November 5, 2021 • 45 mins
It's time to talk about some cars that, for one reason or another, people love to hate. So from the Pinto to the Trabant, join us as we look at cars that were lemons, cost too much or doomed a company to bankruptcy.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Be there and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio, and I
love all things tech and this is gonna be a
fun episode. Now, I am not much of a car guy,
(00:25):
so I really don't do that many episodes about cars,
even though cars aren't clearly tech. You know, I've done
a few about car companies, and I've done a few
about specific technologies that are car related, and a couple
that are focused on specific cars, including one that we'll
mention in this list. Uh, and I've done some on
autonomous cars as well. But I thought it might be
(00:47):
fun to do a round up of some cars that
have a reputation, you know, a bad reputation. So this
episode is dedicated to cars that frequently pop up on
the worst Cars of All Time lists. Some of these
cars are thought of as the worst because of their reliability,
or rather there the lack of reliability, some because the
(01:07):
company that made them famously backed the wrong horseless carriage
and subsequently went out of business. And I should add
this is just a a sampling, if you will. An
amuse bush of the worst cars of all time, and
they're not necessarily the worst worst because there are tons
(01:29):
of different lists, right. I didn't select these cars myself.
What I did was I went through lists like goliath
dot COM's the twenty five Worst Cars of All Time,
otto wise is ten Worst Cars Ever, made, The Drive's
article the ten Worst Cars of All Time, time dot
COM's article the fifty Worst Cars of all Time, and
(01:52):
an Edmond's list called fifty Worst Cars of All Times.
So I used all these lists to curate a small
selection of vehicles that just weren't good for one reason
or another. And I am not ranking these either. These
are not in no particular order, because the whole concept
of worst is at least partly subjective. In fact, there
(02:14):
are some cars that are on this list that other
people who wrote the other lists say that that car
gets a bad rap, it's really not that bad. So
there's no there's no metric I can hold up that says, okay, definitively,
this car is the worst one. And also, you know
where they put cars on on their rankings changes a lot.
(02:36):
Some lists have the Ford Pinto taking the top or
or bottom honors. If you want to look at it,
that way and others will put it somewhere in the middle.
So we'll actually start with the Ford Pinto because it
does pop up on a lot of lists. Just know
that these bad cars appear in no particular order, but
we will begin with the Ford Pinto. This car is
(02:57):
one I remember hearing jokes about when I was a kid,
because Ford made these cars between nineteen seventy and nineteen
eighty and I was also made between nineteen seventy and
nineteen eighty. Uh. The Pinto was meant to fill a
niche in the North American market. It was the first
subcompact car that Ford produced in North America. So for
(03:20):
those not familiar with American car classifications, it behooves us
to go through what those are really quickly so we
just understand what we're talking about. So on the smallest
end in America, you've got what are called many compact
cars M I, n I compact cars that includes stuff
like the Chevrolet Spark or the Fiat five. Those are
(03:44):
roughly equivalent to what would be called a segment mini
cars in Europe. Now, if you go slightly larger than that,
you have subcompact cars that includes the Pinto or the
Ford Fiesta. Then you go up another level and you
are now at compact cars. This would include cars like
the Honda Civic or the Toyota Corolla. Then when you
(04:07):
go a little bigger, you get to mid sized cars
that include stuff like the Toyota Camry and the Volkswagen Passat.
And finally you have large cars like the Chevrolet Impala
or the Cadillac c T five. So it's really in
size that we're talking about. And there are other terms
(04:27):
that can be pop. You know, it can be used
in addition to these or in replacement of these, like
you might hear mid sized luxury like a midsized luxury
sedan or a full sized luxury car, but you get
the idea, like, these are the classifications that came out
of the United States e p A, which is the
Environmental Protection Agency, and it defines these specific classes of cars.
(04:49):
So you know, a car fits these based upon specs
that the e p A drew up. And typically the
e p A uses the interior vaul lume of a
car to determine its classification. So you could theoretically have
a really big car has very small interior volume, and
(05:11):
arguably you could say it's not a large car, even
though the exterior would be quite large. But that's how
e PA defines size for vehicles. Anyway, the car companies.
Oh and by the way, that applies to cars, I'm
not talking in that sense about things like SUVs and trucks.
That's that's slightly different. But I had to you know,
(05:31):
draw the lines. I can actually talk about the bad cars.
So anyway, car companies would market subcompact cars as being
more economical in their fuel consumption. Because you gotta remember
this is after the seventies where we had some oil
crises that drove up cost of gasoline. There were gas
shortages around the United States and the seventies, So the
(05:53):
cars of the past, which were real gas guzzlers, you know,
we're talking about some cars that would get less than
ten miles to the gallon. That was looked at as
being a seriously bad and wasteful thing by the time
you get to the late seventies in the early eighties,
so there was this move towards economy having cars that
(06:15):
are less uh, you know, of a gas guzzler. So
it wasn't always the case that subcompact cars actually were
that economical, but that's how they were marketed. The American
companies were rushing into the design of subcombat cars because
foreign car companies were gaining ground in North America and
(06:35):
the American companies suddenly found themselves facing serious competition from overseas.
So for decades, the American car companies were sitting pretty
in the United States. You know, we had foreign cars
being imported into the country, but they weren't on a
very large scale. It was only when you started seeing
more German and Japanese cars coming in that the American
(06:59):
car companies started to get a little nervous. So Ford
cut the development time for the Pinto nearly in half
compared to their normal process. And this was in an
effort to stave off the growing threat of foreign cars
and to establish an American subcompact vehicle. So when the
Pinto debuted, you saw this two door car and it
(07:21):
had an enclosed trunk. But a hatchback version of the
Pinto followed shortly thereafter. And you know, originally there wasn't
that much criticism about the Pinto. Some people complained about
the brakes a little bit, some people complained about the suspension,
But what would really seal the deal for the Pinto
(07:41):
would be its fuel tank. So Ford had designed the
Pinto to have a rear mounted fuel tank, and it
sat nestled between the car's rear axle, which is where
the rear tires attach, and the rear bumper, so sandwich
between these two components in the car and um At
the time, the US government had really focused on front
(08:04):
end collisions when it came to forming safety regulations because
the seven late seventies was also when the United States
was starting to say, you know, we probably need to
have some regulations in place to protect drivers on the
road that car companies have to meet these specifications if
their cars are going to be sold in our country.
(08:25):
So that had mostly focused on the front end collision
side of things at this point in history, and therefore
they didn't really take a look at the back end
and what might happen with a rear collision. And the
fuel tank location meant that if someone driving a Pinto
were to get rear ended by another car, there was
a very real possibility that the fuel tank would be
(08:47):
damaged potentially ruptured that in turn presented a serious fire hazard.
The Pinto didn't have any significant crumple zone in the
back of it. So if you collide at a good
clock of speed and you know, we're talking about more
than ten miles per hour, certainly, if it was more
than thirty miles per hour, you're looking at a real
(09:09):
potential to have a ruptured fuel tank. And there were
cases of collisions in which people were you know, badly
injured or even died from burns, and it's undeniably horrible. Now,
I should also add that the reputation of the Pinto
was also due to a few sensational articles that may
(09:29):
have inflated numbers to make it seem like the Pinto
was even worse than what it really was. Not that
it wasn't bad. I don't think you could really argue
that it was, you know, good, but rather that the
reputation the Pinto received was worse than what it was merited. Uh.
And there's also this story about a famous cost benefit
(09:51):
analysis memo, and depending upon whom you ask, that cost
benefit analysis memo either showed that Ford had callous leaking
included that if they fixed the problem, it would be
more expensive than just paying off the lawsuits that would
come up, so instead they just said, we'll just deal
with lawsuits. That's one telling of that memo. Uh Or
(10:14):
it was more like it was saying the likelihood of
a tragic accident was no greater than for the average
vehicle of especially of that size. Still, this was bad
enough for the Pinto to show up on a lot
of these worst Car lists, and Ford was pressured to
recall one and a half million Pinto's and Mercury Bobcats,
which were essentially the same car. In Okay, let's switch gears,
(10:39):
so to speak, and talk about a different car. This
one's called the Trabant, or sometimes the Trabby. This one
came out of what was at the time East Germany,
and quick history lesson for all you young uns out there.
Once upon a time, after World War Two, Germany was
split into two nations, who had East Germany and West
(10:59):
german Many. East Germany was a communist country, essentially an
extension of the then Soviet Union. So East Germany began
producing the Trabant back in the late nineteen fifties, and
while there would be a few models produced over the
decades of production, the actual design of the car remained
almost identical. So in other words, like if you were
(11:20):
to look at a Trabant that was made in the
late fifties and one that was made in the early eighties.
You probably wouldn't be able to tell that there were
very many differences. They were essentially the same. In some ways.
