But the s model, which nearly destroyed or murdered many a fine middle-class U. I could just about get it up to 55 mph. I had to replace the head gasket twice in 18, miles. While it seems like something that only appears in retro Communist bloc movies as a punchline, the Yugo actually existed in America during my adult memory. It also had carpeting. No car should have carpeting except for a Rolls-Royce. Smells accumulate, and they really accumulated in the Yugo.
This serviceable villain, offensively misspelled and named after a culture that was exterminated in a genocide, but not before committing human sacrifice for eons, gained a modicum of hipness after Walter White drove it around during Breaking Bad. Alarm goes off for no reason all hours. Horn honks for no reason while driving. But gradually, like an adopted shelter pet who reveals more and more health problems and neuroses as the years go on, we got tired of looking at it, and began to realize it had issues.
When the Pinto got rear-ended, it tended to burst into flames. Apparently, in testing the Pinto, Ford crashed it more than 40 times at speeds of more than 25 miles per hour. The fuel tank ruptured every time. Ford put it on the market anyway, and ended up recalling more than a million of these bombs on wheels. Nothing like that would ever happen in a contemporary car, unless you count airbags that spew shrapnel and diesel engines that spew poison. Still, a chronically exploding gas tank is more than enough to consign the horrible Pinto to a special place in automotive hell.
The Allegro, apart from a mechanical problem where the front axle would collapse, had all sorts of dimensional issues. Send We respect your privacy. Oops, we messed up. Use the pull-down menu to view car models by brand. Worst Used Cars Listed alphabetically by make and model, these vehicles have records of much-worse-than-average reliability, based on subscriber responses to our Annual Auto Survey. Shopping for a used car? Visit our used-car buying guide. Consumer Reports is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to helping consumers. We make it easy to buy the right product from a variety of retailers.
Our service is unbiased: Dan Neil wrote that the Yugo is the " Mona Lisa of bad cars" that "had the distinct feeling of being assembled at gunpoint. Yugo jokes were almost as numerous as lawyer jokes and just as scathing. The Cars We Love to Hate , Eric Peters said that the Yugo was "less reliable than the exchange rate of an African 'people's republic' or a Halliburton financial disclosure ", that it "[taught] folks the hard way about getting what you pay for" and that "The Yugo will likely hold in perpetual ignominy the title of 'Worst Car Ever Sold to the American Public'".
Currently celebrating its 25th anniversary as shorthand for automotive crap. While they were very technologically advanced, with the Riviera being the first production car to have a touchscreen computer in the dashboard, [73] the cars were strongly rejected by consumers.
It was what these cars once represented: GM as a purveyor of excellent design, desirable image, decent build quality, and a stranglehold on the mid-upper premium market segment. All these were utterly destroyed.
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The Cadillac Allante , introduced for the model year, was a top level convertible intended to compete with the Mercedes-Benz SL. However, the Allante was a major commercial failure, selling less than 5, units a year until it was cancelled in The Allante was hampered by poor performance, being a front wheel drive car powered by a horsepower engine while weighing lbs; Motor Trend measured the Allante as having a time of Including the Allante in Automotive Atrocities: The Cars We Love to Hate , author Eric Peters lamented that the Allante "coulda been a contender"; "What turned this magic coach into a pumpkin was the car's dreadful initial quality, exorbitant price, and the less-than-world-class performance.
The fact that the Allante had to be designed and partially assembled in Europe spoke loud and clear that the solons in corporate HQ had lost touch with their target buyer and economic reality [ To beat it all, GM lost money on every Allante ever made. The Sterling was a slightly modified Rover created for export to the United States. The , in turn, was joint developed with Honda and was very similar in design, and shared most of its mechanical components, with the Acura Legend. The Sterling, suffering from numerous build quality and reliability problems, ended up being a major commercial failure, in marked contrast with the success of the concurrently launched Acura.
Naming it one of the worst flops of the past 25 years, Car and Driver retroactively wrote of it, " How could you lose? Quite easily, as it turned out. Predictably, the problem lay in the car itself—the first Sterlings were nothing short of unreliable, hastily screwed-together nightmares. The UK was cool in the U.
Besides, the engine and the mechanical bits were from Honda.
How bad could it be? And so it went with the Sterling The paintwork was terrible. And after a few short years, the car started to rust. Power surveys told the story: The Sterling was near the bottom, while the Acura Legend was near the top. One of the unique selling points of the Sterling, by the way, was the Sterling Plus Motor Club, which offered hotel accommodations for stranded owners — one marvels that Rover didn't go bankrupt from the lodging bills.
Rover of Britain and Honda of Japan would join forces to make a luxury car. The Japanese would bring the build quality, reliability and precision engineering. And - surprise, surprise - that came from Honda. Chrysler established a new brand, Eagle to market it. While a commercial failure, the Premier formed the basis of the company's successful LH platform cars , the Dodge Intrepid and Chrysler Concorde.
