Hacker News

I went from a "sleeper" stationwagon to a Subaru hatchback

Drove both the same and the performance was pretty much the same, but the optics were a lot different and I didn't think it would matter so much.

The amount of times I get people merging in front of me at the last second to go the exact speed they were already going behind someone else took me a while to understand until some 70 year old did it and then I eventually was next to them at a stoplight and he started waving a fucking gun at me. Screaming about how I was a danger to everyone, when I had been going five mph over when he swerved in front of me to hit his brakes.

My car now looks fast. No one blinked an eye at a staionwagon going 5 over, but if my Subaru is going faster than someone, suddenly it's a personal insult against their masculinity. For some reason it's a challenge they just can't stand for. Especially the ones in giant trucks.

And jackasses with no power in life, wants to do things that make them feel powerful. That includes making themselves vigilante traffic cops.

It creates a feedback loop where some people do shit like that, and it just makes the other people legitimately driving too fast or too furious drive even faster and more recklessly because they just got away from someone like that.

So you've got the extremes on both ends fucking with each other while like 90% of other drivers are just trying to get somewhere without dying so someone can feed their ego.

My Subaru is awesome, but my next car I'm definitely going back to something that looks slow so I can go back to not standing out to people with rage issues. I'm really looking forward to the day humans aren't in charge of driving anymore. I love driving, but not constantly watching out for crazy people.

Subaru WRX drivers I can understand... but I have a hard time imagining someone driving an Outback like it's a BMW.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Dodgy driving – covering such reported infringements as speeding, jumping a red light, overtaking on double white lines or ignoring the humble pedestrian crossing – was more likely to be a factor when a Subaru, Porsche and BMW was involved than a Skoda or Hyundai.

Lead author Alan Tapp, professor of social marketing at the University of the West of England, said: “All things being equal, you’d expect the same proportion of aggressive manoeuvres across all types.”

However, there was a higher prevalence in the Department for Transport collision data among makes he characterised broadly as those with “advertising and marketing that seems to celebrate performance driving, look at me, king-of-the-road stuff”.

Drivers of Subaru cars – once enthusiastically defined in his Top Gear days by Jeremy Clarkson as “a fire-breathing incarnation from the pixellated world of the PlayStation” whose slamming door “makes exactly the same sound as a recently shot pheasant hitting the ground” – were involved in proportionately the most “injudicious action”, the paper found.

“None of those experiences and imagery seem particularly real, but people maybe – particularly guys – step into those cars and think they’ve become those brands, even when you don’t have those Swiss mountain passes or the LA Freeway.

A Subaru UK spokesperson said that the brand had changed its range and focus since the 2011-2015 data examined in the paper, adding: “Our core pillars are safety, capability and reliability.

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