Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
Rugnetta, and we have a revving show for you this week. Producer
Georgia talks with Rory Caroll of Alloy Mag about car culture
online generally and the Renault Twingo specifically. How did the
discontinued darling automobile of the Internet meme set attain
such notoriety, and how does the adoption of this European
compact reflect larger shifts in car culture, especially as it
has moved, like everything else, increasingly online? But first,
we're gonna take a quick break.
You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member
feed. And when we return, Georgia, Rory, Car Culture, and
the adorable Renault Twingo.
Georgia Hampton: The racing video game Gran Turismo is an
extremely reputable, if not the most reputable driving simulator
on the market. A car enthusiast's dream game, which
promises that all drivable cars offer extremely realistic
handling, mimicking the way that each one of these vehicles would
actually behave if you really drove them on a racetrack. And
in April of this year, Gran Turismo announced three new cars
that players could drive in GT seven. Two of the three cars in
this update were predictably racy for a racing game. The
first was a now retired Porsche nine sixty four, a variant of
the nine eleven series that was only produced between 1989 and
1994.
The second, the Yang Wang u nine is, according to the company's
website, the fastest EV production car in the world with
a top speed of 308.33 miles per hour. It belongs to a class of
luxury cars called supercars. Lavishly designed vehicles that
are so exclusive and so terrifyingly powerful that
they're basically works of art. Cars like this are sold for
multiple millions of dollars. So while, yes, the u nine is
technically a production car, meaning that quote unquote
normal people could buy them, it is impossible to do so unless
you're a prince with an empire's worth of unimaginable wealth or
like a billionaire oil executive.
For the vast majority of us, Gran Turismo is our one chance
to experience what it would feel like to drive this car. But as
far as I could tell from looking at reactions online, nobody in
the Gran Turismo fandom cared about the u nine or the Porsche
nine sixty four. The exciting part of the April update to GT
seven was the third car. This car was the most anticipated,
most talked about, and by far the most celebrated when it was
announced. Are you familiar with the Renault Twingo?
Rory Carroll: Of course. That's an all timer.
Georgia Hampton: Could you describe to me what it looks
like?
Rory Carroll: I mean, first of all, it's smiling. I mean, it it
is actively it's doing the, like, anime eyes, and it has,
like, a little tiny human smile on the front bumper. It is the
happiest looking vehicle maybe in history.
Georgia Hampton: That's Rory Caroll. He's an automotive
journalist who used to run Auto Week magazine, then was the
editor in chief at Jalopnik, and most recently launched the car
site Alloy last October. Rory has bylines in pretty much every
car publication. And he's the only person I'd wanna talk to
about the fact that a 1993 Renault Twingo had somehow made
its way onto one of the most well respected driving games of
all time. Because as a passive observer, the kinds of cars I
expected to see in a game like Gran Turismo were the ones I
mentioned before.
Extremely fast, intimidating looking cars, luxury cars, rare
vehicles like that yangwang, or even something as unusual as a
moon buggy, which was in fact offered in a previous update.
Speaker 4: K. When he hits the craters and starts bouncing is
when he gets his rooster tail, he makes sharp turns. Hey. That
was a good stop. Those wheels just lock.
Mark off.
Georgia Hampton: But definitely not the Renault Twingo. An
affordable and dorky looking mass production car that was
moderately popular during its thirty plus years on the market.
Yet somehow, there it was. Its smiling face beaming back at me
unabashed and unafraid of the two far more powerful cars that
sat idling alongside it. And it matters that this car of all
cars was the one that got chosen.
Rory Carroll: You can't just throw any car in there. Like,
there there have been cheap kind of micro cars in Gran Turismo
since Gran Turismo started, and none of them have had this like
mummified or or kind of like Internet moment of celebrity
that the Twingo did when it when it joined. Right? Like, this is
kind of like a singular thing where it's like, oh, everyone's
just excited about the Twingo being in in Gran Turismo.