That makes things easy because replacement parts are going to
be plentiful. I mean, presumably that will be compatible across
multiple models. But it also shows, let's say, a lack
(11:41):
of evolution and innovation. It was a tiny two door car,
and the Trabant's body was made from a material called
dero plast, and this is a fiber reinforced plastic, so
kind of like fiberglass. Typically the fibers in dero last
work cotton or sometimes wool, so these were cars that had,
(12:04):
you know, sometimes cotton reinforced plastic bodies. One issue with
this was that the process of shaping and curing the plastic,
called thermo setting, is an irreversible process. So you start
off with a polymer that's in a liquid format, and
you can pour this liquid into say a mold. Then
(12:24):
you can subject that mold to you know, heat and
high pressure, and the liquid polymer cures and it hardens
into shape. But you cannot do the same process in reverse.
Once it's hardened into shape, it's locked there, so you
can't just you know, heat it up and melt it
back down into a reusable format. So that makes makes
(12:45):
the tribun a bit of a pain to deal with.
When they reached the end of their useful life cycle,
which for some of these vehicles appeared to be shortly
after they rolled off the assembly line, eventually people figured
out how to shred the car bodies and use that
material as aggregate for concrete production. And there's some stories
that say that pigs found deer o plastic delicious. Uh,
(13:08):
those maybe urban legends, and I would probably treat it
as you know, being such and not taking that as gospel,
But there are so many articles out there that just
casually present that as fact. It's just when you do
some digging you find out there are any like reliable
reports on it. Anyway, the car ran on a mixture
(13:29):
of oil and gas, so you sort of refuel the trabant,
you would actually have to open up the hood of
the car. There was no like, you know, gas tank
that you could access outside the car. You had to
open the hood so expose the engine and then it
had a little fuel tank at the top of the
the engine blocks. You would open that up and you
would pour in a mixture of oil and gas into
(13:51):
the two stroke engine and then close it back up
and shut the hood. There was also no fuel gauge,
so there was no way to tell from behind the
wheel how much fuel you actually had, so if you
wanted to check and see how much fuel you had,
you had to stop the car. You had to pop
the hood, open up the fuel tank, and use a
dipstick to check the fuel level. So not super convenient.
(14:14):
The Trabant was famous for being notoriously unreliable and smelly.
It would produce a lot of exhaust, like visible exhaust,
like you were rolling coal every time you drove a Trabant.
And it was also very loud. It was the engine
was loud, and it was allowed experience to ride in one.
It was also really slow. I saw one video in
(14:36):
which an owner of one of these said he had
only coaxed a Trabant up to a maximum off on
flat road. Uh, he got a little faster if he
was going down a hill, but on flat road fifty
five was where it maxed out. And also that the car,
you know, handles pretty poorly. It had no interior signal indicator,
(14:57):
and so the turn signal was a bit of a
thing because if you turned the turn signal on and
then you made a turn, it would not automatically reset.
You had to manually turn off the turn signal. But
there was no indicator inside the car that the turn
signal was on, so you know, if you didn't remember
to do it yourself, you'd be irritating everyone behind you
as they just start yelling go ahead and turn already.
(15:18):
So in other words, it was just a lousy car.
But it was also the only game in town if
you were in East Germany pretty much because you know,
it was a state owned operation. So to get a
Trabant East German citizens actually had to submit an application
and the wait time could be up to a decade
or longer. So it was a really crappy car and
(15:38):
you had to wait ten years before you had a
chance to own one. When the Berlin Wall came down,
there were stories of people from former East Germany who
came straight over to West Germany and then they abandoned
their old Trabant cars while getting you know, any other
car that they could uh. The Trabants are pretty rare
these days, especially in the United States, but some collectors
(15:59):
do seek him out because I don't know why, because
they're weird. We have a lot more bad cars to
talk about, but first let's take a quick break. It's
time for us to talk about an American business man
(16:20):
named Malcolm Brooklyn, responsible for several cars that pop up
on worst Car lists. And he's had a really long
career and mostly focused in the automotive industry after he
made some serious bank in the hardware business. And it's
a career. March was some pretty big peaks and big valleys.
So it's not like it's just failure. I mean he's
(16:40):
he's he's been behind some big success stories too. So
let's talk about one of the flops. This one is
the s V one. Now, before the SV one, Brooklyn
had co founded uh Subaru of America. You know, there
was the existing Subaru company, but he created or co
founded the American division of Subaru. And he did this
(17:03):
in nineteen sixty eight, and they imported the Subaru three sixty. Now,
this little vehicle looked a lot like a Volkswagen Beetle,
and in fact, the suber Ut three sixty also shows
up in a lot of worst car lists. That's not
what we're talking about here, though. Anyway, the three sixty
got some scathing reviews for its performance in various safety tests.
(17:24):
It was named one of the most unsafe vehicles that
were available. And this was right around that time when
the US government was mulling over regulations that would force
the automotive industry to adopt new safety measures in car design.
So Malcolm Brooklyn saw the writing on the wall and
decided to go all in on safety. So in nineteen
(17:45):
seventy one, Brooklyn created a car company called General Vehicles,
which you know, sounds a little bit like General Motors, weird.
His idea was to create a two seater car kind
of similar to a sports car like the Corvette, and
this one would have goal wing doors. You know, so
those are the doors that you know, they they open
upward similar to another car that's gonna show up in
(18:07):
this episode. That's a spoiler. I mean, I'm sure everyone
here knows what car I'm talking about. And uh, this
sp one would also have a steel frame chassis complete
with a rollover protective structure so it would protect passengers
should the car be flipped over onto its you know, back,
and it had or top I guess. It had front
(18:29):
and rear bumpers that were pretty chunky. They extended out
a good ways from the car, but they would also
protect the car to a point where the you know.
Brickland said, his company said, really that any collision up
to ten miles per hour would have no damage to
the bumpers. The car would resist that damage because of
this design. D SP one would have an enclosed fuel
(18:52):
tank and reinforced side panels for the doors. It would
have no ashtray and no cigarette lighter. Brick And himself
was a former smoker, and he thought that smoking in
cars was dangerous. I happened to agree with him, and
so he said, yeah, we're just not gonna have it now. Granted,
people would could eventually buy an SV one and potentially
(19:13):
have an aftermarket thing put in, but that's beside the point.
The body was made from an acrylic resin bonded to
fiberglass that ended up being a really huge hassle. Early
versions of the car had problems with the acrylic blistering
and required a total overhaul of the process. It was
supposed to be a super safe sports car, and the
(19:34):
s V in fact stood for Safety Vehicle see I
told you went all in. Brickland was anticipating many of
the changes that the US government would ultimately impose on
the automotive industry. He was ahead of the game, so
the SV one was truly a car that was ahead
of its time. Now, while General Vehicles had its headquarters
in America, the cars themselves would be manufactured in St.
(19:57):
John in New Brunswick, Canada. So Brooklyn was looking around
to find a place to you know, manufacture these vehicles,
and he was looking for places that would have the
government assistance and incentives in order to get things going.
The idea being that the company would provide you know,
more than a hundred well paying jobs in a region
(20:19):
in Canada that was struggling with unemployment problems. It appears
as though the Canadian government was under the impression that
the money was going to go straight to production, like
in other words, everything else was ready to go, we
just need to start making these cars. But in fact,
the SV one's design was not yet complete, so a
lot of the initial money actually went into engineering and
(20:41):
development to work out kinks in the design. So like
they knew what they wanted the card to be like
but they had to find a way to make it
be that way. Right, You have to test all those
ideas and reality and make sure they actually work. Now,
that would mean that Brooklyn would actually have to seek
additional funding as the project went on because he was
(21:02):
still working out the bugs in the in the design
and couldn't go right into production. The car would end
up being a pretty hefty one. The doors alone weighed
around ninety pounds each. Now they had a hydraulic system
attached to them, at least the initial ones did. Uh.
