10 Crappy Cars

1.The Trabant

No list of bad cars can be started without the Trabant. It might be the most beloved bad car of all time. It took ten years to make one, it was partially made out of cotton, and had a gas tank you had to take out, fill with gas AND two-stroke oil, and shake it to mix it up. It had a two-stroke engine that smoked like a tobacco convention. If you wanted one object to prove Communism wasn’t awesome, it was this one.

They’re still viewed affectionately as the junker everybody in East Germany and parts of the Eastern Bloc drove. Except you had them for years.

 

2.The VW Bug

Wait, why does the fuel-efficient, light and cheap triumph of Western German engineering make the list? What’s next? Toyota…errr, Honda? Well, back in the ’60s, VW used to make its engine blocks and other parts out of magnesium alloys. 

This is relevant because:

A) magnesium is really horrible, nasty s**t when it burns and

B) when it DOES burn…ever see somebody add water to a magnesium fire? It doesn’t end well.

 

3.The Chevy Corvair

The Chevy Corvair is why people made fun of American engineering for decades. It really had it all: it dumped exhaust into the heating vents. It had the engine in the back, making it terrible to drive on the highway, and if that wasn’t enough, it had the gas tank up front. So basically you were driving a bomb on wheels being pushed from behind. And even if you didn’t blow up when you ran into something, the hard chrome dashboard with lots of protrusions wasn’t the greatest place to hit.

The Corvair sucked so hard, Ralph Nader made it the subject of his book “Unsafe at Any Speed”, which resulted in major changes to consumer protection laws, and also a bunch of miserably failed Presidential runs.

4.Ford Pinto

Come on, like you didn’t know this one was coming.
The Pinto is a legend for the easily ruptured gas tank. So much so that it pretty much finished the hatchet job the Corvair started on American carmakers. Although the Pinto’s “rolling bomb” qualities were a bit exaggerated, it still makes the list because of how much the image of the exploding Pinto endures. And, really, it’s kind of hard to argue with this:

 

5.Chevy Vega

The Vega really had it all. Rushed into production and designed to be dirt cheap, it had an aluminum engine that barely worked, and a whopping 90 horsepower. So it not only looked bad, it was wussy, too! Yay American manufacturing!

 

6.The Yugo

The Yugo actually wasn’t that bad of a car, but it had one major design flaw: an interference engine.

Essentially, there was a belt on the Yugo that would fail every 40,000 miles or so. If you were a conscientious, careful maintainer of your vehicle, which most Yugo owners weren’t since it cost about as much as a candy bar, you’d replace that belt.

If you didn’t, basically once the belt failed the engine would smash its parts into each other until the engine was destroyed, meaning you were screwed and had to buy another car. Unsurprisingly, Yugo didn’t have that much repeat business.

 

7.The NSU Spider

The Spider was a revolutionary sports car and had the first rotary engine. Meaning, of course, that it was buggy as hell and they hadn’t gotten close to solving all the problems. The Spider’s engine was so bad it became a tradition that people who owned these, when one passed another broken down on the side of the road, would hold up fingers to show how many times the engine had been replace.

 

8.The Messerschmitt KR175

The Messerschmitt KR175 was designed to fit into a variety of urban environments, save space, save fuel…and make you look like an even bigger dork than the guy driving the Trabant and working for the Stasi. Now you know why Mercedes Benz and BMW work so hard on their cars. To live down the shame of THIS.

 

9.The Cord

The Cord was a pretty car with a good idea: make an engine with an aluminum engine block and steel pistons. One minor problem: aluminum shrinks in cold much more quickly than steel, so, if you lived anywhere colder than, say, Florida and didn’t have a heated garage, you couldn’t get your car to start because the pistons would literally be stuck in the engine. This is why you’ve never heard of Cord.

10.The Bugatti Royale Type 41

Bugatti specializes in making very well-crafted, very expensive cars. But they also made the Type 41, which existed entirely to prove how rich you were. Somebody said Rolls Royce was better to Bugatti’s face and he was going to make them eat those words no matter what.

It weighed nearly two tons, was longer than a pickup truck, was more than twenty feet long and had a wheel-base of more than ten feet. Just to cap off what a d**k you were, the hood ornament for this beast was an elephant.

Unfortunately, Bugatti had bad timing: this ode to excess hit right when the Great Depression was getting fired up. He only built six of them and sold three.

On the bright side, he turned the leftover engines into a train. Yes, seriously, this thing had the hauling power to drag trains. That’s how ridiculous it was.