More of the Worst Cars of All Time

We round out a totally-not-definitive list of bad cars with entries like the Trident, the Aztek and the Hummer H2. Plus the scandal of Dieselgate and cars that were meant to fly or swim.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with a heart radio
and I love all things tech. And we are back
with more of the worst cars of all times. So

(00:26):
in our last episode, we talked about cars like the
s V one and the DeLorean d m C twelve.
I like to think of those as like steps cousins
or something. We talked about the Trabant, we talked about
the Ugo, and now we're going to talk about a
lot of other cars that fall onto worst Cars lists.

(00:47):
And just as a reminder in case you haven't listened
to the last episode, I did not pick these cars
out of thin air. These are not the cars that
Jonathan thinks are the worst of all time. Instead, I
looked at a bunch of different lists that had, you know,
a title similar to the worst Cars of all Time,
and then I curated a few of those for y'all. Now,

(01:10):
some of these cars were noted for their atrocious performance
on the road, like they were just terrible to drive.
Others were just the wrong design at the wrong time.
It wasn't necessarily that was a you know, a bad car,
but that it either missed its window or it came
out at just the wrong era. A few of these

(01:32):
cars were such a bad idea that they would end
up bringing down an entire company. And I should add
that nearly all of them have their own fans. Like
there are people who will swear that one of these
cars is the worst of all time, and other people
who will say, you're full of it. So there are
people who love these cars because the cars are bad.

(01:52):
So there's some people who love them because they're not
good cars. There are also people who genuinely love these
cars and who will defend to the end of time
that they are actually good cars. And the best thing
to do when you encounter one of those people is
you smile, you nod, and find the closest exit. All right,
here we go. Now, first off, we're gonna talk about

(02:16):
an eccentric engineer. This is gonna be kind of tied
into our last cars on this list, because I'm starting
and ending with a really weird one. The engineer was
Milton Othello Reeves. He and his brother Marshall had done
a lot of pioneering work in the field of variable
speed transmissions and early motor vehicles at the end of

(02:39):
the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Uh So
they were making things that would become instrumental in uh
in automotives as well as other types of engines. In fact,
I think the first variable transmission that Milton worked on
was for a a saw, not even a car. But yeah,

(03:02):
they did some genuinely important work in the field of
automotive engineering. But then Milton made a car in nineteen
eleven that was a real head scratcher. I guess he
was looking at the common wisdom of the day, which
is that four wheels for a car is a pretty
good idea, and Reeves decided that if four wheels is

(03:23):
a good idea, then more wheels is probably a great idea.
So he would go a totally different route than Reliant.
If you remember from her last episode, Reliant made the
three wheeled Robin. Well, Reeves would go the opposite direction.
He didn't want dick wheels away, you wanted to add
more of them. Specifically, Reeves took an existing nineteen ten

(03:47):
car from the Overland Automobile Company, So he took a
car that had four wheels, just a normal vehicle. This
was back when very few people actually owned cars. Most
drivers were you know, the wealthy folks who belonged to
pretty exclusive driving clubs, and they would spend their days
racing each other in wrecking cars. Well, everybody else was

(04:08):
getting around, you know, on their feet or on horse
or whatever. Well, Reeves then decided to take this Overland
Automobile Company car and perform a real Dr. Frankenstein job
on it. And he added two additional axles to the vehicle,
and that increased the number of wheels to eight, so
you had four on each side. You had four wheels

(04:30):
in the front and four wheels in the back. So,
in other words, just imagine a normal car and then
imagine putting you know, an axle with two wheels in
front of the front wheels and an axle with two
wheels behind the rear wheels and calling it a new car.
And he called his the Octo Auto. And he brought
it to the Indianapolis five hundred to show it off.

(04:53):
This sucker was more than twenty feet long. That was
a long, long car for the time. And let me
be fair, some of the things that Milton was trying
to solve, we're pretty tricky in the early twentieth century.
For one thing, early automobiles didn't have a very smooth
ride at all. It was pretty jarring, like you know,

(05:14):
you would hear people call them things like tooth rattlers
and stuff, because you would be shaken up so much,
and roads were often unpaved, and the suspension that most
cars used, plus the hard tires that they were using
before we got to pneumatic tires, all that meant that
you really felt every single bump in the road. So
Milton's design distributed shock more effectively than four wheeled cars could,

(05:39):
and thus it would provide you with a more comfortable
ride as you went down the road. It's just this
was a more comfortable ride in a car that looked
really weird and was much longer than other vehicles at
that same time, So you know, there was a trade
off there. Well. The design what really was odd. The
front four wells were steerable, and so were the rear

(06:03):
most set of wheels, So the four wheels in the
front and the last two wheels in the back, we're
all steerable. The other set of rear wheels, you know,
the ones that are a little further up the first
set of rear wheels. They're the ones that received power
from the car's drive train. So this was a rear
wheel drive car, just not the rear most wheels. So

(06:28):
it's also what you can call an eight by two
drive system, I guess, but reeves design meant that the
vehicle was pretty complicated to operate, and it would also
be incredibly expensive to manufacture. In fact, the Octo Auto
would end up costing twice as much as the overland
that served as the core of the vehicle. I saw