That did mean, however, that if the hydraulic system failed,
you would have to lift those cars manually. Uh. And
(21:23):
the doors were slow as well, even when they were working,
so if the weather was bad and meant you would
be left standing out or then sitting in the rain
or snow or whatever for several seconds because the car
door takes a while to open and close. It also
meant that the V eight engine that powered the vehicle
really had to push hard to meet the demand of
(21:44):
moving such a heavy car, and Brocklyn had problems and
that he was buying his engines from the American Motor
Company and there was a dispute between General Vehicles and
American Motor Company, and eventually it saw his initial order
drastically reduced. Now what caused that division is a matter
of debate. If you were to ask Brooklyn, he was
(22:08):
said that he was told AMC didn't want to hurt
their own car sales by supplying engines to a competitor,
essentially saying, your car is so good that if we
give you engines, people will buy your car. They won't
buy our car. However, if you ask other people, you
might hear that Brooklyn was talking some smack about a
m C and that that soured the deal. At any rate,
(22:29):
he would get around MC engines, and it was the
three eight to be precise, He would have to get
other engines for future SV one cars. The problems that
Brooklyn encounter meant that the cost of production kept going
up UH and that internment that the company was going
to have to hike up the suggested price for the
(22:50):
SV one in order to compensate for the fact that
it was costing so much to produce. Initially, the price
was supposed to be four thousand dollars for an s
V one UH. The nineteen version that eventually came out
more than doubled that to nine thousand, nine eighty five dollars,
and okay, that sounds like nothing for a car these days,
(23:11):
But then we have to remember we're talking about the
mid nineteen seventies here, so if we adju for inflation,
that nine thousand dollars is closer to fifty one thousand
dollars today. It was way more expensive than comparable cars
at the time, and no amount of safety features were
likely to win people over to it. So why did
it end up getting so expensive? Well, not only was
(23:34):
there the quality issues that they had to solve, the
Canadian policy for workers meant that, you know, Brookland was
hurt as well. See, Canada had this policy that if
you worked at a job for at least ten weeks,
you could then quit that job and you would be
eligible for unemployment benefits. So there were a lot of
(23:55):
workers who just decided to leave their job rather than
continue to work for General Vehicles and admitt that. The
company had to deal with a lot of turnover, and
they had to do a lot of recruiting and a
lot of training, so that drove the price up a lot.
The company needed more loans from the government to stay afloat.
But by then the Canadian government kind of wanted to
(24:15):
get a little distance. It was politically disadvantageous to be
connected to General Vehicles. The car was being seen as
a as a money pit, and the government had already
invested millions of dollars in the SV one, So they
called it quits. And so, after producing just around three
thousand vehicles, the company General Vehicles closed up shop and
(24:37):
the SV one was no more. So. I think a
lot of folks include this on the worst Cars of
All time lists. Not because the vehicle stuff had enormous flaws.
I mean, it did have some, but it wasn't a limon,
but rather it was because that whole process ultimately led
to a car company going out of business. But I
(24:59):
mentioned just now, you know, I alluded to the fact
that going doors were going to play another part in
in an in another vehicle will jump right to that one.
And this is a famous one. It's one that a
lot of people know about. We're talking about the DeLorean
d m C twelve. This is, of course, the car
made famous by the Back to the Future movies. I
remember seeing the first Back to the Future film in
(25:21):
the theater in and thinking that car looks super cool.
But I had never heard of a DeLorean before I
grew up in rural Georgia. No one had a DeLorean here.
And I've actually done a full episode about Deloreans in
the past. So I'm going to give you the cliffs
notes version of the DeLorean story. The whole story, by
(25:41):
the way, it's absolutely fascinating. We just don't have time
to dive into the whole thing here. So John DeLorean,
who is one of the more colorful characters who had
been involved in the automotive history history. He was an
executive with General Motors, but then he left that company
and founded the DeLorean Motor Company in the mid nineteen seventies.
(26:02):
So Brickland's s V one, which remember that one came
out in the seventies, had going doors. And there was
another similarity between the s V one and then the
DeLorean d m C twelve. And that's the fact that
John DeLorean also shopped around to find a place where
he could, you know, establish a manufacturing facility, and he
(26:24):
was looking for a government that would provide incentives to
allow him to do that, so like tax breaks and
government assistants, and that kind of thing. So for the
SV one that ended up being Canada. For the DeLorean
it ended up being Northern Ireland on the outskirts of Belfast.
The d m C twelve was to be a pretty
odd car, and not just because of the going doors.
(26:46):
The body panels were made of brushed stainless steel and
they rolled out of the factory unpainted, so the classic
DeLorean has that stainless steel look to it. Now some
people would later go and get a hate job for
their vehicles, but standard was unpainted stainless steel. Curiously, Dolorean
(27:06):
picked a very weedy engine for the DMC twelve. It
was a V six that was capable of just a
hundred thirty horsepower. For a car that was styled like
a sports car and a chunky sports car at that,
that wasn't very much power, and in fact, during test drives,
drivers found that the car's acceleration left a lot to
(27:27):
be desired. It could take up to ten seconds to
reach sixty miles per hour, that is not fast for
a sports car, and its top speed was around a
hundred nine miles per hour. The car is definitely striking
to look at, I mean it is it is a
cool looking car, and it might have been a modest success,
and it may have even allowed the company to continue
(27:49):
making more vehicles besides the d m C twelve, except
that the path from establishing the company to actually producing
the first vehicles was a really rough one for DeLorean.
A lot of the employees at the manufacturing facility had
little to no experience in manufacturing in general, let alone
in the automotive manufacturing industry. There were a lot of
(28:11):
errors in production that ended up being very costly. There
were supply chain issues, and all of this drove the
cost of production up. Sounds very familiar, right, It's just
like the s V one, And this meant that, like
the SV one, DeLorean had to jack up the sales
price for the DeLorean in order to compensate for that expense.
By the time the cars were ready to be sold
(28:32):
in nine, which was a couple of years behind schedule,
they came in with the price tag of twenty five
thousand dollars. So if we had just that for inflation,
that would make the DMC twelve a seventy five thousand,
five hundred dollar car, or thereabouts. That's how much it
would cost you to buy a DMC twelve for a
(28:53):
comparable amount of money if they were, you know, hitting
the road today for a car that looks like a
sports car but doesn't drive like a sports car, that
is an astronomical price. DeLorean didn't produce as many vehicles
as the company had projected. In the two years that
had actually made cars, it fell short of production goals
and it was hard to sell them at that exorbitant Brice.
(29:16):
The DeLorean Motor Company went out of business in three
whole years before Back to the Future would come out.
And like I said, I had never even heard of
Deloreans before the movie came out. Also, knowing what I
know now, when Doc Brown talks about getting up to
eighty eight miles per hour, I think he was being
really generous over how much time it would take to
(29:37):
achieve that speed. Anyway, because of the failure of the
DMC twelve, the DeLorean Motor Company never got a chance
to make another model of vehicle. All right, we've got
some more bad cars to talk about, but let's take
another quick break. Okay, I was talking about Brooklyn before
(30:03):
the break. You know, he was the one behind the
SV one and uh you know also the SUPERHU North America.
And since we were talking about him, let's mention another
infamous car that he's associated with. This time, this is
not a car that he developed. It's one that his
team discovered in an effort to find the quote cheapest
(30:23):
car in the world end quote. This was because car
prices in America this would be in the early mid
nineteen eighties. Um, We're skyrocketing, largely due to inflation, and
there were a growing number of Americans who found themselves
priced out of buying a car. Brooklyn saw an opportunity
to cater to those potential customers if he could just
(30:46):
find a car that was cheap enough, and that car
would be drumroll, please the You Go. Now, before I
jump into talking about the UGO, I want to mention
that these lists are so darned subjective that I come
across disagreements in them when I was researching this episode. UH.
The Edmonds list in UH includes the seven You Go
(31:09):
as its fourth worst car in a list of fifty.
Time dot Com didn't rank its list, but the Night
five You Go is on that one. UH. The website
The Drive lists it as number six on its top
ten worst cars of all time. Goliath lists it at
number two, in case you're wondering they gave the Ford
(31:30):
pinto the number one spot. Also, Triple A has it
on a list of worst cars, as does motor Biscuit.
The website motor Biscuit that puts The Night You Go
at number twelve. However, Riley at ottawise dot com lists
it as a car that's been judged unfairly. So I
guess you're mileage may vary pun intended. So let's walk
(31:56):
through the complicated story of the You Go. And it
starts not in the part of the world where we
used to call it, you know, Yugoslavia. Instead it starts
in Italy. So the company Fiat created an economical family
car called the Fiat one, and then they had a variation,
the Fiat one seven, that would serve as the starting
(32:17):
point for the UGO, which was a little bit shorter
in length than the already tiny Fiat was. A car
company called Zastava Automobiles secured the rights to produce a
version of this vehicle, which the company marketed as the Coral.
It's a k O R A L. Or It's how
Rick says his son's name, and the walking dead anyway,
(32:40):
it was a subcompact hatchback and it was in fact
very very cheap. Brookland's team reported back, and Malcolm leapt
into action, and the story gets complicated, but ultimately began
importing the Coral and changed the model name to you
Go and marketed it as an ultra budget car. In
(33:00):
the United States. This was in and the you Go
was an odd car. One of the standard features advertised
for the vehicle was carpeted interiors, which I guess tells
you about the luxuries you could expect with a UGO,
and I mean it was a budget car, no one
was really expecting much. Also, the early models had an
(33:21):
engine that put out a measly fifty five horse power
that was still an improvement over the Eastern European version
that topped out at forty horse power. That engine could
push the tiny you Go up to about eighty six
miles per hour as its top speed, and this made
the you Go the car with the lowest top speed
sold in the United States at that time. Dealers would
(33:42):
sell the car for around four thousand dollars. This was
about twice what they paid when they were buying the
car's wholesale from Eastern Europe. The car had a reputation
for being unreliable, though folks like Otto wise Is Riley
say that that was largely an issue with people just
failing to maintain their cars properly. Consumer Reports was less kind.
