What was wrong with the Caprice? They were well built enough to be police cars and NYC taxi cabs for while. The one my parents handed down to me lasted 20+ years with only a few repairs of any significance.
To quote part of what the author wrote:
Cheetham had issues with its handling, and claims that build quality was poor. He says it suffered from ‘rampant corrosion’. And I think he’s only talking about the particular years listed.
The World’s Worst Cars is available at Barnes & Noble. It’s about 4" x 6.5". 320 pages. Each car has two pages. The left page has the reason why the car is bad, a small data sheet, and an illustration of the car or its advertising. The right page has a photo of the car (or a period painting if a photo wasn’t available for older cars) with call-outs detailing a few of the problems.
The sole review on the B&N site calls it ‘a very incomplete history’. I agree, and so do people who have posted here based on the list. But for the price I think it’s a nice little book.
Not surprising, since he’s British and writes for a British car magazine. I think most of the cars in the book were ones available in England.
I was a little sad to see the Amphicar on the list. (Its being on the cover is what prompted me to pick up the book.) I remember when I was a little kid, seeing one on Mission Bay and thinking it was one of the neatest things ever. Cheetham doesn’t like the car’s handling. I’m a little more tolerant, having had a couple Willys CJ2As. With special purpose vehicles, you have to drive them within their limitations. But he also points out that there was no rustproofing, and that they had a tendency to spring leaks and sink when corrosion took over.
It kinda-sorta looks like my Herald 1200, which makes me smile every time I look at it. (The Herald is about 8 - 10 mph faster, though I wouldn’t want to take it out in the bay. 
)
The Ford Explorer was, and still is the best selling SUV. Calling it a failure really doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s rollover rate was no higher than any other suv.
Cheetham says ‘The Explorer is a classic case of a car that in itself wasn’t too bad, but which became the victim of circumstances and dire business management.’ He liked the design. But he faults the partnership with Firestone and the tires developed for it, the easy with which it rolled over after blowing a tire, and what he calls ‘an ill-fated cover-up’. It seems that aside from the safety issue, the reason the Explorer is on his list is because of the large compensations that had to be paid to ‘many victims.’
I’ll add another explorers weren’t a mistake.
My father still has a 95 explorer. It is at 370k miles and going. The transmision was replaced once. The most impressive is the exhaust is still original.
You don’t have much here from Germany.
The Lloyd LT600 6 passenger minivan built in Germany around the eary 1960s deserves to be listed among the worst cars ever built.
My dad bought one and it didn’t last two years. Every Sunday our family of six would have to get out the van so my Dad could drive up the Niagara Escarpment near Vineland Ontario while the rest of us walked up.
UK
No mention of the Sinclair C5
*Toronado?
Seville?
Pacer?*
OK, this guy has no freakin’ idea what he’s talking about. I’ve owned two of those cars and dreamed of owning the Toronado. I like them all.
I oughta move this to the Pit so I can tell you what I really think about it. But I’ll resist using my superMODpowers[sub]TM[/sub] as I can only use them for the good of others, not for my own selfish desires…
Early Toros were too heavy for the stock brakes. All those overheated brakes probably has something to do with its being on the list.
Sevilles from the early '80s were pretty much univerally panned by automotive reviwers for the attempt to revive the humpback trunk. Couple that with GM’s notoroius 5-litre diesel engines and the L62, I can see why that’s on the list. Not sure about the more recent models unless it has something to do with them being based on the Oldsmobile Aurora.
Meh, what cheeses me off is that he calls it Torpedo, the car was called 48, the initial prototype (which was never built) was the Torpedo, but the name was dropped before the car was ever in production.
The list is pretty much crap, IMHO. The Gremlin and Pacer might have been odd looking, but AMC cars are hard to kill mechanically.
Saab has at least one car that should be on the list. I don’t know the name of it, but it was their first model and it had a 2 cycle engine. You can imagine how many people (or should I say how few) remembered to add oil to the gas when they filled up. There’s a few model Volvos which are despised by Swedes, IIRC.
