I apologise if it seems like a bit of mixed-messaging, especially from virtually all of my dearly beloved co-workers here at Gizmodo who tell me I am so grievously wrong that it is causing physical pain to them, so let me set the record straight: Red cars are great, but red soft tops on convertibles are awful. Ban them. Ban them all.
I was reminded today of my hatred of red convertible tops when I saw the other version of the Bentley Continental GT convertible Number 1 Edition. It was black and it had a red soft top. Ick.
The thing with red soft tops is they always look like a cheap afterthought. Like they ran out of the other colours at the factory and were like, “Oh, no! What are we gonna do to keep people dry from the rain?” And someone looked up from sniffing glue, pointed at the drapes and went, “Those will do!”
Red soft tops have always given off a sense of sloppy senescence to me. I always feel like I’d see them rolling through the streets of Coral Gables at the hands of some retiree on the way to the weekly bingo match. They are the people who wear a lot of pastels and have strong opinions about “the younger generation.”
Look. Look at them all, ruining otherwise perfectly good cars. So rude, that warm-hued expanse of canvas, stretching out for far too long. It looks good on no car because it always manages to clash with everything else.
I am a black soft tops-only girl myself, but there are two exceptions.
Exception 1: The car is Italian. Only then is the tan soft top acceptable. I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules.
Exception 2: A blue top looks real good on cars that are either silver or light blue.
These are the two exceptions. If you must buy a soft top convertible, then keep the soft top black unless the car falls into either one of those two categories.
And never check the box for red.