(Off topic) Worst car(s) in history?
Rather than rehash the same old stuff, rooting guide, I'll be the first to admit after the IU loss I am kicking the can and not much into basketball at this time. Is it football season yet?
Worst car(s) produced in history?
My vote is for the Yugo. What say you?
Pontiac Aztec
March 11th, 2022 at 11:36 PM ^
On Survivor, the winner of a reward challenge gets something that, while I'm sure helpful to those playing the game, is fairly trivial: PBJs, coffee, pillows, a live chicken, etc. For one of the reward challenges in an early season, the winner got a Pontiac Aztek. That should tell you everything you need to know about the car...
Logged in to post same.
March 11th, 2022 at 10:17 PM ^
Disagree. Although odd looking the Aztec actually was very well liked by their owners.
All 8 of them in fact!
Two of the owners were the designer of the Aztec and the designer's mother.
I liked my Aztec. I remember buying a 36 inch Sony trinitron TV at Best Buy. This was the kind with the picture tube, it was in a massive box (and weighed a ton), and I told the clerk, I'll take it home. He said you have a pick-up truck? I said no- just a passenger car. He laughed at me. He and a helper loaded it into the back of the Aztec clean as a whistle, fit no problem. Now my wife and I unloading it at the other end was another matter.
Say what you want about the Aztec, but Walter White driving one made it top tier status
Didn't a Yugo get blown off the Mackinac Bridge?
Yep back in the late 80s. Who would have thought driving an ultra light car across a wide expanse on a windy day would be a bad idea.
My girlfriend at the time had a brother in law who was a state cop. They had a joke (poor taste but hey it is kind of funny) about this
YUGO OVER WEGO UNDER.
Sad I know but cop humor.
No way I had it's sister Buick Rendezvous, and it was great. You sat up very high, and was a pleasure to drive. The Aztec was funny looking, and had they assuaged the exterior a bit it would have been a great one. Anyone who had one loved it. So did Walter White...
Great for running over your Meth rivals.
March 12th, 2022 at 11:06 AM ^
Beat me to it
I can only speak to the best...
Cheese, Gromit! CHEEEEEEEEEESE!!
I'll go with the Yugo too.
Some runners up:
Pacer
Gremlin
Chevette
Aspen/Volare
Fairmont
Ahh, the Ford Fairmont. Remember it well
I had a 1981 Fairmount and loved it! This was in like 2006. Bought it for $1200 and had for 5 years, which I consider a major win.
March 11th, 2022 at 10:27 PM ^
Pacer = fishbowl on wheels, but actually not a bad car mechanically
Gremlin = Crumblin’, terrible car
March 11th, 2022 at 11:56 PM ^
Car pooled with a guy that had a Pacer station wagon. It was white with a blue rally stripe that went horizontally around the middle of the car. Damn thing looked like an Easter egg on wheels 🤣🤣🤣
March 12th, 2022 at 12:46 AM ^
I have an uncle whose wife had him buy BOTH a Pacer and a Gremlin.
She also had him repaint the Gremlin purple, with metallic gold flake sprinkled in. She also made her own quilted seat covers that had squares of brown corduroy mixed with others that were flowers. It also helped the she was a heavy smoker so it had that nice blue film on the windshield and well-aged tobacco smell in the upholstery. I remember it vividly, like you would any other traumatic event.
I truly wish I had a picture because it was the most hideous car imaginable. Cousin Eddy from Christmas Vacation would have been ashamed to be seen in it. These were people you only saw at the family Christmas party... because you loved your Grandma and had to. They also had a son who nobody would let play with their kids alone.
Thanks for bringing up the Gremlin. I'll have nightmares tonight.
One positive memory... when I was older (high school) I volunteered to help my Grandma do the seating for dinner one year. My aunt had married a banker that I despised (because he was a condescending ass that bragged about himself and his money non-stop), so I had them sit on either side of him and I took a seat across with my aunt so I could steer the conversation into topics that I knew would be amusing. Things like asking what the best kind of manure was for growing certain vegetables that the banker was eating, etc. It was one of the best Christmas parties I ever attended.
Cool story, 'bro.
Apparently the US market Yugo, while not great, was only the "worst car" by the power of culture, Yugoslavia reputation or size. The cars first importation was largely due to an Occidental Petroleum two-way contract.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2010/01/was-the-yugo-really-the-worst-car-ever.html
Gremlin
I can never see this car name without thinking of John Stewart's description of it at the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors for Bruce Springsteen. Stewart drove one in his youth, and said the Gremlin had been been invented for two reasons:
1. Birth control for young males.
2. So that the Pinto wouldn't feel so bad about itself.
The Ford Fairmont really was a POS. I had a summer job in college where they sent me to accompany a guy on a trip to Virginia. We rented a car at the airport which ended up being a Fairmont. The next day at the hotel we couldn't get it started. So the other guy calls the rental car place and they send someone out. He gets in the car, grabs the entire steering column, shakes it hard, and the ignition turns over. Like I said. POS.