(34:03):
They called the UGO the barely assembled bag of nuts
and bolts, which is a big yikes. Honestly, most of
what I found sites issues with the manufacturing processes, so
it's good to remember these cars were built in a
then communist country and the manufacturing facility was not a
(34:24):
top of the line plant. To put it kindly, Uh,
there were real issues not just with the quality of
the plan itself, but also there was not a real
motivated workforce there. There were stories of like people drinking
on the job and such. Turns out, if you're drinking
a lot, high precision assembly line work is probably not
(34:45):
the best combo there. Anyway, there's a widespread joke that
the UGO had a rear window to froster, not because
you need to clear off ice off the back windshield,
but rather it was there so that you could keep
your hand ends warm while you push the car after
it would inevitably break down. I know that It's a
widespread joke because it showed up in nearly every article
(35:09):
that mentioned the Ugo as one of the worst cars
of all time. It's a joke that's been used a lot. Now,
next up on our list is an entry that really
hurts because it was a car that I genuinely thought
looked super cool. I really like this car when it
first premiered, and it is the Plymouth Prowler. This car
(35:31):
showed up on a couple of lists for the worst
cars of all time, and I can kind of understand why,
but I still think the car looked awesome. Alright. So
it's the nineteen nineties and Chrysler was creating some really
sexy cars. For example, they their Dodge division created the Viper,
which was a super sexy sports car that really good
(35:53):
acceleration and speed and abysmal fuel economy, like no fuel economy.
Now that that thing consumed gas sitting in the garage.
It was not meant for daily driving. It was meant to,
you know, impress people. Essentially, the Plymouth division, which historically
was meant to produce cars for the low price market,
(36:15):
later re emerged to be a brand that was meant
to appeal to a youth market. Well, they dipped into
a seriously retro design to propose the Prowler, and the
Prowler hearkened back to hot rods of the thirties, forties, fifties,
and sixties and had sleek, curved lines, uh, open front
(36:37):
wheels like there were a little bumperrets that were over
the tops of the wheels, but otherwise the wheels were
open in the front, had a raped windshield. Uh, the
hood narrowed to a sort of pointed curve in the front.
A lot of folks thought the whole thing was really outlandish.
I thought it looked gorgeous. Like reading over some of
(36:59):
the critiques blows my mind because I thought this car
looked amazing. However, despite having a hot rod exterior, what
was going on under the hood was a different matter.
The Prowler's engine was a three and a half liter
V six with two horsepower. That engine could push the
Prowler to an acceleration of zero to sixty miles an
hour at around seven point two seconds. That's just not
(37:22):
super duper impressive. It's not the worst. I mean, there
are other cars on this list that have, you know,
worse acceleration, but it's not impressive. Top speed maxed out
at around a hundred fifteen miles per hour, still, you know,
not like super crazy for a hot rod. And Plymouth
only made automatic transmission versions of the Prowler, so that
(37:46):
meant you couldn't have a manual transmission and peel rubber
and pretend like you're racing for papers because you only
could use an automatic, So the performance of the Prowler
couldn't live up to the style of the exterior. Plymouth
was using a lot of parts that were originally designed
for other Chrysler vehicles. This was a kind of a
cost saving measure, so like the steering rack, the suspension,
(38:10):
the engine and more, we're all kind of leftovers from
other Chrysler models. The Prowler failed to find a place
in the automotive market. Curiously, two of the lists I
found both have very similar criticisms, namely that the Prowler
was a concept that looked great on a computer screen,
but it was just not as impressive in person. Now,
(38:32):
I'm not saying that one or both of the people
who wrote those lists copied someone, but I will say
that whenever the two lists had the same car listed,
the wording was not identical, just really similar. I'm not
(38:54):
going to name them, but I will say like I
since there's some plagiarism going on in this world, which
is why I tried to pull from so many different sources,
because I didn't want to get like a list that
someone made that was considered to be definitive and everyone
else just copied it. Anyway. Ultimately, the Chrysler slash Plymouth
Company produced fewer than twelve thousand of these cars. Chrysler
(39:17):
would rebrand it. It was the Plymouth Prowler for a while,
but then it became the Chrysler Prowler. Um. It's still
a car that would love to tool around in, particularly
if I could find one in the original purple paint job,
which I really liked. Some lists also include the PT Cruiser,
by the way, is one of the worst cars of
all time. In many ways, the PT Cruiser was a
(39:38):
kind of spiritual sister car to the Plymouth Prowlers, also
meant to appeal to the youth crowd. UM. I like
the look of the PT Cruiser as well, but I've
also heard that it has a pretty significant blind spot,
so it does have its own drawbacks. But it didn't
feel like it was enough for me to you know,
included on this list. Will do one more for this.
(40:01):
I've actually got a few more, So maybe I'll do
a part two and talk about a few other cars,
because there's no shortage of cars that people have listed
as being one of the worst of all time. As
I said, that's very subjective question, so we can probably
do a part two of this. But you know, three
of the lists that I looked at included a British
(40:22):
car called the Reliant Robin. Now I'm gonna stay up
front that I imagine a really big reason that these
lists included that particular car is that there was a
famous segment on the very popular show top Gear that
made the Robin look like it would spend more time
flipped over on its side than it would upright on
(40:43):
its wheels. Also, it only had three wheels, so as
a three wheeled car, the one wheel in the front
was used for steering and the two wheels in the
back would drive the vehicle. That's where the power train
would deliver the power. So the engine was mounted in
the front. It was not a rear mounted engine, so
not like the old Volkswagen Beetle engines. In the front
(41:07):
of the car, but it's the drive train provides power
to the rear wheels. I looked at all that was
said about the Reliant Robin and all of those lists
said that had a reliable tendency to tip over if
you moved into a turn it to hide our higher
rate of speed. Like they all repeated this um. They
(41:29):
also said if you went through a particularly tight curve
in the road you were, you were going to potentially
tip over. And this is what viewers saw if they
watched that episode of Top Gear. The car tipped over
multiple times in that segment of that episode. However, later on,
the host admitted that his production team had re engineered
(41:50):
the differential on the Reliant Robin so that it would
tip over more readily. In other words, they engineered it
so that it would perform orm in a specific way,
that is to become unbalanced and fall over, you know,
for the camera. So while the car appeared to be
as steady as a domino on a waterbed during this
(42:13):
television segment, that was not necessarily a fair reflection of
its performance for the average driver. But why would a
UK car company even make a three wheeled car in
the first place. Why would you go that way? Well,
the answer to that kind of boils down to taxes.
So by making the Robin a three wheeled vehicle, and
(42:34):
by building the body of the car out of fiberglass
so that the weight would not be too great, Reliant
was able to have the Robin classified as a motorcycle
while still marketing it as a car. So motorcycles in
the UK were the subject of a different and less
(42:55):
expensive tax than cars were, so you didn't have to
spend as much tax to buy a motorcycle, and that
meant the three wheeled cars were slightly more affordable than
the four wheeled versions because their price tag didn't climb
as higher as high due to higher taxes. But when
I say affordable, I don't necessarily mean cheap. They cost
(43:19):
around uh well, when they came out around eight hundred
pounds when they first came out of that would be
around eight hundred pounds today, which is around say eleven grand.
They were also more economical when it came to fuel consumption.
Found sites that said you could go up to around
sixty to sixty four miles per gallon on Robin. That's
(43:42):
really impressive. The engine was very modest. The original Robbins
boasted an engine that had an output of just thirty
three horsepower. It took nearly fifteen seconds to coax a
Robin to get up to sixty miles per hour. Not
that I'm convinced that would have ever been a good
idea in the first place, because even though they weren't
as prone to tipping over as was depicted, they still
(44:06):
could Anyway, I feel like the Robbins inclusion on lists
is largely due to that top gear piece. I mean,
sure it was not a speedster, had a very small capacity.
You couldn't carry very much in it, but it would
also serve just fine while puttering around like a small
English town as long as you know you weren't taking
corners like Mario and Dretti. So I feel like that
(44:29):
one has uh an unearned reputation, or at least only
partly earned reputation, for being one of the worst cars
of all time. All Right, we've run out of time ourselves.
I do have a couple more cars that I was
going to talk about, but I'll save those and we'll
do a part two on this in the near future,
and we'll talk about some more cars that for one reason.
(44:51):
Another people have singled out to say this was a
really bad one. Uh, it would be great to kind
of focus on some that have had ooriously atrocious fuel economy,
for example, particularly cars in the seventies when the oil
crisis made that sort of thing even more of a problem.
