Context
A new analysis by independent automotive blog FuelArc suggests that fire fatalities are 17 times more likely in a Cybertruck than in the infamous Ford Pinto — the posterchild of deadly cars if ever there was one.
Context
A new analysis by independent automotive blog FuelArc suggests that fire fatalities are 17 times more likely in a Cybertruck than in the infamous Ford Pinto — the posterchild of deadly cars if ever there was one.
Whenever I think about 70s cars I always think back to the popular myth that the chevy Nova performed poorly on the mexican market because if you separate the syllables it says “no go” but Nova literally just means new in spanish it was just a shitty car.
Nuevo is new, “No va” means “it doesn’t go”
For the record, nova doesn’t mean new in Spanish. Maybe Italian or Portuguese
Catalan
It does mean the same thing as the English word nova though:
https://dle.rae.es/nova
It means new in latin, not in Italian. Not sure about Portuguese.
Worth noting, the Nova actually outperformed sales targets in Mexico for so long that they ended up building a factory in Mexico City just to make them. They switched production over to the Citation when GM sized down its lineup, and it was so beloved as a car that in 1985 GM replaced the Citation II with new Novas based on the AE82 Corolla platform, built at the NUMMI joint factory in Fremont, CA. These new Novas proved similarly so popular that GM started just straight up importing and rebadging Toyota Sprinters as the Geo Prizm.
Another fun fact: the name association most people in Mexico would’ve had at the time would have been to PEMEX gasoline which was also often branded as “NOVA” gas.
Rant
I googled for an interesting or funny article on the issue but google sent me to three crappy articles and I gave up.
Yeah its a pre-internet myth I doubt there is much about it easily findable.
It’s funny to see an article describe it as a copy-and-paste urban myth when the article itself is probably accurate but still no thought and no effort copy-and-paste garbage. Even NPR let me down. I know there must be something good (a blog post?) but I don’t feel like fighting with google for dozens and dozens of minutes to maybe find it. Or not.
snopes article from 1999 is p good
(Found from a citation in the section about the myth on the Chevy Nova Wikipedia article)
Thanks. I started to instinctively ignore Snopes but that can be very dumb of me. Even if so many recent articles are garbage - the site is very old and it used to be good.
Lol yeah I wasn’t sure about either it until I saw the publish date, that’s why I specified the year. Not sure when it got bad but anything like pre-2010 seems likely aligned with their original purpose of debunking urban legends, and the older the better
That seems about right. It was bad in the years just before Trump 1.0. I remember trying to use it for r/PoliticalHumor. I wanted a simple quote that said in effect “No - the Nazi party wasn’t socialist. And here’s why…” The Snopes article was ridiculously large. Don’t remember how long it was. ~2,000+ words? I kept scrolling down and down and down. Finally the very last two paragraphs were pretty good so I shared them. Snopes did that for any simple situation. You’d have to scroll and scroll to maybe find anything good.
Then it started to turn to shit pretty quickly after Trump 1.0 started. Fact checking™ became a liberal thought terminating cliché and Snopes had a lot of competition for ad revenue from WaPo, Politifact, etc.