After a significant hiatus, I've decided it's time to revive the Friday Fun Thread featuring automotive miscellany in Top Ten Form. This week's topic struck me out of the blue as I followed one of the cars listed home from work: Top Ten Cars That Should Not Have Been. Now, the cars on this list are not necessarily
bad cars - some are quite well-built and long-lasting - just either poor concepts, poor executions, or plain old bad ideas.
So here's the Top Ten Automotive Abominations:
1.
Cadillac Cimarron. Far and away the worst. While the Cimarron was hardly the first instance of "badge engineering", it was the first to take a spectacularly crappy car (Chevy Cavalier) and put a top tier name plate on it with only minor improvements over the low end offering. It felt apart quickly, as low end GMs from the time period were wont to do, cheapened the Cadillac name, and paved the way for every manufacturer out there to slap their top tier badge on a POS and jack up the price.
2.
VW GTI four door. Uh, no. Look, the GLI with strikingly similar badging and trim was bad enough, but actually slapping the GTI badge on the four door Golf was a travesty, plain and simple. After some 20+ years of the GTI being VW's "pocket rocket", they change it to nothing more than an add-on package for the Golf. Pathetic.
3.
Toyota T-100. What a blown opportunity the T-100 was. In the early 1990s, Toyota decided that they wanted to get into the lucrative light truck market. Their small pickup was selling quickly (despite rotting out before it got off the dealer lot in places that have winter), why not take a slice out of the pie belonging to GM and Ford (this was before Dodge re-styled the Ram and wrestled back a piece of the truck pie). What do they roll out? A small, underpowered truck with excruciatingly bland styling that was smaller than the Dodge Dakota but with less power options. FAIL.
4.
Mercury Cougar. The last iteration of the Cougar saw it transmogrify from a twin to the Thunderchicken into a two door escort. The same car that once boasted a 429 Cobra Jet now had a 4-banger. Ugh. It was a toss-up between the Cougar and the Capri for which Merc they screwed up the most, but at least the second iteration of the Capri was a drop-top...
5.
Plymouth Prowler. Yet again, another car that should have been great, but wasn't. The Prowler suffered from the success of the Viper - Chrysler took the Viper from concept to showroom floor, absolutely wowed the automotive world, then started believing their own press releases. They rolled out the Prowler - with its aggressive styling and retro-hot rod good looks - mated to a vanilla V6 and a dogamatic transmission. Sales more or less defined lackluster and the car died a quick and painful death.
6.
Late 1970s/early 1980s GM diesels. Not the trucks, those were/are excellent performers. In the late 1970s, as a response to the gas crisis experienced earlier in the decade, GM decided that diesel engines were the way to go. Now, had they done it right, we might be driving 50 MPG diesel Impalas today - instead, they did it so horrifically wrong that the American public *still*, some 30+ years later, distrusts diesel engines mightily.
7.
Honda Ridgeline. Honda does a lot of things very well. They build solid, dependable automobiles, they have a long reputation for quality manufacturing at reasonable prices, and their cars hold their value very well. What Honda does not do, however, is trucks. A six cylinder, front wheel drive "truck" that costs more than most rear-drive V8s? Err, no. Stick to econoboxes.
8.
2002 Ford Thunderbird. Ford Motor Company really ruined this pair - between turning the aforementioned Cougar into a FWD POS and what they did with the 2002 T-Bird, they killed a very successful marque and nearly brought about the death of the "boutique" automobile entirely. Ford killed the Thunderchicken in the late 1990s, with rumors swirling around of a radical restyle that evoked the original '55 Bird. The car they rolled out looked really nice - and they priced it as though it were a restored 1955 T-bird. Sales were disappointing, to say the least...
9.
Dodge Rampage. Whose idea was it to slap a pickup body on the friggin'
OMNI??? Someone at Chrysler should have been fired - preferably from a cannon - for even suggesting that they put a pickup body on a 96 HP, FWD car. One can only assume they were aiming at the Subaru Brat or the VW Rabbit pickup, neither of which exactly set the small truck world on fire. The only upside to the Rampage is that it would allow one of the coolest conversions ever - take a Rampage body, put the turbocharged Shelby GLHS motor in it with appropriate 5-speed, add the body cladding, and have a Carroll Shelby-inspired pickup...
10.
Cadillac Escalade EXT. No. No no no no no. See the Cimarron entry. You do not slap a top tier badge on a low-end marque, you just don't. Especially when the only trucks ever built before in the entire history of your company were used as flower haulers for funeral homes.
So there's my list of bad automotive ideas through the ages. Once again, if your very favoritest car is on this list, it doesn't mean that the car itself is no good - just that the concept behind it wasn't solid IMHO. There are some very well-built cars on this list (and some stinkers); inclusion on the list for the most part indicates a marketing issue, not an engineering one (except for the GM diesels, although I suspect marketing brought that about as well...)
What automotive atrocities did I miss?That is all.
