Many vehicles are designed to be really good at certain tasks, which comes at the expense of other abilities. A Ford F-350 can tow 20,000 pounds without breaking a sweat, but wouldn’t be particularly spectacular on a track. A Subaru BRZ could be your autocross weapon, but isn’t going to tow your 7,000-pound camper. Despite this, some cars have some real hidden talents. What cars are surprisingly good at doing what they weren’t designed to do?
I have a reputation in the American Smart community for doing things with the Smart Fortwo that nobody else would dare to do. There was a span of time of about seven years when I owned nothing but Smarts. Whenever I ran into a situation that would normally call for a different vehicle, I often made my Smart do it, anyway, instead of paying for a rental or borrowing someone’s truck.
For years, this meant that if I needed to tow a new motorcycle home, move some furniture, or move out of an apartment, I hitched a U-Haul trailer onto the back of my 2012 Smart Fortwo. These cars are not officially rated to tow anything, yet I managed to tow trailers around Illinois and Wisconsin for some 20,000 miles.
Now that I’m older, a bit nicer to my own cars, and not as willing to play with something of such questionable legality, I don’t tow with Smarts anymore. Instead, I take them off-road! I love proving that you do not need a three-inch lift and 35-inch tires to make a Smart decent off-road. In my experience of actually off-roading a Smart, a decent set of tall snow tires and some good technique are all I need. I’ve gotten my Smarts pretty much anywhere that a 2WD pickup truck can go.
But perhaps my favorite example of making a vehicle do what it wasn’t built to do was making a bone-stock, base Jeep Renegade rule at rallycross. At best, Jeep designed the Renegade to handle some soft off-roading. It was not designed to launch off of tabletop jumps and it was not designed to lay down some seriously hot laps on the track. But that’s what my group of friends and I did one weekend.
Our Renegade laid down some of the fastest lap times that weekend, and even the organizers were shocked because the field that weekend included modified side-by-sides, some rallycross-prepped cars, and at least one real rally car. Yet, here we were getting close to their times on regular street tires in a crossover with an automatic transmission that shifted slower than a teen driver learning a manual.
Here’s where I turn things over to you. What cars have you driven that were unexpectedly good at a job that they were not designed to do?
The post What Car Is Unexpectedly Good At Something It Wasn’t Designed To Do? appeared first on The Autopian.
