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50 Worst Cars of All Time
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I thought of you the other day when I took in a 2000 Intrepid. 120,000 miles and it still looked and ran good!
See you in the MTC?
Nice to hear mine isn't the only one that's still moving under its own power! What color/trim level is it? Mine is up to around 145,500 miles. Still runs good, although it has a few bruises and scrape here and there. And mis-matched tires.
Sure do remember Bob Banning Pontiac/Dodge.
"it only had a 3-speed automatic, without the benefit of overdrive."
Am I recalling correctly that the automatic used with the turbo didn't have a lockup, while the one used with the naturally aspirated 2.5 did?
I liked the styling of the LeBaron coupe. It looked good in all the colors offered, in my opinion. The hatchback sedan looked its best in black with a gold pinstripe, and black leather interior, in my eyes. Too bad their quality was marginal, and they had head gasket problems. Also, the five-speed manual had a crummy shift linkage. Hmmm, other than for the lousy engine, bad paint, sub-par fit and finish, etc., etc., they were phenomenal cars. Just kidding. They were what they were, which is to say, not too bad for the period.
I always thought the LeBaron GTS and Dodge Lancer looked good, too. Chrysler really did get a lot of mileage out of the K-car platform. Considering how plain-jane and humble the original Reliant and Aries looked, I think it's amazing how attractive some of the offshoots were. I think they ran into problems though,when they used the K- as the basis for the Dynasty/New Yorker and worse, the 5th Ave/Imperial. The platform was just too narrow to give the shoulder room that a bigger car needed.
Nice to hear mine isn't the only one that's still moving under its own power! What color/trim level is it? Mine is up to around 145,500 miles. Still runs good, although it has a few bruises and scrape here and there. And mis-matched tires. And a couple weeks ago it gave me a scare when the oil pressure light flickered faintly a few times. I think it's just a sensor or wire, or the sending unit. Oil level is fine, and it never made any nasty noises. Still, I'm gonna get it to the mechanic soon, to find out what's up with it.
Andre, My Intrepid is at 140,000, still running good. We need to get back to the Intrepid forum.
Regarding turbos: I had (and wish I still had) a 1985 Omni GLH turbo. The engine and turbo were fine through the 105,000 miles I had it. It rode like a go kart, the 5 speed was finicky and crude. Still it went like Hell.
I would add Volare/Aspen to the list: much worse than the Valiant/Dart they replaced.
Also the Vega: my sister had one and it rusted away in two years. It was simply horrible.
Detroit was at one time like that line of restaurants in a touristy town. They had all the diners they needed, and they all served the same type of food of the same basic quality. Nobody raised the bar, nobody stirred the pot. Oh yeah, one had slightly better french fries, and the other's burgers were 2 oz bigger, but by and large, same-o, same-o.
And then....(theme song from JAWS)......a master chef came to town........
Japan, Inc.
As it was it took all the way into the 1990s for America to make an even remotely competitive product to the Japanese and Europeans. Without protection, they would never have been given that amount of time.
There are too many American cars on all the "worst' lists. And a fair number of British, another country with a failed auto industry.
The American cars of the 60's were so beautiful and powerful and luxurious that the American cars of the 70's actually seemed almost deliberately insulting.
American cars wouldn't start and ran rough. Detroit blamed pollution controls..... but Japanese cars ran just fine.
Detroit responded to the 5 MPH bumper law by tacking protruberences on the noses of their old designs. Ugh-Ugh ugly!
Compare and contrast:
That's the Cosworth version by the way.... The Cosworth DOHC Vega prototype racing engines, rated at 270hp each, were completed by September, 1971. 185hp was the power figure being quoted for the production engines, but by 1975 at production, the horsepower rating was down to 110.
Try selling 110 HP sports cars to Muscle car fans who were used to 400 HP.
By 1975 the Japanese had some decent looking cars
The press was full of news about the GM Lordstown UAW strikes, the "Don't buy cars made on Monday's or Fridays" stories, and the disaster that was the Vega rust story.