(06:48):
one resource that suggested the car would come in and
around a hundred thousand dollars if you adjusted for inflation,
which is a big old yew za. Understandably, Reeves didn't
get in the orders for his car, though at least
one journalist reported that a ride in the Octo Auto
was pretty smooth. Actually like it. It worked, it just

(07:10):
wasn't practical and it was really expensive. Reeves did go
back to the drawing board, and he returned later with
a car that only had six wheels, but that one
also failed to gain traction. And he also built a
motorcycle called the Big seven because that's how many people
could ride the motorcycle at the same time seven people. Yeah,

(07:32):
Reeves had a thing for the weird. I guess now.
While the Octo Auto and the sex to Auto ended
up being nothing more than curiosities with insanely high price tags,
Reeves did make several legit important contributions and automotive engineering.
In fact, the Patent Office granted him more than one

(07:52):
patents in his lifetime. He died in nineteen five at
the age of sixty. Next, let's talk about a vehicle
that shows up on tons of worst cars lists. I
give you, dear listeners, the Pontiac as Tech. That's spelled
a z t e K, so it's not spelled the

(08:13):
same way as the colonist term for the you know,
the cool wa meka people that different spelling. Years before
the tragic character of Walter White, would you know, putter
around in a Pontiac as Tech on breaking bad? This
vehicle would become something of a punchline in the automotive world.

(08:36):
Pontiac used to be a brand under General Motors, and
it was a companion make that complemented another GM brand
of cars called Oakland. If you listen to my history
of General Motors, you heard me talk about this. General
Motors had different lines of cars, and each line of
cars was marketed towards a different section of the population. Generally,

(08:58):
we're talking about you know, different uh wealth levels, right, Like,
some of the cars were just more expensive and they
all belong to one brand. Well, Pontiac was kind of
a companion brand to Oakland, so it was meant to
be adjacent to it to sort of fill in the gap. However,
Pontiac would prove to be more successful than Oakland, and

(09:22):
GM would ultimately sunset the Oakland line but keep Pontiac
around for a while. However, Pontiac itself would later face
extinction by UH. And again you can tune into my
episodes about General Motors to hear more about that story.
But the Aztec, as it turns out, would play a
part in Pontiac's receiving a bad rep and and kind

(09:45):
of fading away. So in the ninet nineties, the sports
utility vehicle or SUV had really exploded in America. It
really gained in popularity. So the classic SUV combines elements
of passenger cars which typic These stick to stuff like
you know, roads and highways, and they combine that with

(10:05):
off road vehicles, you know, like four wheel drive trucks.
As such, your typical suv has a truck chassis as
sort of the skeleton, and usually a truck style engine,
something that has a lot of power to it, and
it also includes stuff like greater ground clearance, you know,
stuff that you would typically see with the truck. I'm

(10:26):
sure you all know this, but it helps to define terms,
and inside you would have a few more comforts that
you would expect in a car. Well, GM saw a
potential market emerge, one that would model itself after the suv,
but would rely on something more akin to a passenger
car chassis, So you could have elements of suv in

(10:48):
the design, but you would also have even more of
the comforts of a passenger car in the vehicle. Later,
we would use the term crossover vehicle to describe this
kind of car slash suv. So SUVs are the truck
version of this sort of thing, crossovers are the car version.

(11:09):
So if we were to think of this as a
as a spectrum, you would say car crossover, suv truck.
The Aztec was sort of a forerunner of crossover vehicles,
so it was a hint of what was to come later.
By most accounts, folks liked the concept art for the Aztec,
which gave it a very suv kind of look. GM

(11:31):
showed off the concept in n had a pretty good reception. Unfortunately,
behind the scenes at the company things were a little
bit different from that concept because there were a lot
of cooks in the Aztec kitchen. Too many cooks, you
might say, it takes a lot to make a stew. Anyway,
Tom Peters led the design of the Aztec, and he

(11:52):
gave it a look that was simultaneously a little bit
boxing in places and weirdly aggressive in others, and the
style received a lot of, well, let's call it constructive criticism. Apparently,
part of the reason for the design was that GM
management decided the Aztec should use the same basic platform
elements as the company's lines of mini vans, which meant

(12:16):
the shape of the vehicle was going to be very
different from what Peters had originally envisioned. It was going
to be taller, for one thing, and more boxy, so
that constrained Peters in his attempts to make an attractive
suv style vehicle. As carrent drivers Daniel Pund puts it,
quote the production Aztec, powered by the corporate three point

(12:36):
four leader V six and with a decidedly on road
focused optional all wheel drive system combined the performance, excitement,
and off road capability of a minivan with the lesser
practicality of a chopped minivan end quote sick burn. Supposedly,
when GM unveiled the two thousand one Aztec at an

(12:59):
auto and made the audience gasp, not out of admiration,
I might add, and GM had hired a bunch of
people to make a quote unquote mosh pit in front
of the stage to hype up the unveiling. I cannot
bring myself to look for a video of this because
it sounds like I would cringe myself out of existence.
I'm told there was even a point where the executive