The Chrylser Turbine car definiately shouldn’t be on the list at all. It was a large test program with, IIRC, 50 cars being given to people to test drive over a period of a couple of years. At the end of the program, to avoid paying import taxes on the cars, Chrysler had all but 3 of them destroyed (I’ve seen video of it, it ain’t pretty). The 3 cars survive. One is in Chrysler’s museum, one’s in a museum in St. Louis, and I don’t know where the third one is.
IIRC, the Vega had a Cosworth racing engine in it (that leaked like a sieve), so perhaps why the author didn’t include it. The Dart doesn’t belong on there for reasons already mentioned. What killed the Corvair was the coming emissions regulations. Also, it wasn’t the Avanti that doomed Studebaker, it was pisspoor management (the Avanti, however, has been in production ever since Studebaker folded). The Nash Metropolitian shouldn’t be on there, either. The only reason they didn’t do well is that gas was like a nickel a gallon or so when they were introduced, so nobody was interested in a dinky car (Now, however, I bet you could make a mint selling 'em.).
And what’s the Aussie car built by the washing machine company? That should be on the list. And well, this car belongs in several different catagories, I think.
What was wrong with the Hillman Imp?
mm
The Toronado was ahead of its time. The author says the front wheel drive gave it greater agility and grip than most of its rivals. ‘[The] Toronado [was] a multi-million dollar investment that never got the returns it deserved… An adventurous and technologically advanced model, but not a success.’ It seems he included it on his list because it lost money for Oldsmobile, not because it was a bad car. That’s one thing I found myself disagreeing with as I read the book. Being a financial failure does not make a car bad. I think he should only have included financial failures that actually were bad cars. Aside from the brakes Lute Skywatcher mentioned, it did have pretty poor fuel efficiency. Cheetham quotes 15 mpg. I have a contemporary car magazine that quotes 16 mpg. On the other hand, gas was cheaper back then and the Toronado was designed as a performance car. IIRC the 1966 Porsche 911 only got about 16 mpg and no one complains about that.
The Pacer ‘rusted instantly’, was slow, and only got 18 mpg in the mid-1970s when fuel economy was paramount.
The Seville looked as if it had been rear-ended by a truck. I remember when they came out, and I thought they were one of the ugliest cars on the road then. Still do.
Poor build quality, leaks that caused excessive rust, poor reliability on the earliest examples. He seems to blame the unions.
He complains about rust, poor handling, and ‘daft styling’. And it didn’t have an opening trunk until midway through its production. I’ve seen a few restored Nashes in NoWA.
I bought this book in the UK last year, glad to see it under discussion.
I’d leave off the list:
Dastsun 120Y – pretty crude, as I recall, but really no worse than any other Japanese economy car of the period
Chevy Caprice – sturdy, a bit less massive than its predecessor, seemed to run forever, don’t see why it’s on the list unless the author just hates big American sedans
Dodge Dart – well, guess he doesn’t like smallish American sedans, either
Chrysler Airflow – yeah, didn’t sell all that well but not necessarily what I’d define as a design disaster, just too unconventional for the time
Chrysler Turbine car – as others have said, never intended as a mass-market vehicle, and AFAIK was a both a technological and styling success
Ford Explorer – I hate the things (the ones from the period selected for the book have the most sick-inducing ride of any vehicle I’ve ever experienced), but for some reason they were wildly popular and even with the tire problems cannot really be considered a failure
Studebaker Avanti – not all that, from what I hear, but c’mon, it was lack of any other viable product that brought the company down
Porsche Cayenne – supremely pointless, but apparently well-engineered, with excellent performance, so what’s the problem? If we’re going to include this, might as well lump in all the other top-line SUVs that are too expensive to risk taking off-road, such as the BMW X5
Triumph Acclaim – basically just a Honda Civic with a different badge, and really more a symbol of how BL had given up any hope of designing a saleable vehicle in-house than anything else.