The whole "American cars are junk was so bitter to us, because our old 60's cars - beautiful cars that ran just fine - were still right there. If you could afford the gas, you nursed that baby through the 70's and cried when you had to buy a new one....
Yeah, Detroit soured a lot of people then because we KNEW that they could do better but couldn't be bothered. We were ripe for the picking, and I really think that by the early 80's (10 years on my guess vs. your more-educated 5 year guess) Detroit WOULD have been finished.
It was terrible. It was as if your younger sister had been a beautiful cheerleader in high school,
but later got fat, sloppy, started taking drugs, and then stealing.
Car lovers either looked backwards at that gorgeous 60s iron, or forward right into a foreign car dealerships with their advanced technology. Even lowly cash-starved companies like Alfa Romeo were putting technology into cars in 1981 that Detroit wouldn't even dream about for another 10 years or more--variable valve timing, Bosch injection, alloy ohc engines, 5-speed transmissions, etc.
Eventually, people would but a domestic late 70's or early '80's car that was a piece of crap, but a foreign make, and never looked back.
:P
As for the UAW, I'd heard about sabotage like welding cans into fenders and the like. However, I attribute most of the crap to D3 engineering, purchasing and cost focused management. People [non-permissible content removed] about Honda and Toyota, but can you imagine the overpriced crap out of Detroit we'd have today if they hadn't come? People should be thanking some of these Japanese companies instead of complaining about them!
Berri, your post raises some good points. Postwar American cars were poorly made and pretty unsafe, it was competition from European and then Asian makers that forced them to compete.
When Japanese cars arrived as an answer to the twin crises of rising gas prices and increasing regulation the "Big 3" fell apart. It's not as if the foreign makers were exempted from the new safety regulations but instead of meeting that challenge they let foreign makers grab the lead that they've never relinquished.
2001 BMW 330ci/E46, 2008 BMW 335i conv/E93
I might have the facts mixed up, but I heard it was a 1977 Caprice or Impala 305 V-8 that Honda did that to. And more importantly, they got it to meet the standards without a catalytic converter!
Chrysler actually tried to argue that with Lean Burn, their cars would be clean enough to comply without a catalytic converter, but the gov't made them put them on, anyway.
I also remember reading, ages ago, about someone who took a 1950 Plymouth, and got it to run clean enough that it would have passed, by 1980 standards. Without a catalytic converter, and running on leaded gas.
I doubt a 50 Plymouth could operate by 1980 standards under ALL conditions, like warm-up, or hard acceleration.
Without computer controls, you really can't dial in an engine that precisely.
It was the computer that saved the internal combustion engine.
Wasn't Lean-Burn troublesome?
I recall you saying something about a Consumer Reports review that likened a 1975 Dodge Dart to a new 1965 car, which wasn't really that bad considering how cars degraded since then.
I know people have ragged on catalytic converters since their inception, but for the most part, didn't the 1975 model year cars tend to run better and get better economy than the 1973-74 models?
And yeah, a 1950 Plymouth would probably pollute more when warming up. Actually, what they might have done was take it to a local emissions testing facility, put it through the test, and then see what the most recent years standards were that it still would have passed. I guess those standards may also vary from state to state.
FWIW, in Maryland, when I took my '85 Silverado and '85 LeSabre in for emissions testing, they ran clean enough that they would have passed by the same 2000 standards that were applied to my Intrepid. The 1985 standards were looser, but those two '85's ran clean enough that they even passed by 2000 standards.
Nowadays though, they just put my Intrepid on an OBD-II scan rather than take an actual emissions reading.
Americans were used to solving problems with brute force, in cars and in war and in just about everything else. This worked great until the world changed.
Yeah, the Lean Burn was supposed to be troublesome, and was probably more so in its earlier years. However, I've had three 1979 Mopars with it, and I've never had to do anything with the Lean Burns on them. I think when the Lean Burn craps out, it's supposed to default to the engine running rich, to keep from burning up the valves, although then I guess you have to worry about bad fuel economy and carboning up everything.