(13:22):
crowd served I can't The Aztec was reviled. It was
also pretty expensive, and so it did not sell well.
GM would pull the plug on the Aztec production in
two thousand five, and Pontiac itself would shuffle off a
few years later. In our last episode, I talked about
the emergence of the subcompact classification of cars here in

(13:45):
the United States that was going on in the early
nineteen seventies, and it was partly in response to rising
oil prices, though those would really hit a little bit
later after the subcompacts that already started to show up.
It was also partly due to the fact that American
car prices were on the rise and Americans were turning

(14:06):
to cheaper imported cars, and that was scary to American
car manufacturers. I mentioned that the Ford Pinto, one of
the most ridiculed cars of all time, came out during
this era. Well so did our next car, the A
m C Gremlin. The A m C part refers to
the American Motor Company, sometimes shortened just down to American Motors,

(14:31):
and I should probably do a full episode about that
company at some point, because it did play an interesting
role in the history of the American automotive industry. But
you know, just to give y'all a spoiler, AMC no
longer exists as an independent company, as it was absorbed
into other companies in the seventies and eighties. But before
all that happened, AMC produced the Gremlin, and just the

(14:54):
whole process is kind of the stuff of legend. Supposedly,
Dick Tigue, who is the chief designer at AMC sketched
out the first design for the Gremlin on a barf
bag while flying on Northwest Orient airlines. I don't know
if that's true. That's what I've seen. Also, the company
unveiled the Gremlin on April one, a k a. April

(15:17):
Fool's Day. That part is true. But then there's also
the obvious that we have to address, you know, the
elephant in the room, because the word gremlin refers to
these mythical creatures who would be said to be responsible
for mechanical failures, particularly in military equipment during wartime. So
if a jeep were to break down, it was the

(15:39):
fault of gremlins. And then we have a car company
that decides to use that word as a name for
a car. The Gremlin was actually a modified version of
a compact car that AMC had made for the nineteen
seventy model year. That car was called the Hornet. And

(15:59):
here's the scoop. AMC was facing big competition from much
larger car companies like GM and Ford. They were dominating
the the market, and those companies had already announced that
they were starting to make subcompact cars, so a m
C wasn't really positioned to take on the challenge of
designing an all new type of vehicle, So instead, the

(16:22):
executives made the decision to take the compact Hornet and
to make some changes to create a new subcompact car.
So the Hornet had a wheelbase of inches, the Gremlin
would have a shorter one at nineties six inches. The
Hornet tapered off in the back with your standard trunk design,

(16:43):
the Gremlin would be slashed back into kind of a
hatchback appearance, making it look stunted. In fact, a common
joke among Gremlin critics was, hey, what happened to the
rest of your car? The Gremlin didn't boast any interesting
technological advant instruments, which isn't a surprise because AMC was
really rushing to get into the subcompact market and they

(17:06):
didn't have a lot of money to spare on that
kind of thing. Heck, even the Hornet was relying on
an older chassis and other parts from an earlier a
MC vehicle called the Rambler American, So the Gremlin was
inheriting hand me downs that were already hand me downs.
At this point, there were a couple of different versions
of the Gremlin. Some of them were two seater cars,

(17:28):
and in those there wasn't even a hatchback because there
was no way to lift up the back windshield. It was,
you know, a solid part of the car. So if
you had luggage, you would have to actually have to
open up one of the two side doors and slide
a seat up and then put your luggage in the
back that way, because there was no rear access to

(17:48):
the vehicle. Now, the four seater Gremlins had a hinged
back windows, so you could lift that up to get
to the little storage space. The back seat, however, was
super close to the front seat. I mean, there wasn't
a whole lot of space, so you had to be
so you might be able to transport, you know, someone
who's four foot taller or shorter, but beyond that it

(18:09):
would probably be a little claustrophobic for someone to ride
in the back of a Gremlin. The launch on April
Fool's Day might have been an indicator that AMC was
aware of how awkward and you know, kind of ugly
the Gremlin was. But it also meant the Gremlin debut
a half year ahead of other subcompacts like the Pinto
and Vega. The Gremlin would still okay, Like it wasn't

(18:33):
you know, it wasn't necessarily a runaway success, but it
definitely wasn't a failure either. However, it does frequently show
up on worst car lists. When we come back, more
of the worst cars of all time. But first, let's
take a quick break. All right, y'all, let's talk about

(18:58):
America for a second. Can The country has a pretty
wild reputation, both internally here in America and around the world. Like,
if I say, what do you think of when I
say America? Chances are at least some of the things
that will come to mind are over the top displays
of excess and perhaps even macho patriotism, you know, the

(19:22):
America kind of America. And that brings us to the
Hummer H two. All right. To understand the story, we
actually have to back up a little bit. There was
this company, a m General, and it specializes in building
heavy duty vehicles, and they got a contract to begin
building out military transport vehicles called hum vs in the

