The Douche Meter

[Zabhawkin]

For a truck that high about the only way to offroad it is to be going through deep mud, though looking at the angle on the front drive shaft its likely they will break the U-Joints constantly. The springs are way too arched and wont give, and are too thick which is probably to control the axle wrap with those 6" lift blocks in the rear. That thing would suck to drive and ride in.

In my experience you start loosing capability when the angle from the outside contact point to center of gravity gets much above 45degrees.

Basically that one would be a show truck only even with the 2.5 ton axles.

[07CobaltGirl]

America has its own culture. It’s a mixture of other cultures, yes, but so is Germany and the rest of Europe. The difference is really just the fact that European culture began over 2500 years ago, with American culture only spawning itself a mere 240 years ago. The similarities are, when European culture was only 250 years old, it was building fires with lightning strikes like the other bronze age cultures. Lets not make this about one country vs another, because it will get ugly.

Having said that, the culture reference was specifically pointing out car culture, with which America is very rich, and until very recently, none of it was “borrowed” from other cultures. In terms of car culture, Europeans are different, but not better or worse, than Americans. But again, lets not make this about vs countries.

[strop]

Perhaps parochialism should count as douche points

[squidhead]

@07CobaltGirl

The difference is really just the fact that European culture began over 2500 years ago, with American culture only spawning itself a mere 240 years ago. The similarities are, when European culture was only 250 years old, it was building fires with lightning strikes like the other bronze age cultures.

You REALLY should brush up on your history before making statements like this.

[strop]

Can we, you know, let this whole country and culture business go? We don’t need that in this thread. Besides, I’m having a hard time figuring out when Europe, aged 250, really is. It’s not like Australia, which isn’t even 250 years old if you count it from when whitefella landed and shortly thereafter obliterated an over 40000 year old commune of nearly 60 indigenous peoples. Then again that European, Christopher Columbus could controversially be credited as the guy who sowed the seeds of syphilis in the devastation of indigenous peoples of North America.

I don’t mean to add fuel to the fire. Well actually I do but at the same time it’s all a matter of perspective

So let’s move on and start slagging out cars, not countries.

[DeusExMackia]

True. Well put!

And now from something a little ‘controvesrsial’…ish.

Range Rover Sport
Douche Meter Rating: 8/10 - but only some of the time. Usually, 4/10.
I spend a lot of time driving around western Kent, UK, which is a particularly middle/upper-middle class area of the country. The main town in the area, Tunbridge Wells, has some seriously expensive houses and the most popular vehicle types are SUVs and German saloons. Sadly, the town also has an affliction with really bad driving. I mean properly, god-awful, total lack of care driving, and sometimes, the many Range Rover Sports of the town are responsible.

Yet, for the most part, I’ve experienced far worse driving from other SUV brands (Mercedes, BMW and Audi are the main culprits) and weirdly, some RR Sport drivers are actually very nice. For me in my little city car, that’s something I am incredibly grateful for. These drivers actually let you go, use their indicators, obey the speed limits etc most of the time. That’s certainly note worthy.

You’re still a insert many words I can’t use in public if you drive one of these, but at least those who do seem to know that they command a little more respect than its German rivals and continue that respect in how they drive.

[Madrias]

I’ll go for a general thing to add an instant 2 douche points to any vehicle: Intentionally debadging your car.

Why? One, it looks fucking stupid, most of the time, because the people who do it don’t fill the damn holes where the badges once went. Two, the people who do it claim ‘weight reduction’ or ‘aerodynamic advantages’ and then stick wheels on the car that have maybe a millimeter of tire wrapped around it, so much camber that they must go through tires at a rate of a set per week, and a multitude of crappy bodykit parts that they haven’t painted yet.

Another way to add a douche point is to rearrange or pick letters off of the car’s name to spell stupid things.
Example: Picking the Y and I off of a Hyundai badge to make Hunda out of it. (I’ve actually seen someone do this in my town.)
Example: Rearranging Ford Capri to be Ford Crapi. (Haven’t seen of it, only heard of similar, and it’s the first one that came to mind.)

Not quite as douchy as pure debadging because it requires a hint more brainpower, but still stupid.

Range Rover Sport

I honestly have never seen any of these. Can’t give an honest rating, so I’ll just lump it in the Generic SUV category, which I mentioned above, and thereby apply it with a 9/10.

[squidhead]

@Madrias

don’t fill the damn holes where the badges once went

Haven’t seen one of those holes in quite a while. That’s VERY ancient technique. Also debadging is a good thing. Why would you want to drive around in a car that has “E 55 /// AMG Kompressor” written on it? It’s not a damn library, you want to read something - get a book. The model designation badges ruin the look of any car.

[maffc]

Double Douche points for the owner of a black range rover sport near me then.
He’s blacked out the “ange over” part of the bonnet badge and highlighted the Rs in bright orange.

[Madrias]

I can understand removing some badges, honestly. I referred to total debadging (Both Make and Model, not just Model designations) with no care taken to clean up the mess afterward. (on older cars, filling the holes, on newer cars, making sure the paint isn’t mismatched, and making sure no tool marks could be seen in the paint around it.)