Naming it one of the dumbest cars ever imported to America, Jalopnik said it was "developed at the final moments of AMC's Renault clusterfuck before Chrysler took over. It's quite a story seriously, it's even got a high-level Cold War assassination! When you get into this car, you feel nothing. It is a symbol of sheer indifference and nothingness. The resulting vehicle was a critically panned commercial failure, due to it being based on K-car mechanicals and it both having a strong resemblance to and being only marginally more capable than the much lower priced Chrysler LeBaron convertible.
In the late s, the Chrysler chairman and perpetual huckster turned a friendship with Alejandro de Tomaso, then president of Maserati, into the most shudder-worthy example of corporate avarice ever to roll off an assembly line. The Maserati trident plastered on the grille just added insult to injury.
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The Cars We Love to Hate , author Eric Peters wrote of it, "If you slipped a wino into a pair of Bruno Magli shoes, not many people would believe he was actually Pierce Brosnan out for an incognito stroll. So they bolted it all together, and then added the handcrafted bits? It's both the worst Maserati and worst Chrysler ever.
For the model year, the Chrysler Imperial nameplate was applied to a long-wheelbase variant of the Chrysler K platform. The Imperial was 10 on Autoblog's list of "The 20 Dumbest Cars of All Time", with the author criticizing its out of date mechanicals and cheesy styling, claiming that the Imperial is evidence that " Lee Iacocca should have been banned from design studios at some point" and suggested that the Imperial is a reason to reevaluate Iacocca's legacy. To cover the embarrassing parentage Chrysler had to disguise it, apparently by asking everyone in the company for styling suggestions.
And then they used them. However, it was strongly criticized for its awkward driving position and strange styling, with many publications nicknaming the vans "Dustbusters" due to their resemblance to a popular handheld vacuum cleaner of the same name. In Crap Cars , Richard Porter describes the van as "[Resembling] an enormous Dustbuster with detailing work by a group of lightly trained monkeys. What Americans really want is a minivan that looks like a space shuttle!
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The combination of the three created a very distinctive visual effect from the outside that caused them almost instantly to be dubbed 'Dustbusters'. The effect from the front seats was also disconcerting, as there was a ledge in front of the dashboard that seemed to go on for eternity, creating the feeling of sitting in the second row of more typical minivan.
It would have made a nice platform for a bed if these were autonomous. Despite their derision in North America, the Trans Sport proved popular in Europe, particularly in France , as its styling and layout was similar to the contemporary Renault Espace. Developed through the s and promoted with its Vector W2 prototype, the W8 was delayed numerous times and didn't go into production until Only 17 examples were completed before the company collapsed.
The car received negative publicity almost immediately due to one of the first W8s being purchased by star Tennis player Andre Agassi , which nearly caught on fire his very first time driving it. Only 17 reached customers — and they needed to be shadowed by a flatbed. It was supposed to be a small, fun leisure time car but was heavily criticized for its sparse interior space, having only two seats and a small boot, as well as its poor performance, bad road handling, lack of driving fun and controversial styling.
Furthermore, it was priced higher than the Sidekick which featured four seats and more interior room, luggage space and practicability at a lower price. Not only does the car look near exactly the same going forward as it does going backwards, it is almost as if the manufactures simply forgot the middle part of the car. Nobody, especially when it had awful handling and zero off-road ability.
The Vector M12 was a repurposed version of the Vector WX3 prototype manufactured after the company's hostile takeover by Indonesian company Megatech, borrowing a number of its mechanical parts, including its V12 engine, from the Lamborghini Diablo. In a period review for Top Gear , Jeremy Clarkson gave the M12 a negative mark, claiming that it "was cooked by a man who learned everything there is to know about quality control in a Bulgarian power station"; he noted that the air conditioning system didn't work properly, the driver's door didn't fit, one of the HVAC vents can be pushed into the dashboard, and that he could smell petrol inside of the car.
While noting that the M12 could be pleasurable to drive around a track, he deemed it not worth buying. The Cadillac Catera was Cadillac's second attempt to market a smaller, sportier model to appeal to a younger demographic after the failure of the Cimarron in the s. While it was better received by critics than the Cimarron, the Catera was again a commercial failure as it was unable to match its German rivals in performance and capability while also failing to appeal to Cadillac's existing customers.
It's unorthodox marketing campaign, featuring model Cindy Crawford and a cartoon duck named "Ziggy", has been retroactively panned and cited as a factor in the Catera's failure. The Catera was also had numerous reliability issues and quickly developed a reputation as being problem-ridden; the Catera broke down multiple times while being tested by Automobile magazine. The styling was generic and gelatinous, the interior bland, and the chassis response lackadaisical, and the 3.
However, they also noted that the Catera convinced GM's management to continue to make Cadillacs smaller and sportier, leading to the creation of the successful and critically acclaimed Cadillac CTS which lead to the brand's resurgence as a German import fighter in the s. The Jaguar S-Type was an executive car that revived the S-Type nameplate first used by Jaguar in and had a distinctive retro design that also paid tribute to the legendary S-Type. It was praised on its release for having a 'luxurious interior', 'creamy composure' and a 'class-leading' 'cosseting ride'.
