Automakers Are Lying To You

It’s not what you drive, it’s how you equip and maintain it that delivers safety, capability, and dependability

When it comes to your ability to safely drive through inclement weather, rely on your vehicle in extreme circumstances or into high mileages, and achieve the kind of performance you see in ads, it’s not the car or truck itself that matters, it’s how you take care of it. This is a problem because that fact runs counter to automaker marketing and advertising, and the wider culture it informs. This point was driven home by an accident Friday night.

“You think it’s totaled?” The kid choked back tears to ask me. He’d just been T-boned in his 3rd gen Tacoma by another college student in a new-ish Subaru Forester. One of those sad low-speed crashes where you can see exactly what’s about to happen, powerless to stop it.

The corner in front of our house here in downtown Bozeman is badly sighted due to parked cars and, currently, six-foot tall piles of sn…