Not just Chevette, *diesel* Chevette. Okay scratch that, that might have been an improvement.
Although the Aspen/Volare twins had many issues, I wouldn't put them on this list because Chrysler at least had good engines.
Family had a Vega, man was that awful. Rusted out so fast. Rusted everywhere. It was traded in for a GM X Car which was an upgrade from awful to merely terrible.
I knew a pizza delivery guy who drove a Yugo, he actually liked it. Had some regular car for when he wasn't working. Once the Yugo died I think he replaced it with a 3 cylinder Geo Metro, so it's entirely possible he was just ... different.
Trabant would definitely be my vote.
As a kid, our family had a Vega, then a Chevette and a Plymouth Reliant (K car). Yeah, we didn't know luxury.
The car I learned to drive on was my parents' 1962 Rambler Classic 2-door with three on the tree. It was the least sexy car made in the entire world that year, and driving it around in Grosse Pointe made it even worse.
It looked like this, only ours had a white top. It looks like something the USSR would have put out in 1973.
Then my mom sold it and moved up in the world to a 1970 Plymouth Duster that was metallic brown. Like a rectangular box of sparkly poop with a 225 Slant Six.
Chevy Vega. Truly awful.
Renault 5 -- "LeCar" -- belongs on this list. Those wheels...
My first car was a 1985 Toyota tarcel. We called it the space shuttle. Least aerodynamic car ever, was like a fridge. Had all wheel drive though and when my sound system was bumping you could only hear the rattling from the outside lol
Least aerodynamic car ever, was like a fridge.
The boxy AMC Renault Alliance that was sold from '83 to '87 was informally called the Appliance.
My dad worked for AMC and we had every AMC product at some point. Including the Renault products. Horrible vehicles. All of them.
Is that a Starsky and Hutch paint job/stripe? LOL.
March 12th, 2022 at 11:32 AM ^
Top gear reliant Robin was weighted so it would dump easier. But yea definitely a strange car
1955 bmw isetta
Aston Martin Lagonda sure was a thing of beauty....
If an anteater was a car
March 11th, 2022 at 10:55 PM ^
Looks like someone rescued a Rolls from the crusher while it was halfway down and said "oh, neat, it still runs."
Chevy Corvair - kind of ugly, rear engine, air cooled, weird rear suspension made it easy to spin out. Subject of Ralph Nader's book, "Unsafe at Any Speed".
Also, the Ford Edsel. Made to be the flagship model for Ford, it never sold worth a crap and only lasted 3 years. An abject failure.
Edsels weren't meant to be the flagship. GM had a bunch of different brands for different slots in the market and Ford thought they needed to match that, so they developed Edsel to slot in between Ford and Mercury. Problem was they never moved Mercury up off of Edsel's price point, so people who did want a Ford of some kind just went with what they knew, since it was the same price as the new brand.
March 11th, 2022 at 10:10 PM ^
OK, I stand corrected, it was a separate premium brand slotted above all other Ford models.
March 11th, 2022 at 10:52 PM ^
It wasn't really that either. Ford meant for the hierarchy to go, from cheapest to most expensive, Ford -> Edsel -> Mercury -> Lincoln. In the sense that it was supposed to be slotted above Ford-branded cars, yes. FoMoCo wanted it to compete with Oldsmobile, while Ford went against Chevy, Mercury went against Buick, and Lincoln vs. Cadillac. It was just, you could usually get a Mercury for the same price as an Edsel, so nobody bothered with the Edsel.
March 12th, 2022 at 10:47 AM ^
My dad used talk about Edsel Ford as a kind of “misfit” in the family. They tried to change the public perception of him with this brand new shiny car named after him. Maybe the lack of Edsel car sales were also impacted by the perception of the man.
"My dad used talk about Edsel Ford as a kind of “misfit” in the family. They tried to change the public perception of him with this brand new shiny car named after him."
It's still amazing to me after all these years that nobody at Ford had the ability to look at the design of that front end and realize "Holy fucking crap, that's a freakishly ugly design—let's scrap it and start over." If it came out that it was actually a conspiracy of FoMoCo insiders to make Edsel Ford a laughingstock, it wouldn't surprise me.
I was pretty car-conscious at a young age—growing up in the Detroit area in the 1950s and '60s made that easy—and even though I was only 6, I still have vivid memories of all the hoo-ha accompanying the introduction of the 1959 Edsel, and what a complete bomb it was to the car-buying public. For many years afterwards, the term "Edsel" became a generic term for a new product that was a colossal flop. It was a much bigger flop than New Coke.