In other words, the type of crap done by every wannabe racer who claims “weight reduction, bro!” when you ask why they’ve stripped all the badges off of their Honda.

If you do it, and do so properly, it can look good. (An example would be replacing the factory grille, thereby removing the original badge in the process, after having removed the model designation badges carefully and cleaning up whatever you find afterward.)

And to continue the list, I’ll add some more general things that can make any car a Douche Car.

Add a point: Those blue fucking headlights. The ones from the factory aren’t quite as bad as the aftermarket ones, granted, but they’re a nuisance.

Add 5 points: Sound systems with subwoofers big enough to be rated in kilowatts.

Add 2 points: A-pillar gauge pods. Usually because when you get one of those, someone’s actually put some work into their car, and I respect that. What I don’t respect is the sudden necessity to try to fill my car with your tire smoke.

Add a point for each one: Bumper Stickers. Nothing like being behind the rolling advertisement for Presidential Candidates from 2004 because those things don’t come off, or the sticker that says “Honk for Jesus” and the sticker that says “Baby on Board” when you’re all over the lane on your phone. Plus, guaranteed, the next person who buys that car has to get out the industrial-grade sticker remover to remove the damn things.

Add 15 points: Putting just one roof rail on a modern large sedan. Ha ha, I get it, you think it’s funny putting one cargo rail up on the roof so it looks like a low-profile police lightbar. You bought a local-police-colored car and did this, just to watch people slam on the brakes. Very funny. Except it isn’t.

Add 6 points: Window open 1/4 of the way, lit cigarette in hand. The world is not your ash tray. They put one in your car for a reason, so use it. And when it’s full, dump it in the trash, not on the side of the road.

Add 3 points: Oversize wheels, stock brakes. Let’s massively increase your rolling mass without increasing the stopping power. That sounds like such a great idea. Now, I know, this isn’t entirely exclusive to my area, but there’s a lot of hills in my town. I mean, flat ground is a hard thing to find. So how many people do you think are driving around under constant brake fade waiting to have an accident?

And because I’ve thought of something, finally, to insult further people with…

Donks

(Just grabbed the first example I stumbled over)

So, you’ve bought a decent old car, and decided to fix it up (or not, in some cases). Cool. Except your method of “fixing” involves buying a truck, mounting the car body on the truck frame, buying an off-road lift kit to jack it up an additional foot or more, and then sticking the biggest, stupidest looking wheels under it. I get it, it’s a style, but at the same time, this is not practical. One, you’ve increased your center of gravity to the point of being a rolling road hazard. Two, your brakes aren’t going to handle that amount of spinning metal, so you’re a rolling road hazard that can’t stop. Three, your exhaust is usually consisting of, at best, the stock exhaust, and at worst, straight pipes, so it’s loud.

And for what? Unlike a lowrider, which has at least visual appeal of being able to move (even if it doesn’t hop), this has the appearance of “My lowrider got stuck in the full up position, so I just stuck really big wheels on it so it doesn’t look as dumb.”

What’s worse is that these things take up all of the decent old 80’s body-on-frame cars and ruin them. That means there’s less cars with RWD on the road. They also take perfectly good pickup trucks and ruin them, taking a decent truck that could’ve been used to haul stuff a few thousand more miles and trashing it in favor of making a dumbmobile. So you take two decent vehicles off the road to make one completely worthless one. And when they either crash, or finally get bored of it? To the junkyard it goes. Because no one will buy it.

For the obscene amounts of waste (one decent car, one decent truck), the massive safety hazard (can’t stop, bumper isn’t at the proper height, not street-legal, despite their claims otherwise), and the stupidity of design (massively lifted car on super-oversize wheels), I can’t give this style a nice rating at all. This has maxed out my overage meter.

100/10. If you build a donk, you are a total douche.

[squidhead]

I will argue on
A-pillar gauge pods.
I can smoke your car up using a 140hp stock 25 year old bimmer, when I have my gauge cluster, it does not change anything

“Baby on Board”
Those serve a purpose. In case of a crash a small child can get crammed or wedged in the wreck becoming pretty much invisible. A rescue knows to look for a child in the wreck in case the driver is unconscious.

Window open 1/4 of the way, lit cigarette in hand. The world is not your ash tray. They put one in your car for a reason, so use it. And when it’s full, dump it in the trash, not on the side of the road.
It IS my ashtray, same as everybody elses’ who smokes outside while NOT being in the car. The 1/4 open window creates a backdraft that prevents the ash to fall into the car. Also I’d rather dump harmless ash on the asphalt than need to vaccuum my car after each time I smoke, since ash gets EVERYWHERE, not just the ash tray (which has better uses than an ash tray anyways).

[strop]

@DeusExMackia

Yet, for the most part, I’ve experienced far worse driving from other SUV brands (Mercedes, BMW and Audi are the main culprits) and weirdly, some RR Sport drivers are actually very nice. For me in my little city car, that’s something I am incredibly grateful for. These drivers actually let you go, use their indicators, obey the speed limits etc most of the time. That’s certainly note worthy.