Georgia Hampton: Even before its debut on GT seven, there's been
a small but very vocal meaning community around the Twingo.
People spliced in pictures of it keeping pace with a Formula one
car or pasted it into a fake breaking news bulletin declaring
that a Twingo just won Le Mans, an extremely prestigious
endurance race that takes twenty four hours to complete. In real
life, it would be completely impossible for a Twingo to win a
race like that. It's just not powerful enough. But online, the
Twingo could do it all.
And putting a car like that into Gran Turismo plays into the
joke. It's making the meme of the Twingo winning Le Mans a
reality. Well, at least through a screen. But it also brought
this jokiness into a much, much bigger digital spotlight. The
meme of the Twingo was no longer the darling of a community of
enthusiasts who had all found the same subreddit.
Now the meme ability of this funny little car exploded across
a broader online car culture.
Rory Carroll: Gran Turismo is like among the, you know,
whatever mainstream racing games. It's like, this is the
real racing simulator. This is the most serious, which is like,
it's great. It's incredible. It's very impressive.
But that's that makes it so much funnier when you see a Twingo
out of the track or like a a huge group of Twingos out on the
track. Like, that's why it's good because it's like this is a
cartoon car. This is a Pokemon going out and racing against
much more serious machinery.
Georgia Hampton: And at first, I thought that was the beginning
and end of this. The Twingo got onto g t seven because it was a
meme. And it was a meme because, I mean, it's called a Twingo.
And it looks the way it looks. Like, it's impossible to
overstate how much this car is just like a little guy.
The Twingo is the kind of car a child would draw if asked to
draw a car. It looks happy to see you. It's so cute. But if
Gran Turismo was just looking for a car that was regularly
being laughed at on the Internet, they'd throw a Tesla
Cybertruck in there. No.
The Twingo and the online community around it represents
something else, something far, far bigger than a meme. And to
better understand that, we have to look at how the Twingo exists
within car culture IRL, and then how the Internet shook things
up. As an actual car on the market, the Twingo had two huge
benefits, affordability and accessible design.
Rory Carroll: It's one of those cars this is like my favorite
genre of cars, which is like a cheap car that does not punish
you for, like, not having a lot of money. So it's like great
design. The wheels are pushed way out into the corner, so
there's tons of space inside and it handles really well. And the
rear seat is on rails. Like, this was very unusual at the
time.
It's like a bench seat, but you could push the seat forward to
create more trunk space and push it back to create more leg room
so, like, adults can fit in the back of the car. And it just
like it is one of those things where it's like thoughtfully
designed. And again, it's it's supposed to, you know, it says
like, hey, look, we know you don't have a lot of money, but
that doesn't mean you have to have this miserable little car.
Like, this is gonna be a fun, cool experience.
Georgia Hampton: But the Twingo wasn't cool in the mainstream
sense of the word when it came to cars. Not by a long shot. A
cool car was more like a muscle car. Something loud and fast and
powerful. It was the 1968 Ford Mustang GT three ninety Fastback
driven by Steve McQueen in Bulleit.
A car that insists upon itself in its bulk or its ability to
beat your car in a drag race, a bully of a car. Offline,
mainstream car culture was and still is the stuff of the quote
unquote car guy. There are many versions of this person, but I
picture him like this. He's a middle aged white man wearing a
polo shirt tucked into slacks and white sneakers. Fancy watch,
worryingly tan skin, an avid Top Gear viewer.
He's the kind of guy who would be excited by the fact that I
just said 1968 Ford Mustang GT three ninety Fastback and that I
referenced the movie Bullet. As someone who's always been
interested in cars and racing, I grew up around this iteration of
the car guy. But regardless of his appearance, he is the
gatekeeper of mainstream offline capital c c car culture. And it
is a culture that has never been especially welcoming. There's
the issue of price and who can afford to drive certain kinds of
cars.
