OLD RUSTY CAR

Last crawled date: 1 year, 8 months ago

Age, neglect, and damage tend to increase the expense of maintaining a vehicle. The vehicle may reach a point where this expense would be considered to outweigh the value of keeping it. Such vehicles are generally stripped for parts or abandoned. However, abandoning a vehicle on the road as a parked car is illegal in many jurisdictions and if a vehicle remains parked, the local authority commonly tows it to the scrapyard.[2][3] Some owners choose to keep the vehicle. These old, neglected, and oftentimes barely functional cars have been used not only for transport, but also as racing vehicles. Their use has earned them a place in popular culture.
During the 1930s, particularly in the wake of the Great Depression, the market for used cars first started to grow and decrepit cars were often a poor man's form of transport. Cheap dealers could obtain the cars for very little, make aesthetic adjustments, and sell the car for much more. Early hot rodders also purchased decrepit cars as the basis for racers, and early stock car racing was called banger racing in the United Kingdom and jalopy racing in the United States. A jalopy was an old-style class of stock car racing in America, often raced on dirt ovals.[4] It was originally a beginner class behind midgets, but vehicles became more expensive with time.[4] Jalopy races began in the 1930s and ended in the 1960s.[5] The race car needed to be from before around 1941.[4] Notable racers include Parnelli Jones.[5] In the 1960s, the Ministry Of Transport Test (MOT) was introduced, in an effort to increase road safety. Many decrepit cars that were missing important parts such as functioning brakes and lights failed the MOT and were scrapped, ending the age of the decrepit car, at least in England.
In Australian slang the terms rust bucket, bunky, old bomb, paddock basher or bomb are used to refer to old, rusty and/or rundown cars.[6] The term 'paddock bomb' or 'paddock basher' often refers specifically to a car no longer fit to drive on public roads, but driven in a local paddock for recreation or sport. Many rural children learn to drive in an unregulated way in a paddock bomb. The term shitbox may refer to an unprepossessing but probably roadworthy vehicle, celebrated in the biannual (autumn and spring) Shitbox Rally, an Australian fundraiser for cancer charities.[7] British English
In British slang the terms old rust bucket or simply bucket are used to refer to decrepit cars but the favoured term is old banger, often shortened to banger. The origin of the word is unknown, but could refer to the older poorly maintained vehicles' tendency to back-fire.[citation needed] The terms shed and cut and shut are also used, although a cut and shut refers specifically to a car made by welding the front of one car to the rear of another, usually after both original cars were damaged.[8] North American English A Missouri family of five who are seven months from the drought area on U.S. Highway 99 (Tracy vicinity) with a jalopy car during the Great Depression
In North American slang jalopy, clunker, heap, rust bucket and bucket are also used. So too are beater—a term especially favored in Canada—and the American urban hooptie, which gained some popularity from the humorous song My Hooptie by Sir Mix-a-Lot. The word jalopy was once common but is now somewhat archaic. Jalopy seems to have replaced flivver, which in the early decades of the 20th century also simply meant a failure.[9] Other early terms for a wreck of a car included heap, tin lizzy (1915) and crate (1927), which probably derived from the WWI pilots' slang for an old, slow and unreliable aeroplane. In the latter half of the 20th century more coarse terms became popular, such as "shitbox car rustycar oldcar 19scar antique cars old vehicle wheel racing tire car wheel motorsport auto manual manual car rust rusty rusty car 19s antique car