(19:43):
mid nineteen eighties. And the hum vs purpose was essentially
to take on the same sort of role that the
jeep had done in the past, namely transporting equipment and
people behind the front lines. So, in other words, it
was not meant to be a combat vehicle necessary really,
but more of a you know, logistics vehicle. Anyway, one day,

(20:04):
Arnold Schwarzenegger sees some hum vs in a military convoy.
I think he was shooting kindergarten cop at the time,
and he says, I vought one of those, excepting doesn't
you know his way? I can't. I'm one of those people.
I cannot do an Arnold Schwartzenegger impression. I don't know
why I'm saying this to you. You clearly know I
can't based upon what happened just mere seconds ago. Anyway,

(20:26):
you get it. Military operations like Desert Shield and Desert
Storm in the early to mid nineties meant that a
lot of folks had seen tons of footage of military
action and this kind of had a groundswell of support
for a civilian version of the hum Vy, and am

(20:46):
General was already considering doing that before this, but then decided, Okay, yeah,
it's time for us to get into the consumer space
and to make a consumer vehicle version of the hum Vy.
This would be known as the Hummer. Now, these would
have a few more comforts installed in them, you know,
stuff like air conditioning that wouldn't be in the bare

(21:07):
bones version of the vehicle that AM General sold to
the military, and this was the Hummer that would later
become known as the Hummer H one. General Motors purchased
the brand from a M General in however, a M
General would continue to actually make the vehicles. GM began

(21:28):
working on the follow up to the H one design,
and that would be our ostentatious H two. The Hummer
H two was a large SUV that took its design
cues from some of the chunky military aspects of the
hum Vy. So while the H one was a military
vehicle that had been adapted to become a civilian car,

(21:51):
the H two was an SUV that was designed to
look kind of like a military vehicle. GM used modified
frame is that it produced for some of its heavy
truck lines to serve as the base for the H two.
And you know, the H two was a monster of
a vehicle. It weighed in at around six thousand, four
hundred pounds or more than two thousand nine at the time.

(22:14):
That meant that the E p A actually didn't have
fuel economy standards for a vehicle. The size of the
H two because there weren't any other ones. So like
the E p A had not created regulations for that
kind of vehicle, which meant that, you know, there weren't
any rules for it, so it wasn't breaking rules because
there were no rules to break. Uh. And it felt

(22:35):
to various publishers to test the H two and check
on its fuel economy and um, it was not economical.
Depending on the publisher, the outcome was that the H
two appeared to make around ten miles to the gallon
of fuel. Uh. Some of them had it as low
as nine, some of them had it almost eleven, but

(22:56):
right in that area, which is pretty atroci. Just This
was at the same time when America was involved in
more conflicts in the Middle East, and of course that
was frequently tied up with America's need for oil. And
here we have this vehicle that would be one of
the biggest gas guzzlers on the road being promoted as

(23:19):
something we should embrace. Uh. There was also a lot
of opposition coming up to the military operations that were
going on in the Middle East. So a vehicle that
hearkens back to military design and guzzles a lot of
fuel was not the best pr move GM could have done.
On top of that, the size of the vehicle meant

(23:41):
it was just an obnoxious car. I mean, it didn't
fit well on narrow roads or in parking spaces. I
can't tell you how many times I saw one of
these things spanning more than one parking space. Anyway, the
public reaction to the H two was generally negative and
really hurt GMS. Reppyteo Aian uh that is outside of

(24:02):
the H two's fan base. And there were fans of
the H two, folks who, you know, felt their freedom
to choose an inefficient, obnoxious car was more important than
making choices that benefit the common good. But hey, we're
all living through another age. That really nails home the
fact that there are plenty of folks out there who
just don't care for anyone beyond themselves. But that's me

(24:25):
getting off track. Let's let's move on with more cars.
In fact, let's talk about another vehicle that GM made.
This one kind of dovetails with the H two. This
one precedes the H two. In fact, a lot of
the story of this car plus the H two makes
for quite the double whammy for GM. And I'm talking
about GMS E V one that was an electric car

(24:48):
that came out in nine seven. It would be the
first mass manufactured electric vehicle from a modern manufacturer in America,
which I know that's a lot of qualifiers, but you know,
you sit there and think about it that way and
you're like, wow, that's actually really progressive and on that No,
my hat is off to General Motors for pushing to

(25:10):
get back into electric cars. I mean, you gotta have
to remember that this was. First of all, this was
not the first attempt for a late twentieth century manufacturer
to make an electric vehicle, and of course electric cars
predate cars that run on internal combustion engines. But electric
vehicles had failed to get a lot of support, and
GM was hoping to change that. Maybe they certainly would

(25:33):
fall short. I'm not even sure how sincere their hope
was so. General Motors had shown off an electric concept
car in the early nineties and that concept got a
lot of attention. So the company went ahead and started
to design and then manufacture the V one, but they
chose not to sell the EV one. Instead, they would