The way vehicles run, what kind of machinery they use, all of
that can become extremely technical very quickly. And if
you don't know what all those words mean, you'd be forgiven if
you didn't feel like participating in the
conversation. It's very easy to make a discussion about, say, a
Formula one car sound like an extremely dense textbook in a
subject you never studied. The IRL car guy really only makes
space for other car guys who have the same interests, dare I
say, same look as he does. My experience, talking to these
kinds of men quickly turns into a pop quiz.
You are veritable, oh, you watch Formula One? Name five drivers
currently on the grid. And I can, and I do, but it sucks
every time. The car guy has dictated a lot of what has been
deemed cool or interesting in the culture of cars for a very,
very long time. And also notably, what wasn't cool?
Rory Carroll: Like, I can remember conversations like, oh,
you can't buy a NA Miata. That's a girl's car. That's a it's a
hairdresser's car or whatever. You know, when I was a kid, and
I think in in probably before that too, it was all about
performance and like, oh, my thing is better than your thing.
Like, I read in Car and Driver that my m three is faster than
your 300 z x or whatever.
It's better. Like, I you know, we've looked at the numbers and
proven that it it is my thing is better than yours. It was men
trying to go fast, and, like, that was the kind of beginning
and end of it.
Georgia Hampton: In this world, the Twingo wasn't just uncool.
It was irrelevant, uninteresting. It didn't fit the
criteria of power, speed, and prestige that made it worth
talking about. A Twingo would never be seen in Bullitt. Or to
use a more contemporary car guy example, the Twingo was never
going to be in a Fast and Furious movie.
Dom Toretto was never going to roll up to the end of the movie
cookout in one of these. In general, unless you are a
certain type of person with a certain type of insider
knowledge, car culture was not an easy thing to enter into. And
as this community moved on to the Internet, it's easy to
imagine that it would create an online culture that perpetuates
an explicitly exclusionary kind of knowledge hoarding. That the
memes would play into the highly technical, elite, oddly
competitive culture of one upmanship that kept this world
shut out from anyone who wasn't a stereotypical car guy. But
what's so exciting to me is that that's not what happened at all.
In fact, it's been the total opposite.
Rory Carroll: Because of the Internet and, again, because of
that dynamic around searching and kind of, like, be being a
connoisseur, I think, like, result has been all the barrier
barriers to entry have gotten lower because, like, it's it's
just there are more there's more knowledge about, like, weird,
cool, cheap cars. I think that's new too. I think, like, that
that car culture, and I think, you know, in large part because
of the Internet has grown to be much more inviting and much more
inclusive, and I think it is just more fun.
Georgia Hampton: Offline, there have always been a select few
car people who are into weird fun cars. But online, those
communities spread out to significantly more people than
they could ever have reached in the physical world. Rebuilding
the car community on the Internet somehow skirted the car
guy and his chokehold over what qualities were needed for a car
to be cool. Now cool can mean cute. It can mean fun.
Like, the fact that the Twingo is just a practical, but
beloved, goofy little guy of a car that is happy to see you,
that's a plus on the Internet. All the things that made the
Twingo a fringe interest for a certain community of enthusiasts
make it the perfect thing to be celebrated online.
Rory Carroll: A lot of meme culture, I think, like, just in
cars, but in everything is like it's sometimes, like, less about
the joke as far as, like, I'm gonna actually laugh at this,
but it's more about, like, in group signaling where it's like,
we understand this commonly. So we have, like, a sense of kind
of community and we're speaking a language that other people
don't understand. And I think, like, the Internet car culture
is in large part driven by that, like, ability to to demonstrate
your obscure knowledge that you know more that you're deeper in
it than the other person.
Georgia Hampton: But in the case of the online Twingo community,
the obscure knowledge isn't necessarily a ton of specs that
have to do with the drivetrain or torque. It's just the
awareness of a car that looks interesting. And that is such a
huge distinction between the IRL car culture and the digital one.
Because online, looking at memes about cars, all you have is what
the cars look like or maybe sound like. All you have is the
flattened version of the car that exists on your screen.
