Saw a Daihatsu Charade this weekend in Allentown, PA.
My fiancees best freind drives a Kia Sportage. Kia just ran a huge “Y2Kia” TV ad campaign throughout 1999.
My dad had a Renault Alliance and he loved it. He claimed it won “Car of the Year” for 1980 and '81. Small and cramped (particularly in the back seat) but always pulled 40+ mpg even with the air on. Sure it leaked oil, but as my dad said, “no need for oil changes, we’re cycleing the oil every 2000 miles”. He was less pleased when I left the oil cap off and it went bouncing down the highway. I spent the better part of a day trying to find a junkyard in Coos Bay, Oregon that had a parted out Renault.
My dad also said: “I’m not getting on the highway without ice cream”.
Mind if we move to Germany for one post? I never thought Germany could build a bad car.
Then I owned two Opels.
This was back in the early 70’s when Opel was pushed by your local Buick dealer.
God, were they horrible.
Pretty cars.
But horrible.
My dad had an Alliance.It sucked big time. It had a digital display and it always messed up. You never knew if you were low on gas or what.
How about Mitsubishi?
My candidate for worst AND most improved is Honda. For the money, the current Hondas are hard to beat, but it wasn’t always that way…
Back in the mid-seventies, my ex-mother-in-law talked me into buying a '72 Honda 600 sedan that a friend of hers was trying to unload. Without a doubt, it was the god-awfulest piece of shit I ever owned.
When it ran – which was mighty seldom – it got over 50 mpg. But the tiny 596cc air-cooled two-cylinder engine wouldn’t maintain 55 mph up a hill or into a stiff breeze. The engine, of course, was straight out of Honda’s motorcycle factory; when I needed parts, I went to the local bike shop.
Once after yet another breakdown, my dad and I put the car in the bed of his standard 1/2-ton Chevy pickup! The tires rubbed the wheelwells, but it fit!
I don’t know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free…
T
The “Diahatsu Charade”?! Are you seroius? 
That’s as bad as the “Gremlin” or the “Chevy Citation”.
“I had a feeling that in Hell there would be mushrooms.” -The Secret of Monkey Island
A friend of mine used to. It was actually not a bad car, content-wise. His had the electronic transmission - press a button to shift gears, no stick, no mechanical linkage. Worked like a charm, but in winter, you HAD to remember to put it in Park or Neutral when you left the vehicle, or else the tranny motor might freeze and you couldn’t start the car when you came back.
The main Edsel problem was the styling, notably the front grille, that came to be known as the “sucking a lemon” look – still distinctive, if you ever see a picture of an Edsel. Needless to say, “lemon” isn’t a word you want associated with your brand name and, after a few years, the Edsel line was quietly dropped.
My friend’s Edsel passed away from rust, despite his best efforts at restoration. Seems the previous owner used to take it to Florida, where he liked to drive up and down Daytona beach, spraying the underside with liberal amounts of salt-laden beach sand.
- Sic transit gloria Edsel*
If a way to do a job wrong exists, someone someday will do it that way.
- Capt. Edward Aloysius Murphy Jr. (yes, THAT Murphy)
Developmental Engineer, Edwards AFB, 1941
My aunt currently owns an Edsel, and has owned it since she bought it new way back when. She lives in California, which explains the fact that it’s never rusted out… and as far as I know the thing still runs. She’s driven it everywhere, and I mean everywhere. The only state it hasn’t been in is Hawaii. The thing is ugly as hell, but when she’d come to visit my family, everyone in the neighborhood loved to come by and look at it. As far as quality goes, the thing gets thumbs up in my book. Looks? ugh. Even now it’s an ugly car. But it’s always run like a top. And it has to have well over 200K on it by now.
She doesn’t run it much any more. She bought herself a '72 Catalina station wagon! (my aunt’s never been one to quibble about gas milage).
“No, you got the wrong number. This is 9-1-2.”
My vote for worst car-AMC PACER! The damn thinks looked like a fishbowl on wheels, rode terribly, and had an engine that was very unreliable. Come to think of it, most of the AMC product line was 20 years out of date-no wonder they went bust.