(25:54):
only lease the e V one. You could not purchase it.
You couldn't even purchase it. At the end of your lease,
you could try to renew your lease, but that's all
you could do. Further, they limited the markets in which
customers could actually lease the cars. I'm pretty sure it
was California and maybe Arizona and that was it, and
the rest of the states you could not get one
of these. The original batch of e V one vehicles

(26:17):
had lead acid batteries, which, while approven technology, were not
able to supply much of a driving range. In fact,
the e V one could travel approximately sixty miles before
it needed to recharge. The second generation of e v
ones also used lead acid batteries, then an increased range
of one d miles on a single charge, and a

(26:38):
later upgrade to nickel metal hydride batteries bumped that up
again to a hundred sixty mile driving range, though those
types of batteries actually took longer to recharge as well.
The battery technology was one of the big limiting factors.
GM also never went into wider mass production of the
vehicles on a truly large scale, and the company said

(27:01):
the reason they did that is because there weren't enough
people to purchase the vehicles to do it. Proponents of
Electric Cars said they were on waiting lists trying to
get a lease for one of these, but they were
told that there was very little chance of them actually
getting an e V one, And you know, that kind
of starts to seem like GMS story and the fans

(27:21):
stories contradict each other. The company says there's not enough
demand and the people are saying there's not enough supply. Now,
I don't know if there really was a limit in
customer demand, like it may be that the people who
are demanding were few. They're just noisy, uh. And there
have also been tons of conspiracy theory suggesting that GM
was worried about, you know, electric vehicles cannibalizing the sale

(27:44):
of spare parts for internal combustion vehicles, that it would
hurt GM's business if they went from internal combustion to electric.
There was also the perception that the profit margin on
the e V one wouldn't be nearly as good as
the profit mark GIN for internal combustion engine vehicles. So,
in other words, GM would make less money on our
per sale basis, and so from a business perspective, it

(28:08):
made little sense for GM to continue supporting the initiative,
so GM stopped the program, and they recalled ev ones
once all the leases were up, and they reportedly destroyed
all the vehicles. And that's the double whammy that I
mentioned earlier. GM was destroying electric vehicles and simultaneously getting
into the business of marketing a gas guzzling monstrosity in

(28:31):
the Age two. So it was, as the kids say,
a bad look and it didn't do GM's reputation any favors.
By the way, based on what I could find out
about the e V one, it sounds like the folks
who leased one really liked the car. This wasn't the
case of a vehicle performing poorly or breaking down, but
rather a car that has a bad rap because of

(28:54):
the business circumstances around the car, namely that GM went
into the e V one a little half hearted, limiting
it to leases and such, and the company then went
on to push the H two. Next, rather than talk
about a specific vehicle, I want to talk about a
car company in the decision to try and cheat the system,
which meant a bunch of vehicles would end up being

(29:17):
a huge problem. And we're talking Volkswagen here, folks. So
it's the twenty tens and among the cars that Volkswagen
produced at that time were several models that ran on
diesel fuel rather than gasoline. Diesel engines are generally speaking,
more efficient than gasoline powered engines, and as a consequence

(29:38):
of that, diesel engines generate fewer carbon dox side emissions
than a gasoline engine will, assuming both engines are similarly
powerful and handling similar loads. Right, Like, if you're talking
about a really efficient small gasoline engine and you compare
it to a inefficient large diesel engine, your mileage varies, right,

(29:59):
But they do put out less carbon dioxide. However, they
also put out more nitrogen oxide, and that's a contributing
factor to stuff like smog and acid rating. So it
is a pollutant. But the world was adopting tougher emission
standards and Volkswagen vehicles appeared to perform really well, and

(30:20):
we're well under the limits set by those standards, like
Volkswagen cars did astonishingly well. Diesel seemed to be a
good alternative to gasoline because of that, and Volkswagen was
championing the idea, really talking it up. And then the
International Council on Clean Transportation comes along and the organization

(30:42):
and received reports on discrepancies and emissions from Volkswagen diesel vehicles,
so this would be around two thousand fourteen. The i
c CT decided to test some Volkswagen vehicles in the
United States, largely because the US standards were more strict
than most other places, and yet volkswagons seemed to pass

(31:02):
with flying colors. So the i c c T discovered
that their data, which was collected in on road testing situations,
wasn't matching up with the data that was found in
the California Air Resources Board during lab tests. The field
tests that the i c c T conducted showed that

(31:24):
the Volkswagen vehicles generated as much as thirty five times
the limit set by the emissions standard of nitrogen oxide.
So that happened on the road, but in the lab
there didn't seem to be a problem. The cars were
under the limit. The investigators first thought they had screwed
up in the testing, like someone forgot to carry a

(31:44):
one or something, or that they had misinterpreted the readings
on the field equipment, because the discrepancy that huge is
hard to explain, But after multiple tests, the teams realized
that their data reflected what they were seeing in reality.
The cars were emitting way more nitrogen oxide when they
were on the road versus then when they were in

(32:06):
the lab, and it took more investigations to figure out
what was happening, and it came down to what ended
up being called a quote defeat device end quote, meaning
it was meant to defeat testing equipment. Now this was
not a physical device. Instead, it was some software that
would make some changes in vehicle operation during a test

