Category: default || By jt3y

When you spend a lot of time in the car, you start to get irritated by the little things you see over and over again. Especially when you have no life, like me.

Take super-stretch limos. Who decided that a super-stretch limo was classy? Certainly not people who actually have class. The Mellons aren't riding around in 40-foot-long Cadillac Escalades, nor are members of the British royal family. (For what it's worth, Queen Elizabeth 2 has a Bentley Arnage limousine, and it's only 32 inches longer than the stock sedan.)

If you want to look classy on your way to a wedding or party, rent something restrained from one of those "black car" services --- a steel gray four-door with discretely-tinted windows. That's what the corporate CEOs and hoi polloi prefer. Riding around in a super-stretch limo only marks you as a nimrod with no taste, or a 16-year-old on your way to the junior prom. (Not that those two things are mutually exclusive.)

Cars are proportioned a certain way for a reason; years of study and hard lessons learned on the showroom floor have taught designers that certain ratios and angles are pleasing to the eye, as well as functional. Stretching those designs a few inches here and there doesn't ruin them, but adding 20 feet of length does. Especially when the car is made up of aerodynamic complex curves, but the panels that are inserted for the stretch are flat.

Besides being ponderous, traffic-clogging eyesores, many of the super-stretches are hacked-together messes when examined closely. PennDOT crews tacking steel plates together over holes in the road do a better job of welding than some of the companies that cobble together super-stretch limos. There's a reason that the insides of those things are filled with overstuffed upholstery, and the outsides are decorated with chrome doodads --- they're trying to hide the sloppy seams.

As if regular Hummers weren't bad enough, the latest trend is toward stretched Hummers --- wouldn't a nice Greyhound bus be more practical (and economical)? But it gets worse: Someone recently sent me a link to an eBay sale of what's advertised as the "first-ever" 2004 Chrysler 300 super-stretch limo. It's being sold by an outfit in Orange County, Calif., called DC Motors.

Gee, and here I thought the new Chrysler 300s were already as ugly as a car could get; thanks, DC Motors, for setting me straight! You've definitely raised the bar for awful auto design. Why not chrome-plate a toilet bowl and bolt that to the hood as the final coup de grace?

The one thing that really sets off a super-stretch limo, in my opinion, is a set of those spinning momentum rims, which are all the rage in the Mon-Yough area right now. (For all I know, they were the rage in California 10 years ago; keep in mind that most trends hit the Mon-Yough area about a decade behind the rest of the world.)

In fairness, although I've seen a few limos with momentum rims, most of the cars I see with them are absolute junk heaps --- clapped-out Pontiac Bonnevilles with strips of paint falling from their fenders, rusty Buick LeSabres blowing blue smoke, and Nissan Maximas with black plastic garbage bags taped over their busted rear windows.

Since momentum rims cost a few hundred dollars a piece, it seems to me that some of these folks would be better off investing their money in an Earl Scheib paint job, or an engine rebuild. Or maybe a bus pass.

(Man, I've really slipped into full-blown Andy Rooney rant mode. But don't stop me now, I'm on a roll.)

Even better than momentum rims is a nice, oversized vinyl top, especially one that's designed to look like a convertible roof. Sure, I believe that your 2003 Lincoln Town Car is actually a four-door convertible! Boy, you really fooled me!

Maybe vinyl roofs look OK on some older cars --- '69 Ford LTDs or Mercury Montereys --- but they make today's aerodynamic cars look like they've swelled up from a rash. According to the Detroit News, the big 3 automakers have asked their dealers to stop installing them on luxury cars like Cadillacs and Lincolns, because they make the cars look cheap and declasse. The dealers have told the companies to go take a long walk off of a short trunk lid.

Those dealers know that the customer is always right! It's a shame that they haven't noticed that Mercedes-Benz or Lexus dealers don't install fake convertible tops on their high-zoot models.

That may explain why the German and Japanese luxury car makers have been clobbering the snot out of Cadillac and Lincoln for the past 10 years. Who said there's no accounting for taste?

I was about to comment on the way drivers in Western Pennsylvania behave when they get to a four-way stop sign --- everyone sitting there, waving each other through the intersection, so that nobody moves for 10 seconds --- but the nice folks in the white coats have arrived to give me my injection, and I can already feel the Thorazine taking effect.

It's a good thing, too, because a Honda Civic with neon lights just went past my window; it was sporting a tailpipe the size of a manhole and fake Japanese writing all over it. You don't even want to get me started on that subject.