Tin Foil Taxi

Tin foil Taxi syndrome is the phenomenon that any player of the GTA trilogy will have experienced. From GTA III, the start of the trilogy, through Vice City and finally to San Andreas, the cars got gradually tougher, especially in San Andreas, to compensate for the comparative hugeness of the world map you were playing in, so that you could still cover a lot of ground without having to swap cars repeatedly because they kept blowing up.

In short, tin foil Taxi syndrome is the effect of moving from San Andreas to GTA III (which many players will have tried because this is the correct chronological order) and noticing the huge difference in how brittle the cars seem to be in GTA III.