(32:28):
environment compared to when it would be used on the road. So,
from a very high level, here's what was going on.
When a Diesel Volkswagen vehicle detected that it was being
run in test mode, it would essentially shut down some
of the engine output. It would reduce it dramatically so
that way it would produce fewer nitrogen oxide emissions. And

(32:51):
since an emissions test doesn't actually involve driving the vehicle around,
the car could operate and essentially feed misleading data to
the person who was administering the test. When the test
was over and you were ready to drive your car
off and hit the road, it would switch back into
normal operation. So you might wonder, well, why wouldn't you

(33:11):
just keep it at the lower output settings in the
first place well, the cars would have less oof to them,
they would handle and perform less well under you know,
those conditions. So Volkswagen said, let's just, you know, cheat
on the test. And apparently the company had been doing
that since as far back as two thousand nine, with

(33:33):
around half a million cars in the United States operating
with that particular system in place, and millions more in
other parts of the world. Actually, I think of this
whole scenario as being kind of a fun analogy to
one really weird aspect of quantum physics. See, when the
Volkswagens were under test conditions, you get one set of outcomes,

(33:54):
but then when you're out of test conditions, you get
a different set of outcomes. That's kind of similar to
the fact of observation and quantum mechanics. If you allow
a quantum effect to occur without observing it or measuring it,
it might behave one way, but then you observe it
and it behaves a totally different way because the act
of observing affects the observed. So maybe Volkswagen was just

(34:16):
trying to give us a lesson in quantum The whole
thing got the name of diesel gait and to this day,
Volkswagen is still kind of dealing with the consequences of
that scandal. When we come back, we'll talk about a
few oddball vehicles that sometimes also make these lists. But
first another break. At the beginning of this episode, I

(34:44):
talked about the Octo Auto, that strange eight wheeled car.
But there are a few other weird vehicles that Merritt
mentioned in an episode about worst cars of All time.
After all, there's the story about Waldo Waterman and the
Aerobile for example. Okay, so or aerobile if you prefer,
because it supposed to be like automobile. Um, this one

(35:06):
is kind of cheating a little bit because the Aerobile
was more of a roadworthy airplane rather than a car
that could also fly. But the whole pitch was that
the Aerobile would be a personal flying machine, and Waldo
built it way back in the nineteen thirties. In the air,
it looked like a plane with a pretty small, you know,

(35:28):
body and very wide wings. The wingspan was nearly forty
ft wide, and it had a rear mounted propeller at
the back of the car. But clearly that would not
be suitable for driving on the roadways. Your your wingspan
would be way too much, so you would have to
detach the wings and then you could drive the base

(35:49):
of this vehicle around. The idea being that you could
keep the wings and say a hangar at an airstrip,
and you could you know, use this as your vehicle
to dry of you to and from the airstrip, you know,
between your airstrip and your home, and then once you
got to the airstrip, you would attach the wings. They
connected onto the car with a little pen that you

(36:12):
would insert into some to the wings and the car
to hold it all together like a single pin. If
that fell out, your wings fall off. Um, but they
were designed not to fall out. It was just one
of those things where it's like, wow, that's a single,
little tiny point of failure. And I thought it was
kind of crazy. Here's the thing. It actually could fly.
I mean, it flew on the same principle as an

(36:34):
airplane really, and you couldn't just you know, drive it
around and then take off like it wasn't like a
vt O L vehicle or something. You needed those wings
and you needed a really long, you know, airstrip in
order to get up speed and take off. But it
would work. Waldo wasn't able to find any buyers, however,
and he only made about a half dozen of them
before he ultimately gave up. It seems a shame to

(36:58):
have it on a list of worst cars because it
actually did work, it just wasn't practical and no one
bought one. Then again, if people had bought them, this
would be a very different podcast episode today. I would
probably talking about the worst ideas in tech history and
why there's wreckage everywhere. Let's go from flying cars to
a car that looked like a little tiny spaceship, and

(37:20):
I'm talking about the Peel Trident. That's p E E
L Trident. Peel Manufacturing is a company that's on the
Isle of Man and it was best known for making
fiberglass and like fiberglass bodies for things like motorcycles and boats,
but it also made a couple of land vehicles when

(37:41):
it decided to kind of try and get into the
car business. One of those was called the Peel P fifty,
sometimes listed as the smallest car to ever go into
full production as a truly truly tiny car. But I
want to talk about the Trident. See, the P fifty
was so tiny it only had one seat in it,

(38:01):
but the Trident, which was only slightly less tiny than
the P fifty, was technically a two seater, assuming you
and your passenger didn't mind getting a real up close
and personal on your car ride. And it's another three
wheeled car like the Robin Reliant, except this time the
single wheel is in the back of the vehicle and

(38:22):
the the two wheels are in the front, so you
would steer with the two wheels in the front. And
it's a rear wheel drive vehicle, so that single wheel
in the back would be getting the power from the
drive train and providing the automotive force to move forward.
And like I said, the Trident looked a little bit
like a tiny flying saucer. If you've never seen one,

