So Apparently France Sucks and Japan Rocks

So yesterday I decided to have some fun on Car Throttle. I gave everyone the option of 6 countries that are well known for producing cars and asked everyone to choose only one car from each country that they would buy. The car could be from any point in history and I was just curious as to what 6 cars everyone would come up with.

I would just like to add at this point that over 280 of the awesome CT Community have commented on the post and more still continue to comment so thank you all for taking the time to comment.

The countries I chose to include were Italy, Germany, UK, USA, France and Japan. All the responses gathered were awesomely varied and showed that there is a massive amount of users on the CT Community that all have varying opinions on cars.

In case anyone’s interested, my list was:
Italy: Ferrari 599 GTO
Germany: Audi RS6 Litchfield
Britain: Mclaren 675LT
America: Chevrolet Corvette Z06 (C7)
France: Renault Megane 275
Japan: Lexus LF-A

Looking through all the comments I noticed a few common trends that kept popping up and I want to go over them in this blog.

1. Japan Make Too Many Good Cars.

It seemed with the majority of your comments that people were able to choose just one car made by each country until it came time to choose a Japanese car. Some of the comments included:

“Japanese: well that is hard… the list is sooooo long, but probably an evo (VI or IX)”
“Japan: Skyline R34, Toyota supra, Nissan GTR, Honda NSX, Honda EG vti”
“Japanese = (Just ONE?!) R34 GTR”
“Japanese: AE86/NA Mx-5/Fc Rx-7 (i really can’t decide)”

I found this quite interesting as I knew what Japanese car I was going to add to my list as soon as I thought about it. I struggled much more to choose just one car from Italy and Germany. It just goes to show how large of a following the Japanese car community has and how loyal and dedicated they are.

2. The French don’t have a good reputation worldwide.

This really surprised me. The great thing about the Car Throttle Community is that the users come from all over the world and it makes me wonder if some areas of the world where French manufacturers don’t sell their cars has harmed their reputation. Don’t get me wrong their are plenty of reasons to not like certain French cars; a lot were sloppy to drive and built with what would seem like zero attention to quality.

But they also make some of the best drivers cars in the world, especially when it comes to front wheel drive hot hatches. From classics such as the Renault 5 Turbo and Peugeot 205Gti up to more current models such as the Renault Megane 275, Renault Clio RS and the little 208GTi. Let’s not forget also for many years the Renault Megane RS consistently set the lap record for front wheel drive cars at the Nurburgring.

I just feel its a shame that French cars as a whole seem to get a bad rep when they do in fact make some great drivers cars.

Let’s not forget as well that Bugatti is a French company #EB110 #Veyron

3. “So what country does that come from??”

It was interesting to note how different users view different cars nationalities; usually being influenced by the nationality of the company that owns the car company in question.

For instance, as I mentioned above, a lot of people seemed to struggle to think of a French car to add to their list; but only a few mentioned Bugatti, and sometimes when they did it was met with some dubiety. Granted that yes, Volkswagen do own, finance and design Bugatti’s since their takeover but I would still consider Bugatti a French company seeing that is where their headquarters are located.

Taking into account the fact that VW also own Bentley with whom they share many parts, engines and platforms, yet Bentley is considered about as British as it gets. The same could be said for BMW who own Rolls Royce and Mini, or Audi who own Lamborghini. So I just know that for me personally I consider a car’s nationality to be its origin country and not whatever company owns it.

But that’s just my opinion ;)

4. What About Sweden??

This isn’t really a trend in the responses as much as it is a mistake on my part. When I was thinking of what countries I should include in my list I think my brain just decided to go with the countries that have the widest selection of manufacturers to choose from. But once I started getting responses from the CT Community like “What about Volvo?”, “Koenigsegg is my favourite manufacturer”, “It’s a shame I can’t include the Seat Leon”, “What about Holden”…I realised I probably screwed up and should’ve included more country options.

So I would just like to apologise and I should not have underestimated the Car Throttle users and their worldly knowledge ;)

5. Ya’ll love an Audi RS6!

And I can’t really blame you. This was one of, if not the most popular choice in the German category and this included myself as I also chose the Audi RS6 but the only difference was if I was buying one I would opt for the Litchfield performance extras which take it up to 750bhp!!! (Check out the link below for a little taste of the Litchfield tuned RS6 in a short video and see Top Gear’s review of it here: http://www.topgear.com/car-reviews/audi/rs6/40t-fsi-quattro-rs-6-5dr-tip-auto/first-drive).

Thanks for reading folks. These were just some of the things I noticed reading all your responses to this and please keep them coming I really appreciate all the thought the users have put into this.