Likely the SMART car.
There is no objective answer to this, but if you look at every survey and review you can, the name that comes up the most often is the Chevrolet Aveo. People vcan have different needs in vehicle and very different opinions, but on a list of Worst Cars, the Aveo is ALWAYS on the list.
define “worst.”
- Worst reliability? I think you’d be shocked to see that some really expensive, exotic marques are unreliable pieces of shit (Ferrari is notable.) There’s even a meme with BMWs and Audis, never to own one without a warranty. But I doubt you would get many people to agree that Ferraris are the “worst cars sold today.”
- Worst build quality? Look at cheap cars. The Versa, some of the low-end Daimler-era Chryslers, Korean cars prior the last few model years.
- Worst performance? cheap cars again.
I loved my Gremlin. You could get rid of empties by dropping them through the hole in the floor.
Well I have owned a Chevy Vega and I have owned a Ford Pinto, and my nomination for Worst Car Ever Sold is the Chevy Corvair, one of which I also owned. I gave it away. The truth is that I put the title on a bulletin board in the student union under a notecard that said FREE CAR. It was up there for days.
Damn you. I’d have taken it in a second, especially if it were post-1965. If not I’d still take it because the “fix” for them is easy and inexpensive.
The worst car ever is almost certainly the Trabant. It had no redeeming value whatsoever. The primary beneficiaries of the reunification of Germany were the car companies, because everybody got rid of their Trabant at the first opportunity.
The worst car officially sold in the US had to be the Yugo, and yet it’s a tribute to the US’ consumer protection statutes and the NHTSA that the Yugo wasn’t even that bad. It was horribly unreliable and the build quality was for crap, but if you got lucky and won the lottery you got a decent car, especially for the price. The Vega actually wasn’t a bad car, it was just rushed to production. GM had an unfortunate penchant for beta-testing their cars on their customers back then.
The worst car you can buy anywhere today is undoubtedly sold in China right now. It might be a Chery or some other home-grown car, but they have a terrible reputation for safety and build quality. Buy your junk from China, but don’t trust your life to them.
The worst car you can buy through mainstream dealerships is a Chrysler 200. You take the worst elements of Chrysler’s demise (styling, engineering, ergonomics, etc.) and put a price tag on it. It’s a slightly warmed-over Sebring, a slow flex-mobile with the structural rigidity of a jellyfish, only it has a new name. The answer a year or two ago would have been a Hummer H2.
Uh-oh. Is it my turn now? What do I have to look forward to?
Because that’s how long they worked?
Mine didn’t have an empties disposal hole in the floor. Did you have to pay extra for that?
I really did bend the hood on that damned thing just by trying to close it. I don’t mean that it flexed and sprang back, I made a permanent bend in the metal, and I was the proverbial 98 pound weakling at the time, not the buff stud I am now. 
I straightened it out (by hand!) and from then on I stood beside the car and grabbed the side of the hood on both sides of the bend in order to close it. It always had that visible bend in the metal. People probably thought that it had been front-ended.
The '73-87 GM pickups were prone to that too.
Another vote for the Chevy Vega. Lent new depth and dimension to the term POS. It answers questions 1 and 2.
Currently being sold? I imagine the Volt, plus any other electric car being sold.
Dave Barry lovingly remembers his Chevy Vega:
*"…in 1971, I bought a Chevrolet Vega, which was the result of a bet among General Motors designers to see if they could make a car entirely out of plastic and rust. If a Vega had a head-on collision with a moth, the Vega would be reduced to a small pile of subatomic particles, while the moth would flit away, laughing. For several years, the only way I could start my Vega was to raise the hood and use a screwdriver to connect two pieces of metal; any thief could have done the same thing, but no thief ever did. ‘‘He’s so stupid, he’d steal a Vega,’’ was a popular expression among car thieves.
So by today’s nitpicky standards, the Vega was not so much a motor vehicle as a paperweight with a horn."*
Why do people think this? Here is a ForTwo being driven (via remote control) into a concrete barrier at 70 MPH.
Non-engineers always seem to believe that mass=safety.
Old joke:
Guy walks into an auto parts store and says:
“I’d like a rear-view mirror for my Yugo”.
Guy behind the counter replies:
“That sounds fair.”
I think the idea of the Vega was good, it’s just the actual execution that sucked. In fact the body style really wouldn’t look that bad today if it were modernized a little. No worse looking than a Pontic Sunfire.
he didn’t say why. My problem with the ForTwo is that given the size of the car, the fuel economy is not good.
Consumer Reports pans it. The fuel economy isn’t that great, it has little utility, poor handling, worse acceleration, and a dismal ride. You’d be far better off in a FIT.
Oh, and crappy reliability, needs premium fuel, and has the lowest road test score in the CR listing.
Every time a ForTwo goes by I do the Nelson laugh “HA-HA!” Really for that size the car should be getting 45 or 50 MPG at least.
I had a 1975 Vega-wasn’t a bad car-the engine block blew at 88,000 miles- I got a rebuilt block with steel cylinder liners-it went another 100K miles. The worst car I ever owned was a Rover-it leaked oil, water, and brake fluid. Would not start when the thermometer was below freezing, and ate batteries. Bt it had great seats. The worst thing about it was trying to get parts-the dealer would always say: “maybe next week” (I always wondered what half-wit ran their parts distribution-he could not have been too bright!)
I would have to argue that the Fiats sold in the US in the 70s/80s would give the Pinto a run for its money. My parents had a little bit of a soft spot for them, I think because the local Fiat dealer let the parish use his showroom while the church was being built in the 50s.
So one of my brothers owned one that he bought new for himself… and I had one that my parents bought used from friends of theirs.
I don’t know all the details of my brother’s trials and tribulations, but the time the clutch cable broke - while he was driving me to college one August - and the car had to be towed and we were lucky they were able to fix it that same day… and the same thing happened to mine (fortunately I was near my college apartment, and had friends who helped me push it off the road)… and happened again a year later except THAT time it was the whole clutch… and the windshield-wiper motor died… twice… and the head gasket wanted replacing the week before we were to drive 2,000 miles in it… and assorted other things went wrong with it.
To add a funny (?) end to the whole thing: I bought a new car after 2 years of being owned by that damn thing. A Dodge Omni, which was an improvement (really!) - that should tell you how bad that Fiat was. On the way to take the Fiat to the place where I was selling it (the Fiat dealer who’d done so much of the work on it)… I was rear-ended. I got out of the car, looked at the damage (not too severe, just the bumper), and started laughing. The driver who hit me was bemused.
The Omni was no great shakes but it was better than the Fiat!!
They’re now marketing Fiats in the US again. They could come with a 200,000 mile all-expenses warranty, a stellar reputation for reliability, get 80 miles a gallon, go zero-to-90 in 1 second… and you could not pay me enough to buy one.
By comparison, the two Pintos the family owned were workhorses.
I guess it can’t win for trying. I’ve heard that before, and it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense to me. Increasing gas mileage is a log curve - each additional MPH is harder to achieve.
The EPA site gives me 30/27/33 for the Fit and 33/36/41 for the ForTwo.
I suspect “car guys” just hate the idea of a car that small and look for rationalizations for their hate. It accomplishes what it set out to do - be a “city car”, a small, efficient thing that seats two, holds the weeks shopping and can be parked in tiny spaces. No, I would not wish to drive cross-country in it, but that is not the idea. As I said in another thread, a Smart ForTwo could be parked in some places no other car could use - or two could be parked in one garage space. Given the cost of Chicago parking spaces, it could potentially pay for it’s self.