On the internet, people who love cars can come together and appreciate automobiles, offer advice, and, of course, utterly taunt every unsuspecting forum member they can find. Here are the ten most laughably vile trolls of internet car culture, as chosen by Jalopnik readers.
Welcome back to Answers of the Day — our daily Jalopnik feature where we take the best ten responses from the previous day's Question of the Day and shine it up to show off. It's by you and for you, the Jalopnik readers. Enjoy!
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Florin C
10.) "I armor all'ed the sidewalls"
Suggested By: scottydawg
Why it's brilliant: This forum troll, Playa4Real, drew the ire of some Lexus compact sedan fans with what looked at first glance like an honest question – did spraying Armor-All on his tires make him crash his car on a drive home one rainy night? Playa4Real perfectly executed his troll techniques, with the whole forum taking the bait, hating on his supposed stupidity, exposing themselves as fools, then quickly descending into flaming each other. Watch it go down here.
Photo Credit: Armor-All
9.) Mazda MX6 Turbo-Enhancement
Suggested By: that other honda guy
Why it's brilliant: The more pressure an enthusiast group feels in the real world, the more its internet community will strike back at possible threats in internet-land. Back in 2007, the user "copex" exploited the camaraderie of the tightly-knit Mazda forum, MX6.com, challenging their technical reputation with some questionable turbo modifications serving as bait. Copex appeared to be proud of his new turbo setup, having welded extra metal onto the turbine blades for "way more torque(throttle response was amazing too) @ around 2000 rpm it feelz like my dads supercharged v8 now. " We won't go into the technicalities of welding up the internals of such precision machinery as a turbocharger, but the protective MX6 community spared no time in "educating" the troll with some forty-eight pages of internet bashing. See the realistic-looking bait yourself here.
Photo Credit: copex
8.) Cayman shooting break
Suggested By: TimTim
Why it's brilliant: The online car community thrives on getting every last bit of automotive news first. There is no time to wait for monthly magazines in the 21st century, and gearheads on the internet will do anything to get wind of the latest scoop. TopGear.com's US-subsidiary was letting go of its editorial team back in 2009, and its editor Jared Holstein worked up a going away project with his summer interns. What they did was design a realistic-looking digital model of a shooting-break variant of the Porsche Cayman and then leak the images out to enthusiast sites and car blogs across the web. Tens of thousands of car fans saw the images, some skeptical of what they saw as unreal or too good to be true. Many, though, fell for the little sports wagon, and feverishly started begging for the made-up car to go into production. Jalopnik broke the whole story down here.
Photo Credit: Matt DuVall
7.) DIY High-compression Miata
Suggested By: y8s
Why it's brilliant: A great trolling requires some work, and "SERformance" did his homework, going as far to doctor an autocar article to give some credibility to his troll bait. SERformance was looking for advice on a plan to welding a chunk of metal to his Miata's pistons to "to raise the compression ratio." You don't have to know much about cars to know that this is probably a terrible idea, and the people of MX5Miata.net did not hold back their opinions when it came to SERformance's continued trollitude. See the whole debacle unfold here.
Photo Credit: SERformance
6.) Honda Engine in the basemanet
Suggested By: Chairman Kaga
Why it's brilliant: Feigning innocence is a great trolling strategy, and the seemingly ingenuous request of user "vtec69" brought the walls crumbling down at Honda-tech.com. vtec69 asked, ""Me and my friend built my motor in his basemanet and now we cant figure out how to get it out of the basemanet without taking it apart.
We have like ten stairs to go up and theres only room for 2 people to be on the stairs at one time.
Anyone have any suggestions on how to get the motor out of the basemant?" It took the forum a long time to come to a consensus if this question was in earnest, but they had fun along the way, that's for sure. Watch a joke get played on the human race here.
Photo Credit: honda-tech.com
5.) 968 snowplow
Suggested By: ejp
Why it's brilliant: Few online car communities take things more seriously than the highly precise Porsche fans and owners forums. Back in 2000, Bruce Corwin took his 968 out in the snow with his friend's snowplow sitting in front of the car and took some Loch Ness-style photographic documentation of his factory-spec snowplow Porsche. The next year he did a similar trick with some diveplanes and a snorkel to make a submarine out of the car. The online car community was in its infancy, Jalopnik hadn't even been invented yet, and the Porsche forum continuum was as much gullible as it was critical when it came to Corwin's creations. He covers the whole mess and puts the real innocence of vintage internet on display with plenty of quotes here.
Photo Credit: Bruce Corwin
4.) Gixxer NOS
Suggested By: twitchykun
Why it's brilliant: If this thread was about cars, it could very well be sitting at the number one spot, but as it's all about a moron and his Suzuki GSX-R, we'll list it at number four. Apparently some shmuck thought he was putting NOS-brand engine cleaner into his rattly motorcycle when he was actually pouring two cans of NOS-brand energy drink into his ride. Needless to say, the internet did its duty and mercilessly mocked him. User "sti2gsxr" sounded ready for a Darwin award, and Gixxer.com let him know it.
Photo Credit: NOS High Performance Energy Drink
3.) Direct Exhaust Injection
Suggested By: that other honda guy
Why it's brilliant: Many people come to the online car community looking for advice on technical subjects that fall outside of their expertise. These fine intentions were happily abused this service over at a corvette forum gmmodernmuscle.com. Don't go looking for the original thread on that site, though, as it brought in so much traffic it shut the site down and has since been deleted. Someone came to the forum with an ingenious plan to bypass the intrinsic lag of a turbo by routing the exhaust right back into the engine. For everyone out there who is not technically inclined, all that I can offer as an explanation is that this will not work. It is functionally impossible for this to work. Many fine lolz were had at the expense of this perhaps-troll's perpetual motion machine, and you can see the reposted origin at FinalGear.
Photo Credit: The Nemesis_ZR2
2.) Don't clean your engine with water
Suggested By: Bonhomme7h
Why it's brilliant: "I'm done with this car!" user MarkNeib declared, having just trashed his high-performance Mustang by running water through its petroleum-powered internal-combustion engine. Let me just say that this is not just a great way to ruin your car; this is a great way to bring out the RAGE and UNRELENTING ANGER of car forum members everywhere. Watch them deliver justice to this menace to society at Mustang Forums.
Photo Credit: mustangforums.com
1.) Welded Diff for Extra Traction
Suggested By: HDC
Why it's brilliant: Jalopnik has already answered how a differential works, but to summarize, it doesn't involve welding all the gears together. This is such a basic piece of knowledge that it was a fun thing to joke about on car forums, serving as fairly harmless troll bait until 2009, when Pirate4x4.com user NittoSuperTamer came to complain about the bad advice he'd gotten from reading "a ton of threads." Not only did he claim to have broken his car and give pictures as proof (pics or it didn't happen!, the forum mantra, held true), but he left the door open for all the troll-bashing and internet hating as could be when he asked, "You are all a bunch of shit talkin Jerks. What the hell did you all do differently?" Behold the majesty here.
Photo Credit: NittoSuperTamer