But we'll save that for the next episode. If you
(45:13):
have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes,
please reach out to me. The best way to do
that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is
text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again,
really sick. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
(45:34):
For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Be there and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio, and I
love all things tech and this is gonna be a
fun episode. Now, I am not much of a car guy,
(00:25):
so I really don't do that many episodes about cars,
even though cars aren't clearly tech. You know, I've done
a few about car companies, and I've done a few
about specific technologies that are car related, and a couple
that are focused on specific cars, including one that we'll
mention in this list. Uh, and I've done some on
autonomous cars as well. But I thought it might be
(00:47):
fun to do a round up of some cars that
have a reputation, you know, a bad reputation. So this
episode is dedicated to cars that frequently pop up on
the worst Cars of All Time lists. Some of these
cars are thought of as the worst because of their reliability,
or rather there the lack of reliability, some because the
(01:07):
company that made them famously backed the wrong horseless carriage
and subsequently went out of business. And I should add
this is just a a sampling, if you will. An
amuse bush of the worst cars of all time, and
they're not necessarily the worst worst because there are tons
(01:29):
of different lists, right. I didn't select these cars myself.
What I did was I went through lists like goliath
dot COM's the twenty five Worst Cars of All Time,
otto wise is ten Worst Cars Ever, made, The Drive's
article the ten Worst Cars of All Time, time dot
COM's article the fifty Worst Cars of all Time, and
(01:52):
an Edmond's list called fifty Worst Cars of All Times.
So I used all these lists to curate a small
selection of vehicles that just weren't good for one reason
or another. And I am not ranking these either. These
are not in no particular order, because the whole concept
of worst is at least partly subjective. In fact, there
(02:14):
are some cars that are on this list that other
people who wrote the other lists say that that car
gets a bad rap, it's really not that bad. So
there's no there's no metric I can hold up that says, okay, definitively,
this car is the worst one. And also, you know
where they put cars on on their rankings changes a lot.
(02:36):
Some lists have the Ford Pinto taking the top or
or bottom honors. If you want to look at it,
that way and others will put it somewhere in the middle.
So we'll actually start with the Ford Pinto because it
does pop up on a lot of lists. Just know
that these bad cars appear in no particular order, but
we will begin with the Ford Pinto. This car is
(02:57):
one I remember hearing jokes about when I was a kid,
because Ford made these cars between nineteen seventy and nineteen
eighty and I was also made between nineteen seventy and
nineteen eighty. Uh. The Pinto was meant to fill a
niche in the North American market. It was the first
subcompact car that Ford produced in North America. So for
(03:20):
those not familiar with American car classifications, it behooves us
to go through what those are really quickly so we
just understand what we're talking about. So on the smallest
end in America, you've got what are called many compact
cars M I, n I compact cars that includes stuff
like the Chevrolet Spark or the Fiat five. Those are
(03:44):
roughly equivalent to what would be called a segment mini
cars in Europe. Now, if you go slightly larger than that,
you have subcompact cars that includes the Pinto or the
Ford Fiesta. Then you go up another level and you
are now at compact cars. This would include cars like
the Honda Civic or the Toyota Corolla. Then when you
(04:07):
go a little bigger, you get to mid sized cars
that include stuff like the Toyota Camry and the Volkswagen Passat.
And finally you have large cars like the Chevrolet Impala
or the Cadillac c T five. So it's really in
size that we're talking about. And there are other terms
(04:27):
that can be pop. You know, it can be used
in addition to these or in replacement of these, like
you might hear mid sized luxury like a midsized luxury
sedan or a full sized luxury car, but you get
the idea, like, these are the classifications that came out
of the United States e p A, which is the
Environmental Protection Agency, and it defines these specific classes of cars.
(04:49):
So you know, a car fits these based upon specs
that the e p A drew up. And typically the
e p A uses the interior vaul lume of a
car to determine its classification. So you could theoretically have
a really big car has very small interior volume, and
(05:11):
arguably you could say it's not a large car, even
though the exterior would be quite large. But that's how
e PA defines size for vehicles. Anyway, the car companies.
Oh and by the way, that applies to cars, I'm
not talking in that sense about things like SUVs and trucks.
That's that's slightly different. But I had to you know,
(05:31):
draw the lines. I can actually talk about the bad cars.
So anyway, car companies would market subcompact cars as being
more economical in their fuel consumption. Because you gotta remember
this is after the seventies where we had some oil
crises that drove up cost of gasoline. There were gas
shortages around the United States and the seventies, So the
(05:53):
cars of the past, which were real gas guzzlers, you know,
we're talking about some cars that would get less than
ten miles to the gallon. That was looked at as
being a seriously bad and wasteful thing by the time
you get to the late seventies in the early eighties,
so there was this move towards economy having cars that
(06:15):
are less uh, you know, of a gas guzzler. So
it wasn't always the case that subcompact cars actually were
that economical, but that's how they were marketed. The American
companies were rushing into the design of subcombat cars because
foreign car companies were gaining ground in North America and
(06:35):
the American companies suddenly found themselves facing serious competition from overseas.
So for decades, the American car companies were sitting pretty
in the United States. You know, we had foreign cars
being imported into the country, but they weren't on a
very large scale. It was only when you started seeing
more German and Japanese cars coming in that the American
(06:59):
car companies started to get a little nervous. So Ford
cut the development time for the Pinto nearly in half
compared to their normal process. And this was in an
effort to stave off the growing threat of foreign cars
and to establish an American subcompact vehicle. So when the
Pinto debuted, you saw this two door car and it
(07:21):
had an enclosed trunk. But a hatchback version of the
Pinto followed shortly thereafter. And you know, originally there wasn't
that much criticism about the Pinto. Some people complained about
the brakes a little bit, some people complained about the suspension,
But what would really seal the deal for the Pinto
(07:41):
would be its fuel tank. So Ford had designed the
Pinto to have a rear mounted fuel tank, and it
sat nestled between the car's rear axle, which is where
the rear tires attach, and the rear bumper, so sandwich
between these two components in the car and um At
the time, the US government had really focused on front
(08:04):
end collisions when it came to forming safety regulations because
the seven late seventies was also when the United States
was starting to say, you know, we probably need to
have some regulations in place to protect drivers on the
road that car companies have to meet these specifications if
their cars are going to be sold in our country.
(08:25):
So that had mostly focused on the front end collision
side of things at this point in history, and therefore
they didn't really take a look at the back end
and what might happen with a rear collision. And the
fuel tank location meant that if someone driving a Pinto
were to get rear ended by another car, there was
a very real possibility that the fuel tank would be
(08:47):
damaged potentially ruptured that in turn presented a serious fire hazard.
The Pinto didn't have any significant crumple zone in the
back of it. So if you collide at a good
clock of speed and you know, we're talking about more
than ten miles per hour, certainly, if it was more
than thirty miles per hour, you're looking at a real
(09:09):
potential to have a ruptured fuel tank. And there were
cases of collisions in which people were you know, badly
injured or even died from burns, and it's undeniably horrible. Now,
I should also add that the reputation of the Pinto
was also due to a few sensational articles that may
(09:29):
have inflated numbers to make it seem like the Pinto
was even worse than what it really was. Not that
it wasn't bad. I don't think you could really argue
that it was, you know, good, but rather that the
reputation the Pinto received was worse than what it was merited. Uh.
And there's also this story about a famous cost benefit
(09:51):
analysis memo, and depending upon whom you ask, that cost
benefit analysis memo either showed that Ford had callous leaking
included that if they fixed the problem, it would be
more expensive than just paying off the lawsuits that would
come up, so instead they just said, we'll just deal
with lawsuits. That's one telling of that memo. Uh Or
(10:14):
it was more like it was saying the likelihood of
a tragic accident was no greater than for the average
vehicle of especially of that size. Still, this was bad
enough for the Pinto to show up on a lot
of these worst Car lists, and Ford was pressured to
recall one and a half million Pinto's and Mercury Bobcats,
which were essentially the same car. In Okay, let's switch gears,
(10:39):
so to speak, and talk about a different car. This
one's called the Trabant, or sometimes the Trabby. This one
came out of what was at the time East Germany,
and quick history lesson for all you young uns out there.
Once upon a time, after World War Two, Germany was
split into two nations, who had East Germany and West
(10:59):
german Many. East Germany was a communist country, essentially an
extension of the then Soviet Union. So East Germany began
producing the Trabant back in the late nineteen fifties, and
while there would be a few models produced over the
decades of production, the actual design of the car remained
almost identical. So in other words, like if you were
(11:20):
to look at a Trabant that was made in the
late fifties and one that was made in the early eighties.
You probably wouldn't be able to tell that there were
very many differences. They were essentially the same. In some ways.
