Bumper cars

I love it when my auto show brethren share on Facebook the ridiculousness that happens to them in their own displays. This comment, from a particularly inventive visitor, is one of my favorites of all time:

"Are the airbags in this car on the inside or the outside?"

Now, people. Really?

The booth bro who shared is little gem is a much nicer person than I, or at least I assume he didn't immediately fall down, pointing and laughing and gasping for breath while loudly relaying his question to his coworker's as I would have been tempted to do (and no, the visitor was not referring to that Japanese iSave thingy, just regular old airbags).

No, while in the moment and faced with such a delightful piece of material our "Be nice to idiots" training kicks in and we just smile and say, "The inside, sir. Like all cars," with only the slightest hint of patronizing. I tend to deliver such responses with a tighter smile than I probably should, but after hearing this kind of ridiculousness for this many years it's truly miraculous I don't just hand them a dunce cap and walk away silently.

But if I could spend my days messing with people's heads, here is what my own response to that brilliant question would have been:

"This model comes standard with a bubble wrap exterior. Interior airbags are part of our $3000 Bumper Car Special Edition, which includes a helmet and a vengeful, nauseated little sister."

Come to think of it, that's a brilliant idea. Someone get iSave on the phone.

Rich people are stupid too

There's obviously a big difference between book smarts and street smarts, and people prove that to me over and over every single day of my life. Some people who you would assume to be smart are actually very, very dumb. And many of those people are very, very wealthy.

There are multiple luxury cars companies repped at Pebble Beach for the tourney right now - I know at least two luxury brands are up there, and probably more (I'm not, for the record). That's right kids, we don't just do auto shows. All summer long we're gluing on our best pageant-worthy smiles on marketing tours, ride and drives, and sponsored concerts, sporting events and state fairs. And if you can believe it, the questions can get even stupider off the auto show floor.

Take this one, for example. This was shared on Facebook by a product specialist at the Open, who says this was the response she got after telling the guest about the company website:

"How far away is the website?"

Ohmyblog. I don't even know how you could respond to that without coming out and calling the person a complete moron or accusing them of setting you up for Punk'd. Did you look in your butt? Because I'm pretty sure the website is in your butt. In fact, the entire interweb might be in there. You should probably go check. Shouldn't be too difficult; your head is already shoved all the way up there.

Stupid auto show quotes

First public day of the NAIAS - the biggie, the Detroit Auto Show. Today's winner of the stupidest question award goes to the gentleman who asked:

"Is this price in American dollars?"

I don't know why exactly he could have possibly thought it was in any other form of currency. I really spent a few minutes afterwards racking my brain, trying to figure out why he could have possibly thought our prices would have been in anything BUT America dollars.

I came up with a few possibilities:
A) He had a Russian accent, and it is cold in Detroit, so maybe he forgot where he was and became confused about the whole rubles/dollars thing.

B) Cobo Hall is right across the river from Canada, so maybe he thought due to proximity we might quote prices in Canadian dollars.

C) He's a dumbass.

I'm going with C.

Stay tuned for more stupid auto show quotes as the week progresses!