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things-about-cars-in-posts · 11 months ago

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What's that you say? You miss small cute cars with neat colouring schemes?

Well, good news - there are many ways you can still get a rainbow of cool colors in the world of modern day cars! And since there's no better time than pride month to demonstrate it (at least none better than when I actually saw those tags, and that ship sailed nine months ago) and I am the one who populated the #lgbt cars tag after all, here is a cool color sold today for each of the colors in the pride flag!

Our starting point is the color of passion, but not just in its shade: its creation drips passion, its process drips passion, and its brand is clearly passionate about it since it's every model's halo color [the shade a vehicle sports in most or all its promotional material and, often, press cars], and frankly they're clearly passionate about cars in general. So may I introduce you to Mazda's Soul Red. See, usually, you spray a panel with paint (that may or may not have had metal flakes mixed in for that extra 'metallic' shine) and then one or multiple coats of transparent protective paint, or "clear coat". Not here. This is, as far as I got it, a reflective layer of aluminium flakes, and then a semi-transparent paint layer, and then a translucent clear coat. This process requires maddening precision. They had to study paint artisans' stroke to make a new control system for the painter robots. And seeing this color in the flesh it is immediately clear why they bothered.

I'm not a big red guy (I'm a white guy and I'm average at best, at least if you mean height, but I digress) but this shade still amazes me a decade on. I remember I was out cross-country skiing -something you can tell Englishmen don't do because that's the most "we didn't pick a name" name I've ever seen- and the road up to the place muddied up every car, but still in the sea of mostly greyscale cars this Mazda shone across the lot so hard that even other red cars there felt not just a different shade but a different color, like grey to white.

But talking of different colors, let's move on to one - and do so in a way that is more befitting of the queer community. So here's some pointless infighting that will accomplish nothing and make things more unpleasant for everyone. SCREW YOU @twingotime, THE THIRD GENERATION TWINGO IS WAY MORE CUTE AND CHARMING AND ENDEARING THAN THE SECOND AND I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL COPE AND SEETHE AND BLOCK AND DNI. It's tiny! It's bubbly! It's quirky, what with its drift compatible rear engine and funky decals and tri/quadrilateral rim designs! And most importantly for us here, it's colorful inside and out, so that even when looking inside you can bask in the greatness of colors like this Jaune Mango!

And all other colors out there too since you can get it with a CANVAS ROOF!!! COME ON!!!

I feel like this picture perfectly highlights my point here. This to me was one of what I'd call 'vibe revivals' - where some models never leave the market, but lose their spirit update by update, until a new model decides to look back at the original and, however successfully, seeks to rekindle its flame.

And through this concept we can tackle the next color in an equally queer way, since it allows us to transition to a new ID. So here's the Volkswagen ID.BUZZ's gorgeous Lime Yellow.

Or rather, its Candy White / Lime Yellow two tone spec - you can also opt to get it in single color if, for example, ?????. As is evident the two-tone, like many of its traits, is inspired by the first generation of the Beetle-based Volkswagen Transporter van in front of it, whose boring direct successor is actually still being produced with our buzzyboi being a separate electric model sold alongside it. And that inspiration I appreciate a lot, because it doesn't just celebrate its forebearers or uphold their memory, but in doing so brings unto itself and reintroduces to the world the colorful beauty they had brought to their own time. After all, the goals of automotive revivals closely align with ours - looking at the wonderful feats of those before us and, within newfound abilities, limitations and hindsight, mirror their spirit and accomplishments in ourselves.

So the streak of 'vibe revivals' could be argued to continue, since there's no good reason to give the green's spot to any color but the Suzuki Jimny's halo shade. Well, except for its name being Kinetic Yellow. But I've already sneakily broken that taboo with the Twingo's orange (jaune is French for yellow), and also screw you, I want to highlight this.

Not just because I love the color, nor because I love the car too (this last form just like every other it took in its half century of evolution), but because I love why the car has that color. See, the reason I so vehemently despise modern SUVs is that they're nothing more than regular cars made bigger, heavier and less aerodynamic just for the sake of achieving the "pretending to be off-roadable" look that's all the rage. And the Jimny is so purpose-oriented its contrast with this useless trend chasing is downright comical, its halo color being perhaps the best example having been developed -and I swear I shit you not- to be extremely visible in the construction fields the Jimny was considered a likely pick for traversing. This thing is so utilitarian not even its color is just for looks!!!

And hell, what is more fitting for a pride flag than celebrating how what may seem like a superficial choice to be gratuitously flashy actually derives from minding the importance of visibility in creating safety?

Perhaps remembering that, for some, the reason for their beauty is not a lucky blessing or a simple choice, but years and years and years of effort put into figuring out how to get that radiance out of a situation that would have seemed to fundamentally lack the potential for it - and that often it is precisely that effort that makes their splendor so special. So here is the Lexus LC's Structural Blue.

The reason for its name is both simple and complicated: none of its components are blue. Like the Morpho butterfly it was inspired by (you know, those gorgeous blue ones), rather than because of a pigment that absorbs all non-blue light that hits it, the reason we see blue upon looking at it is a structure that creates interference within the light that hits it. This means all the luminous energy blue paint normally absorbs is reflected back as well, hence the light silver and bright red of the cars in the background getting utterly eclipsed by a relatively dark blue. So why don't all automakers do this? Well, mostly it took Lexus 15 years to figure out the 8-month-long production process, and every day that process produces enough paint for just two hundred cars. That may not seem so little, but you must for one remember that Toyota sells four Corollas a minute, and for two know that, when I say two hundred cars worth of paint a day, I am lying and it's just two. I don't feel the need to point out that this color makes Mazda's Soul Red seem trivial both to paint and to pay for. But goddamn, this thing is pretty.