And through that format, it really helps to have a vehicle
that has a personality. A photo of a Mustang just looks like a
car. The Twingo looks like your buddy.
Rory Carroll: It is like it's so refreshing to be like, oh, look
at you. Look at you. Look at my little friend here, my little
French friend. You can formulate kind of an appreciation for a
car like the Twingo and express it, where it's like, it's good
because it's cute.
Georgia Hampton: And the Twingo's cuteness is the thing
that invites you in. In on the joke of the memes, and if you'd
like, into the culture that exists around this car. I had
never heard of the Twingo before the GT seven update. But the
second I saw its little egg shaped silhouette, I fell in
love. Then I started going down a rabbit hole of other cute,
interestingly designed cars.
I found the Nissan s car go, a car so wonderfully named because
it looks, yes, like a big snail. That then led me to the Nissan
Figaro, which looks like it should be driven by Stuart
Little. I spent a while looking at k cars, a class of Japanese
cars that are so small, they could easily fit inside my
living room. Those have actually had a meme streak in their own
right. Look them up.
You've almost certainly seen a post about a k car within the
last couple years. Honestly, look up all these cars. All of
them debuted before the Internet as we know it existed. But it's
only through the Internet that I, and now maybe you, had a
chance to learn about them. Each one of these cars has an online
community of people who love them.
And if you spend a little time clicking around, you can find
car people who are happy to be fans of a certain vehicle just
because it's cute. Like, that's the barrier to entry. And the
more I look at the Twingo, the more I adore it for this reason.
I've never really thought about playing Gran Turismo before, but
honestly, I would for the Twingo. I can tell already that
it would be an absolute nightmare to drive on a
racetrack.
It's too slow. It would almost certainly tip over on really
tight turns. But who cares?
Rory Carroll: That's what's good about it. That's what's inviting
about it. It invites people to, like, step back from this very
serious game and, like, experience something that is
just fun and inviting. I think that's great.
Georgia Hampton: The Twingo is approachable by design. It tells
you, hey, don't worry so much. I'm your friend, and I'm here to
get you where you're going. It only makes sense that the memes
around it are that way too. And sure, yes, there is still some
degree of if you know, you know about these posts.
Like, if you don't know what Lamons is, you won't completely
understand why it's funny to imagine a Twingo winning it. But
even so, the fact of the Twingo, its very nature, is the biggest
draw. And it so perfectly represents the kind of car
design I personally love. Sweet, lovely, and unserious. Here's my
favorite example.
The Volkswagen Beetle had the optional accessory of a small
bud vase attached to the dashboard. Like, who needs that?
But also, why not? IRL, I've never really found purchase for
my interest in cute car design. The car guys had nothing but
disdain and mockery for the VW Beetle's bud vase.
But on the Internet, the posts about the Twingo feel like a
doorway into this exact kind of car culture, one that has
nothing to do with speed or intimidation or technicalities,
but just the sheer appreciation of something fun.
Rory Carroll: I don't care that it's slow. It's actually better
because it's slow. You know what I mean? Like and it's it's not
cool because it's expensive. I don't need to prove any like,
it's cool because it's cheap and anyone can get one.
Georgia Hampton: On the Twingo's Internet, egalitarianism is
chic. That Yang Wang u nine with its over 300 miles per hour top
speed and unspeakably hefty price tag, it's tired. It's
boring. It's not fun. And at least on some very vocal corners
of the web, the people yearn for fun, for a cute little car that
drives around with a smile on its face.
A massive thank you to Rory Caroll for talking to me about
the Twingo and turning what I thought was going to be a simple
question of meme ability into one of the most wonderful and
frankly hopeful discussions I've ever had about car culture. I'll
include links in the show notes for Alloy, Jalopnik, and other
places where you can find more of his work. I will also,
obviously, include links to the cars that I mentioned in this
episode. Please, I am begging you, please go look at the S
cargo.
Mike Rugnetta: That is the show we have for you this week. We
are gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday,
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