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Buy Your Dream Car and Lay Off the Internet For a While

Perhaps it’s an AMG or that WRX STI, it doesn’t matter, the recipe remains the same - once you head out there a buy yourself the car you’ve been lusting for, you should lay off the Internet for a while. Given my position, I shouldn’t invite you to do it and yet I can’t help it.
These days, the forum discussions and website commentary have reached a record level, which is why you can’t live happily ever after with the car you buy. Let’s say you’ve gone for the icing on the motoring cake and got your hands on the keys to a LaFerrari. Well, it’s rubbish, because it has a silly name. A Challenger Hellcat? Can’t go round a bend. What’s that, an M4? C’mon, you know what they say about Bimmer drivers.

And it’s not all just about the hate that flows online. Carmakers will give you a difficult time too. Automakers have always had their ways of luring you into their dealerships over and over again and the power of the Internet only amplifies their powers.

Think Porsche, for instance. You’ll have to wait until the end of a model’s initial life cycle to grab the really special models that fill up the forums and occupy our desktop wallpapers. But then the mid-cycle revamp comes along with fresher and fresher versions.

The hot hatch segment is also a good example of how the keyboard craze can determine you to stray off the right path behind the wheel. Let me put it this way - if you’re the kind that likes the A45 AMG, you won’t want to trade it for an RS3 and vice-versa. But many of the online discussions change their magnetic poles as the power levels of this cars surpass each other when updates arrive. Silly.

As I said, once you have your ride, it’s best to ignore the online chit-chat. At least until you two get to know each other better. Spend as much time with your new car as you can, forget the gossip about people doing burnouts in Hellcat Challengers and Z06s straight out of the showroom.

Handle that car of yours the old school way, with a proper break-in procedure and without second thoughts about what the competition has to offer. Let the pedals and the steering wheel tell you if you’ve made a mistake choosing a particular car before the online community deems it uncool or maybe “the best”.

Cars are built by humans and therefore are only as good as we are. They can’t be perfect like our online avatars require them to.

And try to enjoy the drive instead of seeking the ultimate drifting moves preached online these days. Sure, throwing the posterior out is good fun, but modern cars have much more grip than many of the Internet commentators can understand.

Perhaps the BMW M235i is the best example here. This is a BMW I met last year and one that’s not particularly tail happy. At least not in the way its Drift Mob commercial presented things, with a group of M235is reaching crazy slip angles after the electronics have been messed with.

And I won’t even get started on cars like the Mazda Miata. In fact, I will, but I’ll only rant for a little bit. Owning one of these has to be impossible these days. That’s because I’ve only heard extreme opinions on this roadster theme. Sure, the 2015 may change things a little bit, but in the past I’ve mostly head the most biased of opinions on the Miata. The JDM machine was either overrated, “for the weak”, or incredibly cool just thanks to its name. Too few people took to the forums to discuss this Mazda reasonably.

Right now, many of you are thinking “screw all this, I’m an adult, I won’t let myself influenced by some internet bla-bla.” But when you’ve become so intimate with your smartphone, trust me, some of these talks will get to you. You should be sharing your days and nights with your car, not your phone. Now that’s intimacy.

It doesn’t matter if the new model year has brought a 4 percent boost in terms of ... #[insert your trending hashtag here]. Make sure you use the correct driving position and rack up those miles before you zoom in on the debates again. This is not a game, it’s motoring life. LOL
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About the author: Andrei Tutu
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In his quest to bring you the most impressive automotive creations, Andrei relies on learning as a superpower. There's quite a bit of room in the garage that is this aficionado's heart, so factory-condition classics and widebody contraptions with turbos poking through the hood can peacefully coexist.
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