
Badly modified BMWs
##[color=red]Maximum Douche[/color]
Coal Rollers
BMWs (stock)
Tasteless vanity plates
Foreign vanity plates
Hummer H3
Expensive SUVs
Any of the JDM DORIFTO crowd (Altezza/IS300, Soarer, S17, 240SX, Z350 etc.) when riced
Any of the OMG APPEARED IN F&F crowd (Supra, Lancer Evo, Eclipse etc.) when riced
Fart cannons
Expensive Teslas (Model S)
Hot versions of boutique A-segments (Fiat 500 Abarth)
##[color=yellow]Sooooo Douche[/color]
Anything AMG
Audi S
Hondas from the 90s that advertise their VTEC JUST KICKED IN YO-ness
Stuff that appears in rap videos where the rapper is surrounded by a dozen “hos” and throws green all over the camera
Crossovers
Imitation Sports Cars That Are Actually Really Slow (like Vauxhall Astra)
Crap generations of good sports cars (Mustang Foxbody)
Most Nissans
Boutique A-segment (Fiat 500)
Hot Hatches?
Base Audis
##[color=orange]Somewhat Douche[/color]
Hot Hatches?
Cheap SUVs
Cab + Flatbeds, Utes actually used for work but also clearly for recreation
Range Rovers (only expensive SUV that escapes higher douche rating)
Ostensibly environmentally-friendly cars that replace Smog with Smug (original Prius, budget Tesla)
##[color=green]A Bit Douche[/color]
A-Segment Cars that May be the subject of Slamming
RX-7 FD3S (would be mega douche but due to sheer amount of upkeep required to keep it running properly)
##[color=blue]UnDouche[/color]
9th Gen Civic Hatch
Toyota Camry and other anonymous large family sedans (Galant-Magna, stock Commodore/Falcon owned by sizeable nuclear families, stock)
Cab + Flatbeds, Utes actually used solely for work
##[color=purple]Negative Points[/color]
Minivans
/rainbow ↩︎