FWIW, my two '79 New Yorkers get around 10-12 mpg in local driving, maybe 18 on the highway...20 if you keep your foot out of it. I guess though, for a 360-2bbl moving nearly two tons around, that's really about the best you could hope for.
I recall you saying something about a Consumer Reports review that likened a 1975 Dodge Dart to a new 1965 car, which wasn't really that bad considering how cars degraded since then.
Yeah, it was some offbeat magazine like "Consumer Digest" or something like that, that the U of MD library had a big archive of. Interestingly, my grandparents had a '75 Dart, and hated it. It would stall out at random, under almost any condition. The dealer never could get it fixed, so they got fed up and traded for a '77 Granada, which chewed up its transmission almost immediately. But other than that, wasn't a bad car.
They traded on an '81 Granada coupe with the 200 straight six, so I guess the '77 was at least good enough to keep them in Ford products.
I dated a girl who had a '77 Granada 4-door with the 302. She let me drive it once or twice. Didn't seem like a horrible car, although I still preferred my '68 Dart.
This was called the RA272 engine, revised in 1965. Needless to say, European engine builders were startled when it showed up.
They probably did, but recall that GM had just gotten burned for billions on a clever engine design for the Vega... That experiment just didn't go well.
I doubt if there was a lot of desire to go out and try something else really complicated in those days, and -for that matter- a lot of money available for developing a new engine. I seem to recall that it's a very expensive proposition compared to designing a new car overall, although I couldn't quote a figure.
Additionally they were spending a lot of money redesigning cars to meet the 5 mph bumper rule. The J3 (Honda, Toyota, and Nissan) really didn't have very many cars to redesign, compared to the D3. Probably only 2 models or 3 each if I recall correctly.
So, although I believe that it would have been the wisest course of action for the Big D3, I can certainly see why I'd have probably voted against it if I were at the table when decision time came.
And unfortunately yes, even if the domestics had gotten CVCC on their engines and could have evaded the catalytic converter for a few years, the engines would have still been pretty anemic. I imagine the biggest advantage would have been better emissions and slightly better fuel economy. Probably a few more hp, but not enough to make a huge difference. And you might have had to adjust the valves every 15,000 miles!
This seems to say the cats were the cause. I think cats (plus computers and fuel injection, as Shifty mentioned) were the solution to the performance nightmare we found ourselves in.
Oh, I just meant that in the sense of how Honda was able to evade the catalytic converter for a few years, because of their CVCC...not necessarily that the converter was the root of all evil. Sorry if it sounded that way.
I have the NOMINEE for THEEE worst CAR of all-time. Not just the worst 10, or worst 5, or even worst 3, but the worst one (1)!!!
The Dodge/Plymouth Neon. No doubt about it, it is inarguably in worst vehicle ever produced.
Here is my logic and reasoning process:
No doubt, there are lots of lemons from many manufacturers that all had tons of design and durability flaws throughout the years. We could argue endlessly about which cars cost the absolute most to run per mile and keep running and functioning over time. Or which were the slowest and most gas guzzling, most uncomfortable, and most ugly. The Neon is bad in all of those categories, and especially pathetic in terms of quality, build, fit & finish, and reliability.
However, what cannot be argued is that the NEON was an all new DESIGN and car from the BRAIN TRUST at Chrysler as recently as 1994!!!! The car was BRAND NEW never before released in 1994 as a 1995 model!!!! That is recent history, and recent effort of what Chrysler is capable of only little more than a decade ago. Not to mention the fact that they showed little improvement until their discontinuation about 5 years (?) ago?
You can go around town today and see a bunch of 2000+ late model Neons still on the road, but with faded mismatched colored bumpers, and trust me, it's not from an accident that the paint isn't matching. Chrysler used a defective primer and paint on the bumpers, which didn't work on plastic as well as on sheetmetal. They refused to cover this under warranty, and that refusal is a good walking and running advertisement all over town!