I had an Alliance and it kicked ass. I only had to fill it once a week and it got me through my weekly commute of 60 miles round trip 5 days/week. It actually got to about 185,000 miles before the odometer went. Piece of shit, yes, but the thing would have gone another 50,000 miles, at least.
Probably nobody remembers Ramblers. My father bought two of them in the sixties and I had to learn to drive in a lime green Rambler station wagon. One of my worst memories from high school is actually having my friends walk home from the football game rather than be seen in it. The true “zero status” car.
“Hope is not a method”
What, nobody mentined Lada. I knew 3 people who had Lada’s and two of them caught fire going down the road. It was a Soviet era Fiat with an EVEN less luxurious interior. My Chevette was positively luxurious in comparison.
My favorite Skoda quirk was that it had manual tilt headlights. You could tilt them up or down.
You want brilliance BEFORE I’ve had my coffee!!!
I am sooooo glad I drive a Toyota 
My vote for worst car: the little POS blue convertable Fiat that my mom’s roommate drove (on the rare occassion that it was working).
–
Teeming Millions: http://fathom.org/teemingmillions
“Meat flaps, yellow!” - DrainBead, naked co-ed Twister chat
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com
For those who hate Opels: THEY’RE BAAAAAACCCKKKK! The new Saturn ‘L’ series is based on an German Opel design and GM announced that the replacement for the aging Cavalier/SunFire will likely be an Opel.
There are some cars from the past that are FAR worse than anything made by Daewoo today. Examples:
The BMW Isetta. Picture: http://www.weymouth.gov.uk/isetta/isetta3.htm That’s right, a tiny, three-wheeled car with one big door in the front. Imagine crashing into something and that one door being pinned.
The Nash Metropolitan. Picture of one: http://www.onestart.net/nash/57mettd.jpg Probably the smallest car I’ve ever ridden in, and I’ve ridden in a MG Midget.
The Volkswagen Thing. http://www.aquila.com/chris.smith/thing.htm
The Stutz Bearcat. Best I could find was a replica: http://www.greencis.net/~pac/stutzbearcat.htm It is said that the car was built purposely with springs so stiff that a woman couldn’t possibly work the clutch.
The Trabant. http://www.marble.ac.uk/~cjs/trabby.html Read down, it’ll speak for itself.
Tell me if y’all can find anything about the Mohs Safarikar…I hear it’s legendarily ugly.
Hey, easy on the Peugeots already… they make really great cars these days. Great looks, and the best roadholding one can imagine. Not the rattling squeeking oilburners they were in the early 80’s…
www.peugeot.com
FYI, I own a 306.
And regarding the AMC Pacer: that is one of the few cars ever made in the US which actually had a good roadholding and could corner as fast as a European or Japanese car.
Coldfire
“You know how complex women are”
- Neil Peart, Rush (1993)
It’s that wide wheelbase on the Pacer that makes it corner so well. Remember the Pacer limo in Wayne’s World 2?
I was looking for a used Pacer… until I found one, they are ugly.
On an unrelated note, my dad had an old Subaru (and I mean old) that he wanted to tune up so he went down to the parts store to get some plugs. The guy said “Sorry, you’ll have to go down to the Polaris dealership”. The thing had a snowmobile engine in it…
I lived for a while in Eastern Europe (Slovakia), and I have to say that I thought I had had bad car experiences, but nothing like what passed for normal car life over there. Most people had Skodas, a few Ladas and even some Trabants. My pastor had a Ford, a gift from a congregation in the Netherlands, and this was considered one of the best cars people had ever seen. Skoda (which was one of the best engineering firms in the world, before the communist takeover) was bought out by VW, which was slowly improving the quality of the cars. Still, people would take the car apart about twice a year. The whole thing. I remember helping a friend of mine do it. He dismantled the engine, the interior, removed the doors and the trunk lid and hood. Every part had to be cleaned, inspected and if necessary repaired or replaced before the whole thing was reassembled. Several people told me that everyone who had a car did that, because otherwise they didn’t run after about 5 years.
Skoda was the last name of the founder of the company, who was Czech. Skoda is also a Slovak word meaning, roughly, “that’s too bad.” You can imagine the fun people had with that.
The Skoda owners looked down on the Lada owners, but both of them were immeasurably superior to the Trabant owners. THAT was an unbelievably bad car.