Is Direct Drive Really Better?

Direct drive, idler wheel, belt drive. There are good and bad implementations of all of these, just like suspended and non-suspended tables.

BTW, your car analogy is a bit flawed when you consider what the engine's flywheel is designed to do. A stock car will have a heavy flywheel from the factory which helps get the car going from a standing start. When I used to drag race one of the first things we did was to lighten the flywheel just enough to help get the rpm's up quickly. Too much and you had trouble getting the car off the line.

Is this a joke?

Above a certain price point, direct drive is the superior technology. But designing and building a good direct drive unit costs a fair bit of change, which is why it was generally only attempted by companies that could amortize that cost over a large number of units--esp. your larger Japanese makers. And they're largely out of the turntable market now, save for a few really low-end units--belted, of course. The most obvious exception is the Technics 1200.

For smaller makers, belt drives are much easier to build well, so that's what they do. At the same time, they've spent the last couple of decades trash-talking direct drive, so a lot of audiophiles have heard that direct drives disappeared because they were inferior. Not so.