(38:42):
you should definitely look up pictures because it's adorable. It
kind of looks like the sort of toy cars you
could buy for a very privileged kid, the kind that
I always wanted when I was growing up, but my
family couldn't afford it, so I never got one of those.
It's fine, It's totally fine. I mean I don't drive
to this day, and maybe that's why it's totally fine. No, seriously,

(39:04):
it's fine, but it looks a bit like it's a
little go cart that has a clear plastic bubble for
a roof. Uh. There are no doors on the tritent, Like.
You don't open a door to get in and out.
You actually have to lift the top of the car up.
It's hinged at the front of the vehicle, so toward
the front bumper, and you can lift up on the
big plastic bubble and the whole front, you know, top

(39:28):
half of the car folds up, and you do that
to get in and out. Uh. And then when you
get in, you just lower the cockpit back down around you.
There's a little kind of window type hole on the
side of the cockpit. I think it's on both sides,
but I've only seen videos from the driver's side. It's
definitely on that side. But this is what allows some

(39:49):
air circulation, so that you don't you know, drive around
inside a sealed plastic bubble and slowly lose out of air.
But then you also have to remember that that little
pocket of air it's coming in from very close to
the ground outside on the road, so you're probably gonna
get a lot of fumes that way too. The engine
is a humble one. It was fifty c C actually

(40:10):
I think a forty nine c C engine with four
point two horsepower when it first came out. But then
the car is so tiny and so light, I mean
it weighs around like pounds that even though the engine
is pretty weak, it's usually more than enough to coax
the little car up to speed. And I've seen different
claims as to what the top speed of these vehicles

(40:32):
happened to be, and to be fair, there are a
couple of different models. There was one that was a
little bit more sporty um, but the ranges I've seen
have been everywhere from around thirty miles per hour to
sixty miles per hour. And yeah, sixty miles per hour
to be a top speed, that's very slow compared to
most cars. But you also have to keep in mind
this thing is very low to the ground, it is

(40:54):
very small, and you are typically surrounded by much larger vehicles,
so going sixty would be realty terrifying. I would think
the bubble top also means that on a sunny day,
it gets to be pretty toasty in the trident. It's like,
you know, being in a clear plastic tent in a
sunny day. But if you're puttering around on an island

(41:16):
that's off the coast of England, You've probably got cloud
cover most of the year, and the trident might suit
your basic needs to just you know, get some simple
shopping done or something. But as a practical car it
kind of falls short. It is still cute as heck, though,
all right, how about a car that doesn't have a
top at all or sides. Back in nineteen there was

(41:38):
the Briggs and Stratton buckboard Flyer, and this thing was
terrifying on a whole new level. It looks a bit
like a wooden sled, like if you think of those
wooden sleds have the two skis underneath them, and you know,
the sled self is made up of a frame that
has slats of wood next to each other, and you
sit on the slats of wood you go rushing down

(41:58):
the hill. It looked kind of like that, except instead
of the skis, it had you know, four wheels, a
steering wheel and a couple of like bucket style seats
on it. Uh, And then there was a fifth wheel,
so technically this was a five wheel vehicle. The four
of the wheels were in the normal position you would
expect on the car, you know, two in the front too.

(42:20):
In the back, the fifth wheel was in the center
of the back of the car and it was lifted
off the ground when the car was not in motion.
So uh, it was the fifth wheel that actually attached
to the buckboard flyers two horsepower motor, and that could
get you up to twenty five per hour, which you know,

(42:42):
when your bottom is just a couple inches off the
pavement is plenty fast, trust me. And here's how it
would work. The drive wheel and motor were mounted on
a lever essentially, so you would begin with the wheel
and motor elevated above the ground. They would not be
making contact with the ground. You would start the motor
and that would immediately cause the wheel to turn. Uh.

(43:04):
There was no throttle, so once the motor started, that
wheel would start spinning. There was no way to control
your speed, you know. You you just went at the
speed the motor was going and you would get into
the seat of the flyer. So this wheels spinning, but
again it's not making contact with the ground, so you're
not going anywhere yet. So you get into the the

(43:25):
driver's seat and then you had this lever right next
to the driver's seat that you would use, and by
pushing on the lever you would lower the engine and
wheel the drive wheel until the drive wheel made contact
with the ground, and then off you would go. If
you wanted to stop, you would need to maneuver the

(43:46):
lever to lift the drive wheel off the ground and
then you could apply the brakes such as they were.
The wheels on the flyer had these little fenders over them,
like partial fenders on top of the wheels, and when
you applied the brake, it was essentially pull the fenders
in towards the wheels and that was your brake. And

(44:08):
again you had to make sure the drive wheel was
off the ground or else, you know, it would just
keep on going. Uh. That also means there was no
reverse on the flyer, so you better be comfortable with
where you're going. There was, however, a control on the
steering pole like the steering wheel was on. You could
call it a column, but that would be a bit
grandiose for what it was. But there was a little