Perhaps too pretty for some of you? I appreciate that this post may strike some as too sappily quaint for something that in their view may be most about unapologetic demands for rights and visibility and riotous rebellion to whoever may dare object. And yes, I believe that society must always head towards dialogue, because only understanding and empathizing can bring peace and harmony, and all that corny stuff... but I understand that some may never dialogue as long as they live, some may need to be coerced into dialogue, and even more simply some of us are sitting in the jaws of the beast and can't afford to try their hand at polite deescalation. And ultimately, a call needs to be loud to reach all those it should. And louder still for them all to listen. So the purple's dedicated to you lot.

A long long time ago, Dodge came out with the Challenger, a muscle car whose weight, handling and rear visibility gave submarine pilots déjà vu. It was sold with an "ought to be enough for anyone" 250 horsepower V6 (for reference, we were a couple years past Japan at least pretending every single car it made had less than 280) and a "fuck you, more power" 425hp V8. And then, a couple years later, Dodge went "fuck you, more power" and swapped the V8 for a bigger V8 that made 470hp. And then, a couple years later, Dodge went "fuck you, more power" and released a special edition called the Hellcat you were able to have make 500hp. How? Simple: by using the keyfob that told it not to make 707. Of course, the presence of a key that didn't do that resulted in a number of crashes so humongous that, in a couple of years, it finally made people at Dodge decide that it was time to stand up and do something. More specifically, saying "fuck you, more power" and making the 840hp Demon. Now, some would argue that having that much power is completely useless anywhere that isn't a dragstrip. However, that is not quite true, since American dragstrips forbid cars that run the quarter mile in under ten seconds, which this does, and don't have a full rollcage, which this, being a road car, doesn't. So it is actually useless anywhere that isn't or is a dragstrip. At which point, the engineers at Dodge went "Welp, that really is enough power now, eh". They then looked at each other silently for four straight years before erupting in the biggest laughing fit in American history and launching the 1025 fucking horsepower Demon 170 because fuck you.

In short, there's good arguments for calling the Challenger the most riotous car on sale today (its production ended in December but you can still order remaining stock). So really, it only follows that this color, arguable descendant of the "high impact colors" featured in muscle cars in the late 60s early 70s and brought back in the modern lineups, is called none other than Hellraisin. Yes indeed.

Happy final week of Pride, y'all!

Links in blue are posts of mine about the topic in question: if you liked this post, you might like those - or the blog’s Discord server, linked in the pinned post!

twas a '98 polo green de ville. its so pretty bro

See? Shows what I know!

I went and checked, by the way, because that seemed exactly like the right car in the right period of time, and indeed, all De Villes made from 1996 were equipped with the Northstar V8.

I made roughly this face.

To make a long story short, someone at Cadillac saw the legendarily good LS V8 they freely had available as part of General Motors and thought "You know what we should do? Spend an absolute fortune to develop a V8 of our own that fulfills exactly the same purpose". And apparently the people sensible enough to run the place were all on vacation, because lo and behold, we got the Northstar V8, a Cadillac-only V8 that was supposed to tell the world that Cadillac is still bangin', babey! We're not just throwing GM parts together here, we're putting in effort and making something serious, something unique, something Cadillac! Something whose together-keeping threads just shear off after a while. Woo, Cadillac. You were so brave for this one.

But since I don't wanna be all negative, let me tell you about what "98 polo green" made me think about!

In 1996, the Volkswagen Polo was coming out with new colors! And they were like "Let's show the motor show audiences our new colors in a fun, captivating way!" and so they made a Polo out of pieces of all the new colors!

And then they got a FLOOD of dealers shouting WE WANT THIS NOW and they were like "Oh all these new colors are coming in-" and they were like NO we want THIS and they were like "Ah Sheiße" (fuck) and so they begrudgingly took a set of four cars of four different colors off the production line, swapped their body panels around to create the color combinations you see below, and kept repeating the process until they got one entire thousand of Polo "Harlekin"s.

Which vaporized off the lot before they could say "That ought to be enough" in German (and in German it's just 5 syllables so that's saying something), so they upped the production to around 3800 total, which were sold over two years without letting the customers pick the color combination they got.

They also did this to the Golf for the US market (now spelling it 'Harlequin'), but they only made 264 and some of them had to be un-harlequin'd by reshuffling the different colored parts back into four uniformly colored cars (and sometimes just straight up repainted) to be moved off the lot. And they say it's Germans who lack sense of humor.

But I know what you are wondering - or at least, what you will react to with "fuck that's actually a very good question" upon reading: what the fuck do these cars' documents say under "color"? The answer is actually pretty logical (these are German cars after all): the car was one single color when it rolled off the production line, and while they bolted parts of different colors onto it, that color remains in the non-replaceable elements like roof, sills, rear pillar, and all the inside parts like door seams, engine bay, underside and what have you - so that is the color the car legally is.

So yeah man there's your fun facts about the Cadillac De Ville.

Links in blue are posts of mine explaining the words in question - if you liked this post, you might like those!

#lgbt cars #car colors #the great catchup #mazda 3 #renault twingo #volkswagen ID.BUZZ #suzuki jimny #lexus lc #dodge challenger

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