What's Your Guilty Pleasure Car?
Photo: Greg Gjerdingen from Willmar, USA, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
If you’re a regular Jalop reader, you probably like cars. I know, kind of an out-there prediction, but I’m just guessing. In fact, I’m willing to bet that you like lots of cars — big cars, small cars, fast cars, and cars that only feel fast. But what about the cars you know you shouldn’t like, the ones that make you feel a bit perverse for loving them?
Today, we’re talking about guilty pleasure cars. We’ll include trucks, motorcycles, any roadgoing transportation that you really feel like you shouldn’t love — yet, you love it anyway. Like a bad slasher movie or a saccharine desert, what car do you hate to like?
Photo: order_242 from Chile, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
For me, the question dates back to my earliest car-shopping adventures. At the ripe old age of fifteen, scouring the internet for used cars, I worked my way into a K5 Blazer rabbit hole. A convertible SUV that could go off-road, with big round headlights and a squared-off body? What wouldn’t you love about that?
I mean, sure, the K5 is downright ancient in its technology. Yes, vehicles of this size are objectively unnecessary and harmful. No, I don’t have any place to even take one off-road. But still, to this day, I occasionally find myself browsing Facebook Marketplace for dirt-cheap beater K5s — including the browser tab I have open right now.
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That’s my pick for a guilty pleasure car: an offroad SUV that’s too big, heavy, and inefficient to be at all relevant in the modern world, let alone my Brooklyn city streets. But what’s yours? Give us your guilty pleasure car in the comments, and we’ll collect our favorite answers tomorrow.