(44:29):
control there, a little hand lever, and if you flip
that then you would kill the fuel going to the
engine and it would sputter out. So you could turn
the engine off from the driver's seat. Um, and you
wouldn't have to, uh, you know, lift the wheel up
and come to a stop that way. You could do
it the other way too. It wouldn't mean that if

(44:51):
you wanted to start back up, you'd have to lift
the wheel up off the ground and go back there
and and hand start the motor. However, the motor was
the same type that had been used for motorized bicycles
around the time, and it could, accordint to the company,
travel up to eighty miles per gallon of fuel. The
thing that made me the most surprised by it is

(45:11):
this darn thing was street legal, Like you could drive
this on the roads and it wasn't against the law.
And that's terrifying to me. It would be against the
law now, but back then they're like, yeah, sure, go
for it. It's you know, the Roaring twenties. Let's let's
roar in a sled on wheels with a bicycle motor

(45:33):
attached to it. Okay, in the last episode, I bad
mouthed the East German trabant. Now it's West Germany's time
to shine or sink, as it may be our final
vehicle in this list. Is the Ampha Car model seven
seven zero the seven seventy. This car was one of
several boat cars. Now, I don't mean a boat car

(45:57):
in the sense of a car that handled like a boat,
but rather a car that could also be a boat.
So the Ampha Car was meant to travel by land
or by water. It was the first amphibious vehicle made
for private customers, and it launched figuratively and literally in
nineteen sixty one. An engineer named Hans Triple was responsible

(46:19):
for the Ampa Car, having previously modified a personal vehicle
to serve as an amphibious car with limited success. The
car looks like a classic vehicle from the late fifties era.
It's kind of similar to like a nineteen fifty nine
Cadillac because it actually has those fins in the back,
but it's much shorter than a Cadillac would be. The

(46:39):
car sits a little higher than most cars do, like
there's more ground clearance with this type of car. That's
good because there are a set of two propellers that
are tucked in back below the rear bumper of the vehicle.
Um Triple worked with a company called Quant Manufacturing UH,
and they marketed the of a car for the American market.

(47:02):
The Model seven seventy was meant to indicate the speeds
at which the car could travel. It can move up
to seven miles per hour in the water or seventy
miles per hour on land. Going from land to water
meant having to put the engine in neutral and then
use a separate control to engage the propellers and direct
the drive power toward the propellers rather than towards the wheels.

(47:24):
The front wheels would still act as kind of rudimentary rudders,
so that's how you would steer. You would continue to
use the regular steering wheel in the water. When you
were coming out of the water, you would have to
switch the propellers off before they fully emerged from the water,
because without the resistance of water, the propellers would spend
so quickly they could damage the transmission. The plan was

(47:45):
originally to produce twenty five thousand of the amph car
Model seven seventy, but the public reception wasn't super positive.
Critics said the car handled like a mediocre car on
land and a mediocrec boat in the water. Some people
said that it handled like a boat on land and
a car in the water hardy heart hertor. They also

(48:05):
pointed out that a few hours of water use would
mean that you would have to apply grease to multiple
areas in the vehicle. You'd have to grease different parts
of it in order to just have routine maintenance. So
if you were to go out for a day on
the lake, for example, the next day would probably be

(48:25):
spent in your garage greasing up a car. It's also
a rear wheel drive vehicle, so getting out of the
water it can be tricky. If it's a steep incline,
it would be really hard to get there because until
your rear wheels have traction, you're not getting any you know,
any any force there right, Like the front wheels do
nothing other than steer, so they can't help you go

(48:47):
up a steep incline. So that made it kind of
tricky and just limited the the use case for these vehicles.
So while the company had planned to make twenty five
thousand of them, the actual numbers were less than four thousand.
By the way, if you visit Walt Disney World's Disney
Springs area, you can actually take a ride in an
Ampha car. You can even go out on the water

(49:09):
in fact, that's what it's all about. You can take
a tour, a twenty minute tour of the water on
an Ampha car. The tours leave from the Boathouse restaurant,
and like pretty much everything at Disney World, it is expensive.
A twenty minute trip will cost you one dollars. However,
that's per a car, so you can have up to

(49:29):
four people ride on a tour. If you split it
between the four of you, maybe you think, oh, well,
this is this is worth the experience of going out
on the water in a car. I've seen them while
I've been hanging out at Disney, but I have never
actually written in one, so I don't know what the
experience is like from a personal level. And there we go.
There's some more cars that often appear on Worst Cars list.

(49:51):
There are tons more. Some of them I feel are
just like the journalist grinding an axe because they personally
found a particular vehicle to look ugly or something. But
others like have legit issues with them. So you know,
I didn't cover like the Ford Mustang too, for example,
which was severely underpowered compared to the original Mustang, largely

(50:13):
because we were in an oil crisis in the seventies
and it would have been political suicide to have a
car that would perform at the level of the Mustang.
But anyway, that'll have to wait for some other future episode.
If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in
tech Stuff, please reach out to me and let me know.
The best way to do that is to use Twitter
to handle for the show is text stuff H s

(50:34):
W and I'll Talk to You Again released it. Tech
Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts
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