Matra Rancho – an interesting idea for a light utility vehicle, and the forerunner for what has become a relatively poular class of inexpensive wagon/van crossovers, such as the Renault Kangoo
Oldsmobile Toronado – way too big, way too heavy and not really the optimum application for front-wheel drive, but it worked, and had plenty of charisma, stylewise.
Cars I’d add to the list:
Chevy Vega/Monza – and, frankly, pretty much every small Chevy since. I drove a brand-new two-door Cobalt a couple of months ago, and couldn’t believe how much it reminded me of a '75 Monza. Ugh.
Ford Granada (US version)/Mercury Monarch – along with the Pinto and Mustang II, the sad poster children for the utter lack of imagination in US car design and engineering in the mid-70’s. A riot of styling fakery built for the lowest possble price using the cheapest possible materials, with its upright, faux-Mercedes grille and thick lashings of vinyl cladding everywhere, cartoonish locomotive-sized bumpers typical of the period, and the power and driving dynamics of an oxcart.
Renault Dauphine – similar in concept to the VW Beetle, but made of materials that guaranteed it to have the service life of your average wax-paper cup. My father bought one of these brand new in 1967, and the thing was hauled off for scrap four years later, with less than 25,000 miles on it. It rusted to bits just sitting in the garage, where it sat forlornly after the fourth time a clutch bearing failed and my parents simply couldn’t afford to fix it any more.
Plymouth Horizon/Dodge Omni – attempted Chrysler knock-off of the successful VW Golf/Rabbit formula, but with considerably less style and reliability than than its already somewhat iffy inspiration; THE car least likely to ever impress a date
HUMMER H2 – a tarted-up Chevy Suburban with vastly more weight, vastly less aerodynamics, tragic build quality and no point whatsoever
Cadillac Escalade – another Suburban spinoff that gains next to nothing over the source vehicle, at an inflated price; the ultimate expression for those who measure their personal success by the pound
Subaru B9 Tribeca – yet another in Subaru’s long and storied history of competent, technically interesting, reliable vehicles completely scuppered by hideous styling
Ssangyong Rodius – probably arrived too late to make the book, but this thing makes an Aztek look like a runway model; be careful as many who have gazed on it for too long have turned to pillars of salt.
What is wrong with the Lexus SC430? A quick search on the internet to see what the car looks like doesn’t show anything bad to me.
Well you could order the Gremlin with a 402 so there was always a beauty and the Beast thing going for it. Remember the Levi’s seat cover option?
The list looked pretty subjective to me and **EL Kabong ** summed up most of the glaring errors.
Some other serious ommissions:
As Max Torque pointed out, the BMW Isetta. Any worst car list that doesn’t include the Iseetta and the Vega makes you wonder if the author knew anything about cars. It’s like talking about the history of baseball without mentioning Babe Ruth.
Cadillac Cimmarron. Nothing other than a cheap Chevy with Cadillac nameplate. They even used the same dashboard. It screamed, “We are GM and we are clueless and we think the public is stupid and we want to kill the Cadillac nameplate.”
Now here’s one that will get me flamed:
VW Beatle. Hugely popular but so were the songs “Honey” and “Mandy”. It was not really a small car. It’s just that passenger room was minimal, there was no luggage space and it just seemed small because it was a totally inefficient use of space (like it really needed running boards instead of an extra 10 cubic feet in the passenger compartment). The engine was always noisy because of the timing chain. If you wanted heat in the winter you had to fart because the engine didn’t deliver any (there was no blower). It always ran but it never ran right. The transmission was sloppy as hell. Really, the car was a crappy design that survived in spite of itself. It should have been killed at least 20 years before it was. It was underpowered and only got good gas milage on a comparative basis to the guzzlers of the time. What were people thinking?
Flame away.