Well, last week's fun thread on shitboxes seemed to have touched a nerve. Oddly enough, folks are mighty passionate about the cars they've owned that have been, well, let's just say less than 100% reliable and/or safe... Heck, I didn't even tell the story of the Dodge Club Cab my friend owned that tried to eject me while going around a rotary...
In a similar vein this week, the Top Ten list is going to be the Top Ten automotive mistakes. These are cars that just didn't work, for one reason or another. Some were overpriced, some unsafe, yet others underpowered. Some were all three. In any case, here are the cars that you know cost someone a high-payin' gig...
1. Edsel. The Edsel has got to be the most famous flop in automotive history. Ford had grand designs for the Edsel, with plans for it to be its own marque, a step up in luxury from Ford with bigger, more luxuriously appointments and flair. Instead, it languished on dealers' floors, priced too high and offering too little in return.
2. Ford Pinto. Yeah, a car that explodes in a rear-end collision has FAIL written all over it. Add in butt-ugly styling - even for the 1970s - and a pathetic attempt to cash in on the small(er) car preference in light of the gas crisis, and it all came down in one bad car.
3. Plymouth Prowler. If Mopar had offered an eight cylinder engine, or a turbo-charged V6 with a six-speed manual transmission rather than the auto-tranny V6, they'd have had another winner like the Viper. Instead, they charged an absolute premium for a car that would get beaten off the line by Escort GTs...
4. Chevy Vega. Ah, the car made out of compressed rust, the Vega was GM's answer to Ford's Pinto. The Vega didn't explode, although there were rumors that letting one off a jack too quickly would cause it to fall apart completely. Quality wasn't Job 1 on the Vega. Or Job 2. Or Job 83...
5. Buick Reatta. Too pricey, too slow, and with a nameplate that everyone's grandmother drove. Not exactly a winning combination. The Reatta was intended to be, well, we're not really sure - it was too small and cheap to challenge the Mercedes C class; with only 165 horsepower out of the 3.8L V6 and front-wheel drive it wasn't challenging anybody off the line, either. It was too cheap to rival the Mercedes and BMWs and too expensive to rival the Celicas and Zs.
6. Toyota T100. The only foreign car on the list, the T100 was Toyota's first attempt at a large(r) truck. The only problem was, Toyota forgot to power it like a larger truck, putting in a 3.9L V6 when Ford had a 4.0L V6 in the Ranger and GM had a 4.3L V6 in the S-10/S-15. It was bigger, but with the little engine couldn't get out of its own way or haul much of anything.
7. 1991 Chevrolet Caprice. The last iteration of GM's B-body had a significant design flaw, one that GM stubbornly denied until the end. The seat belts were attached to the door rather than the "B" pillar, and in high-speed collisions had been found to actually yank occupants out of the car. This proved catastrophic for the police fleet sales, as these are the kinds of crashes police cars are often subject to...
8. 2002 Ford Thunderbird. This was simply a case of Ford getting greedy. They saw the success of the New Beetle and the PT Cruiser as a hankering for a "retro" car and released the "boutique" T-bird as an obvious hommage to the original '55 T-Bird. Problem was, they priced it about what a full-on restoration would cost for an original...
9. Chrysler Aspen. Simply a case of the wrong car at the wrong time. Just as gas prices went through the roof and the economy started dropping faster than frat boy trou at pledge week, Chrysler decided that what they really needed to do was re-badge the gas-guzzling Durango with the Chrysler name badge and charge more for it. Just a couple years later, they've dropped both SUVs from the line...
10. Cadillac Cimarron. I know I've bashed this one before, but it's so damned pitiful that it deserves a second whack... GM took the Chevy Cavalier, a no-nonsense, entry level econobox, tossed Cadillac emblems on it, and doubled the price. GM was perfectly willing to throw the good Cadillac name under the quality bus just to make a quick buck. I honestly think the Cimarron is the starting point of GM's decline...
So there's my list of automotive failures. Some too slow, some too expensive, some too dangerous; all were losers in pretty much every sense of the word.
How many other "oops"s did I miss?
That is all.
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11 comments:
I LOVED the '02 T-Bird, but no, I didn't fork out the coin for one.
The Toyota truck. Lulz.
That's what my friend was driving when we busted a tire rode last week.
Not to mention the steering wheel does this hilarious funny thing about being turned 45 degrees to the left just to go straight...
Or the slipping transmission....
Or the horn that only honks when you jerk the steering wheel...
Or the fact that it only seats three at most and we travel in packs of at least seven, and that poor little thing can't haul us.
Ha!
I have to disagree with you on the Vega. I would disagree on the Pinto too, except for that whole "explodes if you look at it too hard from the rear" thing.