That makes things easy because replacement parts are going to
be plentiful. I mean, presumably that will be compatible across
multiple models. But it also shows, let's say, a lack
(11:41):
of evolution and innovation. It was a tiny two door car,
and the Trabant's body was made from a material called
dero plast, and this is a fiber reinforced plastic, so
kind of like fiberglass. Typically the fibers in dero last
work cotton or sometimes wool, so these were cars that had,
(12:04):
you know, sometimes cotton reinforced plastic bodies. One issue with
this was that the process of shaping and curing the plastic,
called thermo setting, is an irreversible process. So you start
off with a polymer that's in a liquid format, and
you can pour this liquid into say a mold. Then
(12:24):
you can subject that mold to you know, heat and
high pressure, and the liquid polymer cures and it hardens
into shape. But you cannot do the same process in reverse.
Once it's hardened into shape, it's locked there, so you
can't just you know, heat it up and melt it
back down into a reusable format. So that makes makes
(12:45):
the tribun a bit of a pain to deal with.
When they reached the end of their useful life cycle,
which for some of these vehicles appeared to be shortly
after they rolled off the assembly line, eventually people figured
out how to shred the car bodies and use that
material as aggregate for concrete production. And there's some stories
that say that pigs found deer o plastic delicious. Uh,
(13:08):
those maybe urban legends, and I would probably treat it
as you know, being such and not taking that as gospel,
But there are so many articles out there that just
casually present that as fact. It's just when you do
some digging you find out there are any like reliable
reports on it. Anyway, the car ran on a mixture
(13:29):
of oil and gas, so you sort of refuel the trabant,
you would actually have to open up the hood of
the car. There was no like, you know, gas tank
that you could access outside the car. You had to
open the hood so expose the engine and then it
had a little fuel tank at the top of the
the engine blocks. You would open that up and you
would pour in a mixture of oil and gas into
(13:51):
the two stroke engine and then close it back up
and shut the hood. There was also no fuel gauge,
so there was no way to tell from behind the
wheel how much fuel you actually had, so if you
wanted to check and see how much fuel you had,
you had to stop the car. You had to pop
the hood, open up the fuel tank, and use a
dipstick to check the fuel level. So not super convenient.
(14:14):
The Trabant was famous for being notoriously unreliable and smelly.
It would produce a lot of exhaust, like visible exhaust,
like you were rolling coal every time you drove a Trabant.
And it was also very loud. It was the engine
was loud, and it was allowed experience to ride in one.
It was also really slow. I saw one video in
(14:36):
which an owner of one of these said he had
only coaxed a Trabant up to a maximum off on
flat road. Uh, he got a little faster if he
was going down a hill, but on flat road fifty
five was where it maxed out. And also that the car,
you know, handles pretty poorly. It had no interior signal indicator,
(14:57):
and so the turn signal was a bit of a
thing because if you turned the turn signal on and
then you made a turn, it would not automatically reset.
You had to manually turn off the turn signal. But
there was no indicator inside the car that the turn
signal was on, so you know, if you didn't remember
to do it yourself, you'd be irritating everyone behind you
as they just start yelling go ahead and turn already.
(15:18):
So in other words, it was just a lousy car.
But it was also the only game in town if
you were in East Germany pretty much because you know,
it was a state owned operation. So to get a
Trabant East German citizens actually had to submit an application
and the wait time could be up to a decade
or longer. So it was a really crappy car and
(15:38):
you had to wait ten years before you had a
chance to own one. When the Berlin Wall came down,
there were stories of people from former East Germany who
came straight over to West Germany and then they abandoned
their old Trabant cars while getting you know, any other
car that they could uh. The Trabants are pretty rare
these days, especially in the United States, but some collectors
(15:59):
do seek him out because I don't know why, because
they're weird. We have a lot more bad cars to
talk about, but first let's take a quick break. It's
time for us to talk about an American business man
(16:20):
named Malcolm Brooklyn, responsible for several cars that pop up
on worst Car lists. And he's had a really long
career and mostly focused in the automotive industry after he
made some serious bank in the hardware business. And it's
a career. March was some pretty big peaks and big valleys.
So it's not like it's just failure. I mean he's
(16:40):
he's he's been behind some big success stories too. So
let's talk about one of the flops. This one is
the s V one. Now, before the SV one, Brooklyn
had co founded uh Subaru of America. You know, there
was the existing Subaru company, but he created or co
founded the American division of Subaru. And he did this
(17:03):
in nineteen sixty eight, and they imported the Subaru three sixty. Now,
this little vehicle looked a lot like a Volkswagen Beetle,
and in fact, the suber Ut three sixty also shows
up in a lot of worst car lists. That's not
what we're talking about here, though. Anyway, the three sixty
got some scathing reviews for its performance in various safety tests.
(17:24):
It was named one of the most unsafe vehicles that
were available. And this was right around that time when
the US government was mulling over regulations that would force
the automotive industry to adopt new safety measures in car design.
So Malcolm Brooklyn saw the writing on the wall and
decided to go all in on safety. So in nineteen
(17:45):
seventy one, Brooklyn created a car company called General Vehicles,
which you know, sounds a little bit like General Motors, weird.
His idea was to create a two seater car kind
of similar to a sports car like the Corvette, and
this one would have goal wing doors. You know, so
those are the doors that you know, they they open
upward similar to another car that's gonna show up in
(18:07):
this episode. That's a spoiler. I mean, I'm sure everyone
here knows what car I'm talking about. And uh, this
sp one would also have a steel frame chassis complete
with a rollover protective structure so it would protect passengers
should the car be flipped over onto its you know, back,
and it had or top I guess. It had front
(18:29):
and rear bumpers that were pretty chunky. They extended out
a good ways from the car, but they would also
protect the car to a point where the you know.
Brickland said, his company said, really that any collision up
to ten miles per hour would have no damage to
the bumpers. The car would resist that damage because of
this design. D SP one would have an enclosed fuel
(18:52):
tank and reinforced side panels for the doors. It would
have no ashtray and no cigarette lighter. Brick And himself
was a former smoker, and he thought that smoking in
cars was dangerous. I happened to agree with him, and
so he said, yeah, we're just not gonna have it now. Granted,
people would could eventually buy an SV one and potentially
(19:13):
have an aftermarket thing put in, but that's beside the point.
The body was made from an acrylic resin bonded to
fiberglass that ended up being a really huge hassle. Early
versions of the car had problems with the acrylic blistering
and required a total overhaul of the process. It was
supposed to be a super safe sports car, and the
(19:34):
s V in fact stood for Safety Vehicle see I
told you went all in. Brickland was anticipating many of
the changes that the US government would ultimately impose on
the automotive industry. He was ahead of the game, so
the SV one was truly a car that was ahead
of its time. Now, while General Vehicles had its headquarters
in America, the cars themselves would be manufactured in St.
(19:57):
John in New Brunswick, Canada. So Brooklyn was looking around
to find a place to you know, manufacture these vehicles,
and he was looking for places that would have the
government assistance and incentives in order to get things going.
The idea being that the company would provide you know,
more than a hundred well paying jobs in a region
(20:19):
in Canada that was struggling with unemployment problems. It appears
as though the Canadian government was under the impression that
the money was going to go straight to production, like
in other words, everything else was ready to go, we
just need to start making these cars. But in fact,
the SV one's design was not yet complete, so a
lot of the initial money actually went into engineering and
(20:41):
development to work out kinks in the design. So like
they knew what they wanted the card to be like
but they had to find a way to make it
be that way. Right, You have to test all those
ideas and reality and make sure they actually work. Now,
that would mean that Brooklyn would actually have to seek
additional funding as the project went on because he was
(21:02):
still working out the bugs in the in the design
and couldn't go right into production. The car would end
up being a pretty hefty one. The doors alone weighed
around ninety pounds each. Now they had a hydraulic system
attached to them, at least the initial ones did. Uh.
