My parents owned an '89 Toyota van that they bought new, put 150k miles on, then gave to me ca. 2001 and that I then drove for a couple of years. Ugly as sin, yes, but it had a 5 speed manual, front and rear A/C with seperate controls (something my wife’s 2001 top-trim Town and Country minivan did not have), the middle seat (a 2-person bench seat) could fold down to make an actual bed that was comfortable, and it had respectable towing capacity for a minivan. I hit two deer with it --at the same time! – and it just kept going. Damn near indestructable. It was also quite comfortable. For a family car, I’d take that over any modern-day “crossover.”
I had one. A Maverick. It wasn’t my first car, but it was my first NEW car. I will never forgive Ford for ruining my first new-car experience with that piece of shit. The passenger door wouldn’t close properly without slamming it, the engine would intermittently go into coughing spasms, and no one could ever figure out why, and the thing started rusting literally within months.
The Ford Maverick holds the record in my car-ownership history as the car I had for the shortest time. After around six months, I took it to an auto-body shop to have the rust cosmetically repaired, and traded it in for a real car, not a Ford.
I don’t know why they called it Spark, but yes, about 7200 Spark EV all-electric cars were made between 2014 and 2016 and mostly sold in California. Apparently, this was because California required GM to have at least one full EV in its catalog. I guess the arrival of the Bolt in 2017 allowed them to discontinue the Spark EV.
Ford recently came out with a compact pickup and re-used the Maverick name. I didn’t know about the 70s car by that name and was mystified by how quickly you noped out.
The 1953 Studebaker coupes were some of the most beautiful American cars of that era. But due to Studebaker’s financial situation they couldn’t afford to develop and truly new models after that, so they just kept updating the '53 design and after a few years Studebakers evolved into truly ugly monstrosities. But I think the worst were the late 50s “Packardbakers”, the Packard branded cars that were just slightly restyled Studebakers:
This was my car in high school, an '84 Chevette. It literally went “putt-putt-putt”. One day I took it out on the highway, to see if I could actually get it up to 60 mph. Took about 10 minutes, and I had to slip the hamsters a couple of greenies, but it finally got there. Then the engine caught fire.
It looks like the designer had some extra clay left over after making the model, and said, “Eh, I’ll just stick in on the back”. It’s an adequate, if unexceptional, design from the front to the back seat; but that extra three feet of trunk makes it look off-balance and ungainly.
I wasn’t actually joking when I said it took me ten minutes to get my Chevette up to highway speeds.
I also wasn’t joking when I said the engine caught fire, afterwards - my sister came into the house about five minutes after I’d gotten home and said, “Uh, there’s smoke coming from under your hood”.
I was, of course, joking about giving amphetamines to the hamsters under the hood. They were squirrels, and it was Mountain Dew.
The orange hubcaps made me want to vomit but, in truth, several of their “ugly” cars were far from ugly. I guess that’s to be expected because, at a show featuring some of the most rad cars in the world, finding the “ten ugliest cars” is like finding the “ten ugliest contestants” at a Miss America Pageant.
My brother’s T1000 was so slow that he installed an air-conditioning-compressor cutout that ‘paused’ the a/c when the car was near/at full throttle … just to try to get some extra oomph out of it.
But the car was SO f’n slow that the interior would heat up intolerably while waiting (/hoping/praying) that the car would make some speed – say: attempting to take a surprisingly gentle hill.
He eventually installed an override switch to disable the a/c compressor cutout.
My friend had a white “Shove-ette” as we called it, back in the day. It was every bit as pathetic as you all are decribing it. That Pontiac version only had two doors, so sportier?
Nope. The Omni wasn’t a car. It was an oddly-shaped lemon on wheels.
Mine was red, not yellow, which I think was horribly misleading. It’s rather telling that it was an improvement on its predecessor (I was given a 1975 Fiat 128 by my parents, my last year in college. It took me a while to forgive them).
I quite like the back, it’s a nod to the Monte Carlo of the Seventies. For me, it’s the front clip with those silly bowtie headlights that’s the problem.
What I always found funny about GM is that they named their cars or their trim levels after European locations where they would have been laughed off the roads. Monte Carlo, Corsica, Pontiac Le Mans, Pontiac Parisienne (Canadian name for the Bonneville in the 1970s), Monza, and to top it all off, the Celebrity Eurosport.
My first vehicle was a 1976 Chevy Luv. My engine caught fire twice! I suspect my children will never get to experience the joy of an engine fire; which is sad, as it definitely builds character.
