{"id":1991313,"date":"2026-06-15T13:25:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T10:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1991313"},"modified":"2026-06-15T13:25:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T10:25:00","slug":"what-car-has-the-strongest-cult-following","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1991313","title":{"rendered":"What Car Has The Strongest Cult Following?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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We all love cars, but there are some car owners who are a little too in love with their cars, ya know? The dudes with “MOPAR or No Car<\/a>” bumperstickers spring to mind. Here in Michigan, whole families often pledge their loyalty to a certain brand going back generations.\u00a0It’s not unheard of to go to a Christmas gathering and find 90% of the vehicles in the parking lot all bearing the same badge. Car enthusiasm itself is a bit culty as well. We have a special language, indecipherable to outsides, and are constantly testing each other’s purity of knowledge and belief.<\/p>\n

But then there are the one make, one model crowd that take things to an extreme. The Jeep Wrangler wavers<\/a>, the Miata modders, the people who try to convince others that the Chevrolet Covair was a Good Car<\/a> (guilty as charged) and the weirdos with their cars tattooed somewhere on their body; cars can become passive, all consumer cults in their own way. Which car or brand do you think has the strongest believers?<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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The Volkswagen Beetle has earned its cult status honestly. It was a funky, affordable option during a time in American automotive manufacturing that focused on long, luxurious road yachts. The Bug had a certain off-beat appeal to hippies and students in particular, and is practically a symbol for the ’60s second maybe only to its big brother, the Microbus.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was also, famously, the favorite car of Charles Manson, who planned for a dune buggy based post-apocalyptic cult. In actuality, Manson never thought the world was going to end, he just wanted to hold on to his cult of drugged-up women. You could even say the VW, which was designed by\u00a0Ferdinand Porsche with support from the Third Reich, was born out of a cult, though the Beetle wouldn’t really become popular until after the war. Once folks overcame the icky historical beginning of the Bug it became incredibly popular, so much so that the last factory (sort of) producing the Beetle finally ended production in 2019<\/a>. People are still plenty obsessed with this little vehicle today, as evidence by our own stories<\/a> and the revival of the Beetle in the late ’90s, when everyone was 60s obsessed.<\/p>\n

So what’s your pick? What car do you think has the most die-hard, loyal fans.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We all love cars, but there are some car owners who are a little too in love with their cars, ya know? The dudes with “MOPAR or No Car” bumperstickers spring to mind. Here in Michigan, whole families often pledge their loyalty to a certain brand going back generations.\u00a0It’s not unheard of to go to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,247],"class_list":["post-1991313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawlmanager","tag-jalopnik-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1991313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1991313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1991313\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1991313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1991313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1991313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}