That did mean, however, that if the hydraulic system failed,
you would have to lift those cars manually. Uh. And
(21:23):
the doors were slow as well, even when they were working,
so if the weather was bad and meant you would
be left standing out or then sitting in the rain
or snow or whatever for several seconds because the car
door takes a while to open and close. It also
meant that the V eight engine that powered the vehicle
really had to push hard to meet the demand of
(21:44):
moving such a heavy car, and Brocklyn had problems and
that he was buying his engines from the American Motor
Company and there was a dispute between General Vehicles and
American Motor Company, and eventually it saw his initial order
drastically reduced. Now what caused that division is a matter
of debate. If you were to ask Brooklyn, he was
(22:08):
said that he was told AMC didn't want to hurt
their own car sales by supplying engines to a competitor,
essentially saying, your car is so good that if we
give you engines, people will buy your car. They won't
buy our car. However, if you ask other people, you
might hear that Brooklyn was talking some smack about a
m C and that that soured the deal. At any rate,
(22:29):
he would get around MC engines, and it was the
three eight to be precise, He would have to get
other engines for future SV one cars. The problems that
Brooklyn encounter meant that the cost of production kept going
up UH and that internment that the company was going
to have to hike up the suggested price for the
(22:50):
SV one in order to compensate for the fact that
it was costing so much to produce. Initially, the price
was supposed to be four thousand dollars for an s
V one UH. The nineteen version that eventually came out
more than doubled that to nine thousand, nine eighty five dollars,
and okay, that sounds like nothing for a car these days,
(23:11):
But then we have to remember we're talking about the
mid nineteen seventies here, so if we adju for inflation,
that nine thousand dollars is closer to fifty one thousand
dollars today. It was way more expensive than comparable cars
at the time, and no amount of safety features were
likely to win people over to it. So why did
it end up getting so expensive? Well, not only was
(23:34):
there the quality issues that they had to solve, the
Canadian policy for workers meant that, you know, Brookland was
hurt as well. See, Canada had this policy that if
you worked at a job for at least ten weeks,
you could then quit that job and you would be
eligible for unemployment benefits. So there were a lot of
(23:55):
workers who just decided to leave their job rather than
continue to work for General Vehicles and admitt that. The
company had to deal with a lot of turnover, and
they had to do a lot of recruiting and a
lot of training, so that drove the price up a lot.
The company needed more loans from the government to stay afloat.
But by then the Canadian government kind of wanted to
(24:15):
get a little distance. It was politically disadvantageous to be
connected to General Vehicles. The car was being seen as
a as a money pit, and the government had already
invested millions of dollars in the SV one, So they
called it quits. And so, after producing just around three
thousand vehicles, the company General Vehicles closed up shop and
(24:37):
the SV one was no more. So. I think a
lot of folks include this on the worst Cars of
All time lists. Not because the vehicle stuff had enormous flaws.
I mean, it did have some, but it wasn't a limon,
but rather it was because that whole process ultimately led
to a car company going out of business. But I
(24:59):
mentioned just now, you know, I alluded to the fact
that going doors were going to play another part in
in an in another vehicle will jump right to that one.
And this is a famous one. It's one that a
lot of people know about. We're talking about the DeLorean
d m C twelve. This is, of course, the car
made famous by the Back to the Future movies. I
remember seeing the first Back to the Future film in
(25:21):
the theater in and thinking that car looks super cool.
But I had never heard of a DeLorean before I
grew up in rural Georgia. No one had a DeLorean here.
And I've actually done a full episode about Deloreans in
the past. So I'm going to give you the cliffs
notes version of the DeLorean story. The whole story, by
(25:41):
the way, it's absolutely fascinating. We just don't have time
to dive into the whole thing here. So John DeLorean,
who is one of the more colorful characters who had
been involved in the automotive history history. He was an
executive with General Motors, but then he left that company
and founded the DeLorean Motor Company in the mid nineteen seventies.
(26:02):
So Brickland's s V one, which remember that one came
out in the seventies, had going doors. And there was
another similarity between the s V one and then the
DeLorean d m C twelve. And that's the fact that
John DeLorean also shopped around to find a place where
he could, you know, establish a manufacturing facility, and he
(26:24):
was looking for a government that would provide incentives to
allow him to do that, so like tax breaks and
government assistants, and that kind of thing. So for the
SV one that ended up being Canada. For the DeLorean
it ended up being Northern Ireland on the outskirts of Belfast.
The d m C twelve was to be a pretty
odd car, and not just because of the going doors.
(26:46):
The body panels were made of brushed stainless steel and
they rolled out of the factory unpainted, so the classic
DeLorean has that stainless steel look to it. Now some
people would later go and get a hate job for
their vehicles, but standard was unpainted stainless steel. Curiously, Dolorean
(27:06):
picked a very weedy engine for the DMC twelve. It
was a V six that was capable of just a
hundred thirty horsepower. For a car that was styled like
a sports car and a chunky sports car at that,
that wasn't very much power, and in fact, during test drives,
drivers found that the car's acceleration left a lot to
(27:27):
be desired. It could take up to ten seconds to
reach sixty miles per hour, that is not fast for
a sports car, and its top speed was around a
hundred nine miles per hour. The car is definitely striking
to look at, I mean it is it is a
cool looking car, and it might have been a modest success,
and it may have even allowed the company to continue
(27:49):
making more vehicles besides the d m C twelve, except
that the path from establishing the company to actually producing
the first vehicles was a really rough one for DeLorean.
A lot of the employees at the manufacturing facility had
little to no experience in manufacturing in general, let alone
in the automotive manufacturing industry. There were a lot of
(28:11):
errors in production that ended up being very costly. There
were supply chain issues, and all of this drove the
cost of production up. Sounds very familiar, right, It's just
like the s V one, And this meant that, like
the SV one, DeLorean had to jack up the sales
price for the DeLorean in order to compensate for that expense.
By the time the cars were ready to be sold
(28:32):
in nine, which was a couple of years behind schedule,
they came in with the price tag of twenty five
thousand dollars. So if we had just that for inflation,
that would make the DMC twelve a seventy five thousand,
five hundred dollar car, or thereabouts. That's how much it
would cost you to buy a DMC twelve for a
(28:53):
comparable amount of money if they were, you know, hitting
the road today for a car that looks like a
sports car but doesn't drive like a sports car, that
is an astronomical price. DeLorean didn't produce as many vehicles
as the company had projected. In the two years that
had actually made cars, it fell short of production goals
and it was hard to sell them at that exorbitant Brice.
(29:16):
The DeLorean Motor Company went out of business in three
whole years before Back to the Future would come out.
And like I said, I had never even heard of
Deloreans before the movie came out. Also, knowing what I
know now, when Doc Brown talks about getting up to
eighty eight miles per hour, I think he was being
really generous over how much time it would take to
(29:37):
achieve that speed. Anyway, because of the failure of the
DMC twelve, the DeLorean Motor Company never got a chance
to make another model of vehicle. All right, we've got
some more bad cars to talk about, but let's take
another quick break. Okay, I was talking about Brooklyn before
(30:03):
the break. You know, he was the one behind the
SV one and uh you know also the SUPERHU North America.
And since we were talking about him, let's mention another
infamous car that he's associated with. This time, this is
not a car that he developed. It's one that his
team discovered in an effort to find the quote cheapest
(30:23):
car in the world end quote. This was because car
prices in America this would be in the early mid
nineteen eighties. Um, We're skyrocketing, largely due to inflation, and
there were a growing number of Americans who found themselves
priced out of buying a car. Brooklyn saw an opportunity
to cater to those potential customers if he could just
(30:46):
find a car that was cheap enough, and that car
would be drumroll, please the You Go. Now, before I
jump into talking about the UGO, I want to mention
that these lists are so darned subjective that I come
across disagreements in them when I was researching this episode. UH.
The Edmonds list in UH includes the seven You Go
(31:09):
as its fourth worst car in a list of fifty.
Time dot Com didn't rank its list, but the Night
five You Go is on that one. UH. The website
The Drive lists it as number six on its top
ten worst cars of all time. Goliath lists it at
number two, in case you're wondering they gave the Ford
(31:30):
pinto the number one spot. Also, Triple A has it
on a list of worst cars, as does motor Biscuit.
The website motor Biscuit that puts The Night You Go
at number twelve. However, Riley at ottawise dot com lists
it as a car that's been judged unfairly. So I
guess you're mileage may vary pun intended. So let's walk
(31:56):
through the complicated story of the You Go. And it
starts not in the part of the world where we
used to call it, you know, Yugoslavia. Instead it starts
in Italy. So the company Fiat created an economical family
car called the Fiat one, and then they had a variation,
the Fiat one seven, that would serve as the starting
(32:17):
point for the UGO, which was a little bit shorter
in length than the already tiny Fiat was. A car
company called Zastava Automobiles secured the rights to produce a
version of this vehicle, which the company marketed as the Coral.
It's a k O R A L. Or It's how
Rick says his son's name, and the walking dead anyway,
(32:40):
it was a subcompact hatchback and it was in fact
very very cheap. Brookland's team reported back, and Malcolm leapt
into action, and the story gets complicated, but ultimately began
importing the Coral and changed the model name to you
Go and marketed it as an ultra budget car. In
(33:00):
the United States. This was in and the you Go
was an odd car. One of the standard features advertised
for the vehicle was carpeted interiors, which I guess tells
you about the luxuries you could expect with a UGO,
and I mean it was a budget car, no one
was really expecting much. Also, the early models had an
(33:21):
engine that put out a measly fifty five horse power
that was still an improvement over the Eastern European version
that topped out at forty horse power. That engine could
push the tiny you Go up to about eighty six
miles per hour as its top speed, and this made
the you Go the car with the lowest top speed
sold in the United States at that time. Dealers would
(33:42):
sell the car for around four thousand dollars. This was
about twice what they paid when they were buying the
car's wholesale from Eastern Europe. The car had a reputation
for being unreliable, though folks like Otto wise Is Riley
say that that was largely an issue with people just
failing to maintain their cars properly. Consumer Reports was less kind.