That’s interesting. You might actually be right. In order of least troublesome Rich Soccer Mum (otherwise known as Toorak Tractor), Range Rovers are probably the least shit driver. The VW Touaregs (now Tiguan) aren’t too bad either but also a lot rarer. The Audi drivers are a bit worse. The BMW X5/X7 etc. drivers are quite bad. The Cayenne drivers are possibly the worst. Strangely enough the ML350 etc. etc. aren’t that bad, they’re just so large they tend to get in the way of everything. And I find anything with a 4Matic badge on it tends to ‘drive like a granny’.

Now while we are here, I’d like to introduce a car that is generally driven terribly, but actually breaks the rule that if the drivers are terrible it’s a douche car:

Toyota Camry. Of any age.

Reliable, handy, boring and anonymous, at least, to the point that it fairly screams “I’m a terrible Asian driver who got my license from Wang’s ABC Driving School* and like to straddle the lane doing half the speed limit and fall asleep at lights.” The drivers of these cars are not douchy at all. They’re just ultra incompetent. This is partially because Camrys suck every joy out of driving to the point if one derived even a scerrick of enjoyment from driving, they would never get a Camry.

Like Volvo, Toyota did a lot to try to shake the hoodoo of the image of being staid. Volvo was more successful because they actually overhauled the car along with the image (without sacrificing their reputation for safety, remarkably). Toyota, however, kind of missed the mark. “Buy a Camry, then do something crazy” ad campaign comes to mind. Camrys from 2008 onwards got a lot more power (0-100 in around 7.5s, not bad at all), got a proper suspension tune, and were quite capable on the road. It injected a bit of life into the model, but ultimately, at least in Australia, promptly became irrelevant when the family sedan market completely collapsed, thus securing its place in history as the Car For The Non Driver.

Camrys are a plague upon our road to the point that if the Camry is at the front of the line at the lights, cars will queue up in the other lane to avoid being behind it because you never know if it will actually go when the lights turn green. However, the only Camry that would ever score douche points are the Sport models that have the daft wing on the back, because really a sporty Camry, bruh.

• This sounds terribly racist but a) again, I’m of Chinese ethnicity myself b) the phenomenon of almost being run over while crossing at a pedestrian crossing where the signal is still green, then horned by the instructor of one of these random Chinese driving schools is not isolated at all. They literally do not teach you the correct road rules. One of my friends tried to save money by getting lessons from one of these places and ended up spending twice as much because he failed his driving test four times. To this day I do not ride passenger in his car. Which is a Volvo, I might add.

[BobLoblaw]

I have to give the Range Rover and any other Land Rover a 9/10 I’m afraid. For one reason: The price. Land Rover is a brand well known for it’s off-road prowess. And they’ve certainly done a good job whether by technology or just plain rugged construction (We’ll leave the British Leyland years out of the equation for this one) They’ve cemented a pretty good reputation. But if I’m spending $60,000-$80,000 on a vehicle, there is no way in hell that I’m gonna thrash it about on the trail. Thus the 4WD system is superfluous as nobody in their right mind would put something that expensive through that kind of abuse. Especially when I could just as easily find a beat up old pickup for $2000 and do the same thing. Sure it’s not as reliable as something off the line, but if I wreck it, $2000 is a much easier financial hit to take than $60,000. The same could be said for Mercedes or BMW for that matter.

I agree with the rating on donks, that’s just something that should not be.

[Awildgermanappears]

Regarding Donks, they’re less douche when any of these apply:

a) Wheels aren’t so ridiculously large that they require extensive chassis modifications

b) Don’t take themselves seriously

c) Are built from an old shitbox nobody was going to miss anyway (basically any Chrysler)

d) All of the above

If these apply, Donks are only 9/10.

[strop]

Okay guys I put up a bit of a list in the OP. It’s very approximate because some of the points are controversial, and I don’t want to actually ascribe a specific number to many of those things. It’s more just in a vague “order of doucheness”. I would have liked to make a table but, well, I don’t think this forum supports that kind of markdown.

If you have any disagreements with the list, feel free to bring it up. That’s what we’re here for!

[SkylineFTW97]

Looks decent enough.
Anyway, I have to disagree with the rating on donks.

They’re worth way more than 100 points.

[CadillacDave]

What about the Hummer H2 I put a picture up of?

[SkylineFTW97]

I thought it was an H3.
Anyway, let’s add something new to the discussion.

One of the fastest production cars in existence, which has largely been doomed to life as a glorified show car. Which is odd, since it looks so meh to begin with. Really, it’s a codpiece for rich show-offs who may not even care about cars.
Base: 8/10. SS: 10/10. Cabrio: 42/10.
Come to think of it, convertible (soft or hard top) supercars in general get a maximum douche rating from me.

[07CobaltGirl]

Not really sure what you’re trying to say, but whatever.

[findRED19]

Now the question is, is the third gen camaro more duchey than the fox mustang?
I’d say equal.

But the second gen camaro is much less douchey than the third. This is due to the body being more desirable as a “classic” and also due to the lesser presence of young, dumb drivers with the gen2 camaro. So id rate it -2 off the gen 3 if the fox mustang and gen3 camaro are around a 8/10.