The retro design received also a mixed reputation, with some comparing it unfavourably to that of the Rover 75 who featured a similar design and was released at the same time and, like the S-Type, was first presented to the public at the Birmingham International Motor Show. Motoring Research said of the S-Type's styling: Describing the radiator grille as 'goppingly awful', he said that the car 'sums up everything that's wrong with Jaguar', and that the vehicle annoyed him and was bettered by its successor.
From its launch the Pontiac Aztek earned a strongly negative reception, mainly for its controversial styling, which former General Motors executive Bob Lutz described as resembling an "angry kitchen appliance". This car could not have been more instantly hated if it had a Swastika tattoo on its forehead. CNBC listed the Aztek as one of the 10 ugliest cars of all time. The Cars We Love to Hate , Eric Peters says of it, "The only vehicle to look like it's been in a bad accident even before it left the factory, the Aztek will be remembered as evidence that advanced degrees in automotive design are not necessarily indicators of good taste — or spelling ability.
It's the very worst car of all time because it's the only car on the list to kill an year-old car company. It's undeniable that the Aztek's utter hideousness drove the biggest and last nails into Pontiac's heavily side-clad, plastic coffin. The H2 was polarizing when introduced and has since gained extremely negative retroactive recognition as well as a negative social-political image in the United States.
Including it on Time magazine's list of the 50 worst cars of all time, Dan Neil wrote of it, "One struggles to think of a worse vehicle at a worse time. GM birthed this overfed monstrosity in an effort to bring the H1's street cred and off-road talent to America's middle class. It was difficult to see out of, and far too wide to navigate the type of twisty trails most often enjoyed by Jeep enthusiasts. The worst part, though, was driving a vehicle that became the poster child for vehicular conspicuous consumption.
And I'm happy to report that it is true — that the H2 is just as bad as you could've ever expected. Now you can feel like you're justified when you see one driving down the road and you start to chuckle.
Launched in summer , the Jaguar X-Type , designed to compete with compact luxury cars such as the Mercedes-Benz C-class , was a commercial failure that has earned derision for being based on the Ford Mondeo. The result was the English version of the Cadillac Cimarron, a tarted-up insult to a once-proud marque and a financial disaster for the company. At a time when Jaguar reliability was finally approaching respectable, the all-wheel-drive X-type was the lone, laughable holdout.
It was obnoxiously underbuilt, remarkably overpriced, and about as charming as a hernia. The Blackwood was a major commercial failure and was withdrawn from the market in a year, with it taking two more years to sell off the remaining inventory. This is a symbol of the fall of the brand. Now we're stuck with a lifeless shell of a company, making badge engineered Fords that bastardize the Mark MK?
When Renault started manufacturing their new generation of Espace MPV in-house instead of at Matra , the latter company needed a new product to build. Renault chose to create a kind of luxury coupe on the basis of the old Espace. According to Craig Cheetham in his book 'World's Worst Cars', "the car was doomed to failure by its very concept. Retaining the height of an MPV, the car appeared tall and ungainly. With only 8, units sold, the Renault Avantime became one of the biggest sales flops in automotive history, making it more numerically rare than some models of Rolls-Royce or Ferrari.
In production was halted due to the bankruptcy of the Matra car production company.
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Alongside the Avantime, Renault's other effort to get into the luxury market at that time was a more conventional, but still rather oddly designed four-door hatchback limousine called Vel Satis. The most distinctive but unattractive design features include the large front headlight units and bloated rear styling. All it needed was a Gauloises cigarette wedged on one side and the image would have been complete. Instead of being sexy and sophisticated, it was seen as fat and ugly. The revised model continued until , and the successor model can be considered to be the Renault Latitude.
It was the result of MG Rover wanting to offer a new small car after the discontinuation of the Rover in and of the Mini in , but as the company was in financial trouble and had no money to develop a new small car on its own, they entered a deal with Indian Tata Motors. In May , Rover refused to lend a CityRover to motoring show Top Gear to test it, so James May went undercover and test drove one at a dealer while carrying a hidden camera. May went on to say that it was the worst car he had ever driven on the programme.
The Indian-market Indica had already been in production for five years when the CityRover was launched, too, so it felt dated even as it first appeared in showrooms.
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It was a commercial failure and earned lasting critical derision due to its Trailblazer origins and poor performance. Named one of the 50 worst cars of all time by Time magazine, Dan Neil described it as being "heavy, underpowered and unforgivably lazy. It was no more hotrod than Britney is the next Helen Mirren. Neither, because both of those can justify their existence. So does a car fire. The Crossfire was a commercial failure, with dealers having a day supply of the model by November , prompting Chrysler to start selling it on Overstock.
Most famously, he criticized the Crossfire's "hideous" styling, claiming that its rear end resembled a dog defecating.
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The ultimate triumph of style over content, only without the style. It beggars belief that the aristocrats of engineering, the artistes formerly known as Mercedes-Benz, have associated their name with such an aesthetic, functional and social atrocity. Or an Infiniti G35 or a BMW 3-series , both of which were more fun to drive than the Crossfire, and neither of which looked like a dog in the middle of a life-altering dump.
To further pile on the drawbacks, the interior fell short of expectations, as did overall performance and everyday convenience.