(34:03):
They called the UGO the barely assembled bag of nuts
and bolts, which is a big yikes. Honestly, most of
what I found sites issues with the manufacturing processes, so
it's good to remember these cars were built in a
then communist country and the manufacturing facility was not a
(34:24):
top of the line plant. To put it kindly, Uh,
there were real issues not just with the quality of
the plan itself, but also there was not a real
motivated workforce there. There were stories of like people drinking
on the job and such. Turns out, if you're drinking
a lot, high precision assembly line work is probably not
(34:45):
the best combo there. Anyway, there's a widespread joke that
the UGO had a rear window to froster, not because
you need to clear off ice off the back windshield,
but rather it was there so that you could keep
your hand ends warm while you push the car after
it would inevitably break down. I know that It's a
widespread joke because it showed up in nearly every article
(35:09):
that mentioned the Ugo as one of the worst cars
of all time. It's a joke that's been used a lot. Now,
next up on our list is an entry that really
hurts because it was a car that I genuinely thought
looked super cool. I really like this car when it
first premiered, and it is the Plymouth Prowler. This car
(35:31):
showed up on a couple of lists for the worst
cars of all time, and I can kind of understand why,
but I still think the car looked awesome. Alright. So
it's the nineteen nineties and Chrysler was creating some really
sexy cars. For example, they their Dodge division created the Viper,
which was a super sexy sports car that really good
(35:53):
acceleration and speed and abysmal fuel economy, like no fuel economy.
Now that that thing consumed gas sitting in the garage.
It was not meant for daily driving. It was meant to,
you know, impress people. Essentially, the Plymouth division, which historically
was meant to produce cars for the low price market,
(36:15):
later re emerged to be a brand that was meant
to appeal to a youth market. Well, they dipped into
a seriously retro design to propose the Prowler, and the
Prowler hearkened back to hot rods of the thirties, forties, fifties,
and sixties and had sleek, curved lines, uh, open front
(36:37):
wheels like there were a little bumperrets that were over
the tops of the wheels, but otherwise the wheels were
open in the front, had a raped windshield. Uh, the
hood narrowed to a sort of pointed curve in the front.
A lot of folks thought the whole thing was really outlandish.
I thought it looked gorgeous. Like reading over some of
(36:59):
the critiques blows my mind because I thought this car
looked amazing. However, despite having a hot rod exterior, what
was going on under the hood was a different matter.
The Prowler's engine was a three and a half liter
V six with two horsepower. That engine could push the
Prowler to an acceleration of zero to sixty miles an
hour at around seven point two seconds. That's just not
(37:22):
super duper impressive. It's not the worst. I mean, there
are other cars on this list that have, you know,
worse acceleration, but it's not impressive. Top speed maxed out
at around a hundred fifteen miles per hour, still, you know,
not like super crazy for a hot rod. And Plymouth
only made automatic transmission versions of the Prowler, so that
(37:46):
meant you couldn't have a manual transmission and peel rubber
and pretend like you're racing for papers because you only
could use an automatic, So the performance of the Prowler
couldn't live up to the style of the exterior. Plymouth
was using a lot of parts that were originally designed
for other Chrysler vehicles. This was a kind of a
cost saving measure, so like the steering rack, the suspension,
(38:10):
the engine and more, we're all kind of leftovers from
other Chrysler models. The Prowler failed to find a place
in the automotive market. Curiously, two of the lists I
found both have very similar criticisms, namely that the Prowler
was a concept that looked great on a computer screen,
but it was just not as impressive in person. Now,
(38:32):
I'm not saying that one or both of the people
who wrote those lists copied someone, but I will say
that whenever the two lists had the same car listed,
the wording was not identical, just really similar. I'm not
(38:54):
going to name them, but I will say like I
since there's some plagiarism going on in this world, which
is why I tried to pull from so many different sources,
because I didn't want to get like a list that
someone made that was considered to be definitive and everyone
else just copied it. Anyway. Ultimately, the Chrysler slash Plymouth
Company produced fewer than twelve thousand of these cars. Chrysler
(39:17):
would rebrand it. It was the Plymouth Prowler for a while,
but then it became the Chrysler Prowler. Um. It's still
a car that would love to tool around in, particularly
if I could find one in the original purple paint job,
which I really liked. Some lists also include the PT Cruiser,
by the way, is one of the worst cars of
all time. In many ways, the PT Cruiser was a
(39:38):
kind of spiritual sister car to the Plymouth Prowlers, also
meant to appeal to the youth crowd. UM. I like
the look of the PT Cruiser as well, but I've
also heard that it has a pretty significant blind spot,
so it does have its own drawbacks. But it didn't
feel like it was enough for me to you know,
included on this list. Will do one more for this.
(40:01):
I've actually got a few more, So maybe I'll do
a part two and talk about a few other cars,
because there's no shortage of cars that people have listed
as being one of the worst of all time. As
I said, that's very subjective question, so we can probably
do a part two of this. But you know, three
of the lists that I looked at included a British
(40:22):
car called the Reliant Robin. Now I'm gonna stay up
front that I imagine a really big reason that these
lists included that particular car is that there was a
famous segment on the very popular show top Gear that
made the Robin look like it would spend more time
flipped over on its side than it would upright on
(40:43):
its wheels. Also, it only had three wheels, so as
a three wheeled car, the one wheel in the front
was used for steering and the two wheels in the
back would drive the vehicle. That's where the power train
would deliver the power. So the engine was mounted in
the front. It was not a rear mounted engine, so
not like the old Volkswagen Beetle engines. In the front
(41:07):
of the car, but it's the drive train provides power
to the rear wheels. I looked at all that was
said about the Reliant Robin and all of those lists
said that had a reliable tendency to tip over if
you moved into a turn it to hide our higher
rate of speed. Like they all repeated this um. They
(41:29):
also said if you went through a particularly tight curve
in the road you were, you were going to potentially
tip over. And this is what viewers saw if they
watched that episode of Top Gear. The car tipped over
multiple times in that segment of that episode. However, later on,
the host admitted that his production team had re engineered
(41:50):
the differential on the Reliant Robin so that it would
tip over more readily. In other words, they engineered it
so that it would perform orm in a specific way,
that is to become unbalanced and fall over, you know,
for the camera. So while the car appeared to be
as steady as a domino on a waterbed during this
(42:13):
television segment, that was not necessarily a fair reflection of
its performance for the average driver. But why would a
UK car company even make a three wheeled car in
the first place. Why would you go that way? Well,
the answer to that kind of boils down to taxes.
So by making the Robin a three wheeled vehicle, and
(42:34):
by building the body of the car out of fiberglass
so that the weight would not be too great, Reliant
was able to have the Robin classified as a motorcycle
while still marketing it as a car. So motorcycles in
the UK were the subject of a different and less
(42:55):
expensive tax than cars were, so you didn't have to
spend as much tax to buy a motorcycle, and that
meant the three wheeled cars were slightly more affordable than
the four wheeled versions because their price tag didn't climb
as higher as high due to higher taxes. But when
I say affordable, I don't necessarily mean cheap. They cost
(43:19):
around uh well, when they came out around eight hundred
pounds when they first came out of that would be
around eight hundred pounds today, which is around say eleven grand.
They were also more economical when it came to fuel consumption.
Found sites that said you could go up to around
sixty to sixty four miles per gallon on Robin. That's
(43:42):
really impressive. The engine was very modest. The original Robbins
boasted an engine that had an output of just thirty
three horsepower. It took nearly fifteen seconds to coax a
Robin to get up to sixty miles per hour. Not
that I'm convinced that would have ever been a good
idea in the first place, because even though they weren't
as prone to tipping over as was depicted, they still
(44:06):
could Anyway, I feel like the Robbins inclusion on lists
is largely due to that top gear piece. I mean,
sure it was not a speedster, had a very small capacity.
You couldn't carry very much in it, but it would
also serve just fine while puttering around like a small
English town as long as you know you weren't taking
corners like Mario and Dretti. So I feel like that
(44:29):
one has uh an unearned reputation, or at least only
partly earned reputation, for being one of the worst cars
of all time. All Right, we've run out of time ourselves.
I do have a couple more cars that I was
going to talk about, but I'll save those and we'll
do a part two on this in the near future,
and we'll talk about some more cars that for one reason.
(44:51):
Another people have singled out to say this was a
really bad one. Uh, it would be great to kind
of focus on some that have had ooriously atrocious fuel economy,
for example, particularly cars in the seventies when the oil
crisis made that sort of thing even more of a problem.
But we'll save that for the next episode. If you
(45:13):
have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes,
please reach out to me. The best way to do
that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is
text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again,
really sick. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
(45:34):
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