So, I wanted to identify the car, and I was dead set on Subaru because those looked like a Subaru door handle and the Sunshine Orange Subaru painted the XV, known in the US as the XV Crosstrek because I don’t write the jokes about yankees needing shit spelled out, the world writes them and I just read them aloud.
So surely this is the car in picture, one would think, especially once assured by Google Lens that that’s what the picture depicts. But there’s one conclusion I kept coming back to:
Yes, people. Someone out there not only cares what car we think that is but is actively working to deceive us into thinking that is the last generation of the car I keep having to remind myself is not spelled Crosstek. But I will not fall for it, and with my help neither will you!
From such a closeup, in fact, one would surely, if not notice the upper feature line being a nick further out than the upper edge of the handle hole, at least notice the presence of a lower feature line below it, or at the VERY least the doorline curve to its right being concave and not convex.
So perhaps the previous generation had the simpler lines we’re looking for?
Yes, but also a handle recess that does not reach all the way to the back of the handle, so, having gotten back to square one, I resorted to a cunning strategy: waiting ‘til I got home and finding the picture source on my computer.
(Which I could still do on my phone too if Google wasn’t hellbent on pretending Lens could ever be a serviceable replacement for the OG reverse image search when you can’t even sort matches by fucking size and its idea of exact matches is as accurate as my idea of staying on topic speaking of which what were we talking about I swear this never happens.)
And I found it’s a 2009-2014 Subaru Liberty (name by which Aussies got the Legacy ‘till 2020).
But, oh the irony, the orange that clued me onto the Subaru brand altogether? It never adorned this generation. And this, as you can see in this more accurate lighting, is not even that orange. Because as it turns out…
Indeed, in the ultimate act of deceit, what you were looking at wasn’t yellow paint nor orange paint for, being a wrap, it wasn’t paint altogether!
This explains what would otherwise be a bafflingly uninteresting picture: in any normal car, that’s just a door handle. In a car basically coated with sticker, that is a flex.
And yes, fortunately, the filename can chime in in the debate.
Not saying that a color necessarily is anything someone making it is willing to say it is, but if you mean to insist that this is yellow…
…well, go tell 3M that. Or go get told that by 3M! They do offer samples.
Links in blue are posts of mine about the topic in question: if you liked this post, you might like those - or the blog’s Discord server, linked in the pinned post!
EDIT: This is, by some order of magnitude, this blog’s most popular post, and I’m happy to have entertained so many.
If you’re one of them, like @uxbridgeenglishdictionary here…
…I have great news for you: there’s now a spinoff blog called @what-is-this-car, dedicated to identifying make, model, generation and year of vehicles seen around or sent its way, and explaining what gave them away! I work on it with the very appreciated help of many talented friends, and I’d love of you to check it out. (And, well, to check this blog out too, if you have the time.) Thanks! :)
Also, @furreteatingicecream posted a render of what the picture looks like to those suffering from protanomaly (or red-weak colorblindness), courtesy of color-blindness.com’s color blindness simulator.
If you think this doesn’t look any different, well, we may have worked out why you don’t think it’s orange.
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