'Crap Cars' book title captured my eye. What's your version?
The book title that captured my eye at the John K. King Books North in Ferndale a few months ago seemed tailor-made for a fun read or even a quick column. After all, everyone who drives probably has a memory or two of some vehicle somewhere that wasn’t quite up to snuff or was maybe even legendarily awful.
The title, “Crap Cars,” made it hard to miss. The book wasn’t even recent, and honestly, some of the offerings, spanning a wide range of automotive history, wouldn’t have immediately come to mind. I was briefly surprised to see names like Porsche 924, Ferrari 400 and Rolls-Royce Camargue listed for a variety of sins among the 50 “most craptastic cars ever to hit the American highway.”
I ended up giving the book to my dad because, well, he’s a car guy. I thought he’d appreciate it. Plus, memories (not of the Rolls and Ferrari variety in case you’re wondering).
But I was still interested in putting something together on the subject.
The Pacer: 'Hideously deformed'
My local library was able to get the book (by Richard Porter) for me, and I’ve gone through it a bit more closely. It is a bit dated, from 2005, but I’ve been in more than a few of the entries and can't always argue. I do struggle a bit with so much hate for the original version of the Volkswagen Beetle and the DeLorean DMC-12, a car that Doc Brown thought enough of to use for time travel.
Ask anyone over a certain age about a crap car and names like Ford Edsel, Pontiac Aztek, even the AMC Pacer seem to bubble up. I've had little direct experience with any of them, although I was always intrigued by the Pacer. “Crap Cars” described the Pacer as a “hideously deformed turtle,” but I always kind of dug that bubble look. Plus, it did seem perfect for headbanging to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” if that was ever really a thing before “Wayne’s World.” A few of our staffers suggested it as well for this topic.
Environmental reporter Keith Matheny offered a tale from his own past:
“When I first became a teen driver in the mid-1980s, what I got to drive was my mom's Pacer. It was trying to look futuristic, but I think the consensus ultimately was that it just looked silly. My friends nicknamed it ‘The Boat,’ and once pranked me into driving down the road with a connected anchor clanging in the street. I don't remember it breaking down a lot — it was decently reliable. But it was lousy for northern Michigan winter driving. I remember taking a girl I really liked out on a first date, and we got stuck in the snow, twice. We didn't have a second date, as she apparently sought out a non-Pacer driver.”
Memories make the difference, I think. That’s why for all the assumptions about crap cars or lemons or whatever you want to call them, our memories color it all. The Ford Pinto makes just about every list I’ve seen. The stories about its tendency to explode are just part of the story, although that was the point of its cameo in the 1980s Val Kilmer movie, “Top Secret!” What I remember about one (not kidding) of my family’s Pinto Wagons, a brown Country Squire variant if I’m recalling properly, was being able to stretch out in the back during what were seemingly halcyon days of the 1970s (without the hindsight of what can happen to unrestrained bodies in a crash), that and the way the doors rusted out.
If a car has a reputation for exploding or catching fire, though, that does tend to trump other crap attributes.
That’s why reporter Jennifer Dixon mentioned the Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, whose fires she wrote about years ago. Some tough reading there.
The Yugo is another standout on many worst-of lists. Colleague Bill Laytner recollected a tragic story with Michigan-specific roots connected to the diminutive import, which I’ve read more than once, had used cardboard as a material in its interior. Leslie Pluhar, 31, of Royal Oak lost her life in 1989 when her Yugo “went over” the Mackinac Bridge, according to reporting at the time that referenced high winds, speeding and guardrails without much in the way of definitive answers. Perhaps explaining its brief popularity, the 1986 Yugo GV was also a standout for its $3,990 base price tag.
Cars that make Americans mad
As an aside, I was pleased to have a list forwarded to me recently by editor Maryann Struman that focuses on the emotional reaction we have to certain vehicles. Turns out the Kia Sedona, Mazda3 and Nissan Armada top the rankings for cars that “make Americans the angriest.” Although I’m positive that’s absolutely true, I remain a bit unclear on the methodology, which somehow relied on machine learning and some AI-related entity called Hugging Face.
For me, the level of anger about a specific vehicle is usually proportional to how idiotic I consider the maneuver made by the driver who just decided the exit he needed to take was the one we’re both in the process of passing.
So here’s where I turn to you, dear reader. What’s your version of a crap car? Tell me a story (email below), not a novel, which you'd be OK with me sharing. What car always needed a little extra push, literally, to get where you, at least, were headed? Which car is/was the automotive manifestation of cringe?
It doesn’t have to be an old vehicle from the before times. You might even have one sitting in your driveway right now making Americans everywhere angry.
Contact Eric D. Lawrence: elawrence@freepress.com. Become a subscriber. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters.