🆕 Never Post! The Happiest Car On The Internet

Georgia talks with automotive journalist Rory Carroll about the memetic rise of the Renault Twingo, its debut on the racing game Gran Turismo, and what the popularity of this dorky car says about online car culture. –

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The Happiest Car On The Internet 

Find Rory:

• Alloy's website
• Bluesky
• Auto Week
• Jalopnik

Cute Car Links:

• What is a Kei car? - Jalopnik
• The Nissan S-Cargo is a Postmodern Masterpiece - Road & Track
• Nissan Figaro 

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our contributing producer is Kurt White. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Revving an engine to Steal attention.
Flirting cool furniture with blithe lids Closed.
A tidy splash on a mirror. A Fear
Of belonging an avoidance of Cleaving to Incompletion
As of a flash as of hit by a flash
Or an echo
Of an echo of a speech into stones.
Tone deaf stick lashings who
Spoke, along school railings
Paramount Noise

Excerpt of Stranger, by Cris Cheek

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

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.

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?

Of course. That's an all timer.

Could you describe to me what it looks like?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

That is the show we have for you this week. We are gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday, July 16. Is your wallet too heavy? Bank account, feeling slightly too cumbersome. Allow Never Post to ease some of that burden by handling four to 12 of your monthly dollars.

That's right. We have three membership tiers, 4, 7, and $12 depending upon how much of your wealth you would like Never Post to manage by turning it into a podcast. Hey, it's a more sound investment than a lot of other things out there. You can become a member today at neverpo.st. Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name, last name.

Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. Revving an engine to steal attention. Flirting cool furniture with blithe lids closed. A tidy splash on a mirror.

A feel of belonging and avoidance of cleaving to incompletion as a flash as of hit by a flash or an echo or an echo of a speech into stones. Tone deaf stick lashings who spoke along school railings, paramount noise. Excerpt of Stranger by Chris Cheek. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and it's distributed by Radiotopia.