In praise of crap cars

If there is a term I hate more than any of the other lazy generalisations peddled by smug hacks with little knowledge and even less sense it is the suggestion ‘there’s no such thing as a bad car any more.’

I’m too old to bother these days but, my, how I used to rail against the contention. ‘All cars sit in a class,’ I would fume, ‘and if a car is the worst in that class, it is by definition a bad car.’ I wasn’t done yet. ‘And if standards improve in that class, so must we raise our expectations to meet them. It doesn’t mean “there’s no such thing as a bad car any more.”’