Truth In Images
Car manufacturers have been playing visual tricks on us for years! In the sixties car ads featured renderings of cars that were impossibly long, low and wide. Pontiac being one of the worst offenders... look at this illustration from 1963 – that four door hardtop must be 9 feet wide and 23 feet long.
Today, we're a little more subtle, we have TV ads showing cars with windows tinted so dark they appear to be solid black – this enhances the look of the car, but would never be considered street legal anywhere.
Truth in Design
How many cars have you seen where the exhaust pipes appear to be 3 inches or more in diameter – but then when you look more closely, that's just a short extension on the end of the pipe. The REAL exhaust is only 1-1/2 inches. A true high performance car will have larger diameter exhausts, so car manufacturers create the illusion of big exhausts on lesser cars in the hope we'll believe they're more powerful.
Open the hood of just about any luxury car and what do you see? Not the engine, but a cover that sort of looks like an engine. It makes things under the hood appear clean and tidy, while underneath is a sea of pipes, wires, relays, belts, pulleys etc. I guess planning the real parts in a neat and organized manner would cost more.
Truth in Materials
Thankfully the vinyl roof era has disappeared into the mists of the past. But we're still being inflicted with things like wire wheel hubcaps – if you want wire wheels, get wire wheels, nobody is fooled by a cheezy set of hubcaps.
Truth in Engineering
When a car maker wants you to think a car has a really powerful engine, they make the gas pedal very touchy. In the two Corvettes I've driven, if you pushed the pedal down a quarter inch, you got about half throttle – thus enhancing the fact you're driving a performance vehicle. Trouble is, for some, this makes the car very difficult to control. Furthermore a Corvette IS a high performance car, why not just make the throw of the gas pedal such that it makes the car more drivable – if you want more go, it's there, just put the pedal to the metal.
Truth in Fuel Economy
We are warned that vehicle fuel economy figures generated by the government and published by automakers are for only comparison between different vehicles. They are not representative of realistic real world fuel consumption. Why not?
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