The vega was a perfect car for what my buddies and I used it for: A car to beat up when out carousing after school and on the weekends.
If something fell off, it didn't look a bit out of place to put it back on with duct tape. With four teenage boys and 2 cases of beer as cargo, it could barely get over 70mph and handled like a refrigerator...so it was hard to get into any real trouble with it.
If you hit anything with it, the object stuck would hardly notice and the dents and dings usually improved the appearance of the Vega.
It was a perfect car for us.
They (and the Pinto) were also very common on the streets, so they couldn't have been too bad a call for the auto makers. Even if something is a piece of crap, if the sell the heck out of them, they must be meeting the demand of at least one segment of the market.
I actually likes the Vega's styling. But what I really liked was whipping cosworth Vegas in a race with my '65 Corvair. =)
Rusty, You'd have had trouble beating my Vega with your Corvair unless you were runing a V-8 in your back seat, heh.
Loved the Vega; and the Corvair Monza. Did have a friend who stuffed a Pontiac 400 in the back seat of his Corvair. Had to put about 200 pounds of weight in the front truck, heh.. Blanked out the rear windows and had lots of fun until his opponents got a look at the back end.
Okay, just so someone mentioned the Cosworth Vega.
Am assuming the Toyota truck gaff was tongue in cheek...or drunken pecking:-)
Um gotta correct you on the Aspen/Durango. They may have discontinued the Aspen.
But the Durango is still in product.
http://www.dodge.com/en/2009/durango/
In fact, I think the Aspen may still be in production as well. Though I'd just get the Dodge with all the features - cheaper. ;-)
http://www.chrysler.com/en/2009/aspen/index.html?bid=1758115&adid=207939705&pid=30087464&KWNM=aspen%20auto&KWID=3974212&gclid=CPf588z6jpkCFYh_3godalAGYg
I had a buddy in the Navy that tricked out a Pinto.
narrowed rear end, flared rear fenders, wide rear tires.
Put a 351 Windsor in it with a blower and a 3 speed manual tranny.
I was a bit skeptical when he first started working on it, but when it was finished, it really looked good.
I wish I'd taken a picture of it but, alas, I did not.
You missed why Chevy Novas never sold south of the border.
Spanish interpretation "Chevy doesn't go".
Gee, why didn't we get that warning?
They resurrected the name "Aspen"??? They didn't get the clue from the piece of crap that they LAST hung that name on?
My family has a long history of keeping cars until they simply fall apart from old age. We were getting 100,000+ in cars that were made in '66 and '70. We NEVER traded in a car that was a year and a half old...
Until my parents didn't listen to their gearhead 17 year old son and bought a 77 Dodge Aspen. *spit*. I mean, when you're in the DEALER'S PARKING LOT and someone backs into the demo you're taking out for a test drive, shouldn't that be considered a SIGN? *sigh*. Nope. Slow speed collision left a HUGE dent in the aluminum foil that they called a body.
Came home one day and there's this "Spitfire Orange" 4-door POS glowing on the driveway. The ONLY good thing about that pile of crap is that it had a three on the tree, so it was the car I learned to drive a stick on. 'Course, the clutch return spring required about 30 lbs of force to get it down far enough to shift gears. I remember getting caught in traffic on the Cross-Bronx Expressway one Friday night in that shitbox... my left leg HURT the next morning. I was 18 and in great shape, but man... my left leg was hurting from all the clutching.
And the engine... Seems that Dodge managed to screw up the immortal Slant Six in '77 - they put a new carb on the thing. A carb with gasketing material in it that SWELLED when the then-new-to-market unleaded gas hit it. You started to pull out at a light and the engine would just bog down... no power whatsoever. You'd be sitting there in the middle of an intersection and swearing at this thing to MOVE!!! And of course, Dodge would admit no wrongdoing and wouldn't try to fix it.
The last straw was when it got hit by a tree. Yes, BY A TREE. My mother was waiting in traffic to get on Rt 46 one night in a rain storm, and the wind blew down a rotten tree. Crushed the roof right behind her, dented the trunk lid... Cop said that if she'd been SIX INCHES farther back, she'd have been killed.
After getting that junker fixed, we traded it in. It was a year and a half old. Her previous car? '66 Dodge Monaco. Gave it to me at ten years old with about 110,000 miles on it. Before that? '59 Studebaker Lark. Kept that for 7 years. Far as I'm concerned, you should have nominated the DODGE Aspen for an automotive "OOPS".
Possibly the WORST car I've ever seen.
the car you referred to as made out of swiss is my car and it is 40 years old with no rust. and next time you need to use my name as the copyright owner to use the image.
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