Hondas and cat converters - I do know that starting with MY 80 they required them to run on regualr unleaded. There was still not a catalytic converter on them that year. I had one and no cat but it had the narrowed filler neck so you couldn't put leaded gas in it. The service guy at Honda would tell me ways around it but I never took him up on it.
Designing the Neon at Chrysler and why it can't happen any more
He's quite proud of the design and damn furious about the execution.... and what the Germans did to the design staff.
Unfortunately, Eaton had replaced Iacocca before the launch of the Neon, and demanded several changes that were the undoing of the car in the public eyes including the exhaust donut and head gasket. About $2 saved per vehicle (over $2,000,000 total), but more was lost in customer value.
Interesting reading. When the Neon first came out I thought it was an interesting design. A little coarse, but -finally- a fun-to-drive made-in-America small car.
Later, of course, things starting leaking, peeling, and falling off in traditional Detroit fashion and my interest faded below zero.
NEON--my biggest disappointment in a decade. I had hopes for this car to be the next Alfa Romeo Sprint--an inexpensive, *really* fun to drive sport coupe for the common man.
But noooooooooo--Chrysler suddenly forgot how to make a head gasket. ARGHHHH!
And then they took away the larger displacement engine (oh, swell).
Well that was the end of Shifty's dream....
99% of all Neons seemingly had head gasket failure, but it seemed 99.9 % also had Air Conditioner failure and Auto Tranny failure.
You couldn't count the amounts of rattles and squeeks by the time you reached 40,000 miles you had more rattles than miles.
Leaky glue under the window trimmings, leaky gas tanks, faulty parking breaks, bad belts, bad starter wires and cables, corrosive wires and cables and batteries, and on and on.
I thought the Neon had a lot of promise when it first came out, and I liked it a lot. Finally, FINALLY, a little car that I felt comfortable in! And it came with 132 hp, standard. Sure, there were other small cars that had stronger optional engines, but I don't think anything in the Neon's class had that much power standard. Heck, even today, the Corolla only has 132 hp standard, while the Civic is only 140.
Shifty, what larger-displacement engine went in the Neon? I was under the impression that the only engine was the 2.0, although it came in several configurations. 132 hp was base, with a 150 option, and yet another that was 175 or something like that. Supposedly, the Neon's platform couldn't handle the extra torque of the 2.4 engine.
It is a shame that they rushed out the 2000 version, just so it could be the "first new car of the new millenium". What a flash in the pan that turned out to be. They dumped the coupe and the hot engines. And worse, I don't think they even offered a 4-speed automatic until something like 2002. Oh well, at least by this time the 3-speed automatic, which dated to the '78 Horizon/Omni, had most of its kinks worked out.
And as non-competitive as the Neon was, considering where fuel prices went, I bet they would've done better if they just kept it in production, rather than bringing out the Caliber.
I liked the styling of the first generation Neon better than the second. However, once it adopted the 4-speed automatic, I thought the Neon performed competently, and was a decent car. I rented three of them, and that was my conclusion. Then, just when the Neon was reasonably competitive, Chrysler replaced it with the Caliber.
I've also rented three Calibers, and, contrary to what one reads, I found that they were okay. The two improvements I'd recommend would be a better interior, and more communicative steering. I didn't mind the CVT transmission. In fact, the driving experience is kind of interesting with the CVT. I understand that Nissan sets the standard, in terms of CVT refinement.
I think that Caliber sales would have been better if it had also been offered in a sedan. Although I like the Caliber's hatchback configuration, I imagine they lost a lot of former Neon owners by not also having a sedan.
By the time the Neon had the 4-speed automatic, it may not have been among the best cars in its class, but it was definitely not among the worst cars. I think the same applies to the Caliber. Unfortunately, neither has the "gotta have it" factor, so, as mediocre entries they have to sell on price. Would I buy a Neon or Caliber? Sure, but only a used one. They may be bargain used cars. I hope Fiat will change this, and doesn't disappoint us, as the first Neons did.
OR she could be the luckiest woman on earth.