The author of the to 50 crap towns, Richard Porter, is bringing out a book - Crap Cars.
The top of the heap - worst car, is TADA
The VW Beetle
Describes owners as "mush brained gits who know nothing about cars"
"Dismal car with the engine in the wrong place, its slow noisy uncomfortable with a completely pathetic heater that on cold days you would be off setting fire to your hair" "Its only good feature was that VW killed it off"
Second worse is the Alegro "Godfather of the crap car"
Third worse is Suzuki X90
Crap cars published today
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Shouldn't that be Tata?
Here's its website advertisement extolling the virtues of the values that have guided it through the 100 years or more of its existence....:-))
www.tata.com/
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What's for you won't pass you by
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Tata as a group have been around a lot longer than Rover ever did. They have always been honest to all stakeholders and grown organically to be a formidable conglomerate.
Rover/ Austin/ morris started around the same time and look where they are !
Tata make cheap competitive cars for less developed countires. If they want to make sophisticated cars - they can. It is not their fault that a third party like Rover takes their car and inflates the price by adding a carpet.
IMHO -Rover and Tata would have been a formidable combination - smaller models sourced from Tata and larger models built by Rover with joint r&D. I guess SAIC will kep the baadge and throw everything else away in a few years.
BTW treat yourselves to a cup of Tetleys, a company owned by...........TATA
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Shouldn't that be Tata?
No. I think he means Tada, as in Ta-Da!! Best way to describe it is to go into your Microsoft Sound files and search for tada.wav and play the sound.
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Wasn't the Moskvitch the worst mass produced car sold here in living memory. I've heard that many of them went to an early grave as they were virtually incapable of passing their first MOT when 3 years old. I knew an old chap who bought one new and said it was an appalling car.
The VW Beetle was a success because it was better built and more reliable than other cars. In its early days it probably performed and handled as well as its competiors but their successors left it further and further behind.
I had an Allegro once, a 1500 estate (with circular steering wheel, I hasten to add!) It was a reasonable car actually - at least as a cheap runabout.
Cheers, Sofa Spud
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There was a phone in on Radio 2 this lunchtime about the book and in particular the Beetle which allegedly was referred to by those in the trade who had to work on them as "Hitler's Revenge".
Judging by the lack of ability to articulate their thoughts there must be something about owning a Beetle that significantly reduces ones mental capacity. Carbon monoxide poisoning from the heat exchangers maybe?
I also owned an Allegro (talked into it by my Dad) with a quartic steering wheel. The only really good things about it were:
1. Because it was white and the police were using them everyone got out of the way
2. I made a profit on it when I sold it after 6 months (There's one born every minute!)
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I would nominate the Citroen 2CV as a crap car. Basically it was a minimalist approximation to a typical 1930's small car, made out of panels that look like they were all designed by different people who had no contact with each other.
OK, it was cheap and economical and if I had a big collection of cars I'd include a 2CV, but I always thought 2CV owners needed a bucket of water thrown over them or something -
"Hall-ow-ooo, you don't need to drive that thing you know, there's other types of car too. That one one there's quite nice, it's a Ford Ess-cort. Or maybe a Vauxhall Chevette, or even a Mini Metro....."
cheers, Sofa Spud
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"the Citroen 2CV . Basically it was a minimalist approximation to a typical 1930's small car"
Which of course meant that the French had the perfect small car for the time it was designed. A contrast to my Dad, who at the same time had to buy a really crap 1930's Austin 7 at an extortionate price because it was the only car he could get at the time - very early 1950s. The fact that people were still buying 2CVs into the 1980s(?)is a testament to the excellent design principles that it fulfilled FOR THE TIME. Please don't say that a Chevette represented 20 years advance in car design.
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Hhaving owned an aged Chevette, I'd say that it did represent a 20 year advance ... a huge advance in built-in obsolescence.
Apart fom chassis rust, the 2CV went on for ages, but the Chevette was a hodge-podge of short-lived components and (according to my mechanics)not very easy to work on. So the Chevette-owner would return for a new one long before the 2CV-owner had to.
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Apart fom chassis rust, the 2CV went on for ages, but the Chevette was a hodge-podge of short-lived components and (according to my mechanics)not very easy to work on. So the Chevette-owner would return for a new one long before the 2CV-owner had to.
not so fond memories of scuffed knuckles trying to get spark plug four out.... At least the radiator was easy to replace. And the water pump. Oh, and the alternator.
in it's defence, (put on rose tinted retrospectovision glasses) they held the road well, and were ok for what they were. Ugly though. i took mine to 130000 miles and it was a race between the body and the engine to see which would go first. A blown head gasket got it in the end. Aah, memories. Oh for a rear wheel drive small hatchback...
Now where's that BMW 1 series brochure?
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I don't think Beetles were crap when they came out, but they most certainly were in the 70's and 80's when almost everything else you could buy was faster, more comfortable, more economical, more reliable......etc etc etc......
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These books are obviously TIC, a bit of fun and not to be taken too seriously.
Judging an old car by the standards of today is an exercise in fallaciousness (?syntax) anyway, and of course the Beetle wouldn't score any points on that basis in 2004. With what's on offer nowadays not many people would want one anyway.
My experience of the Beetle gives me a broader view. I have seen these things plough through Turkish floods, Himalayan snowstorms and across 130 degree Afghan deserts and atrocious Iranian corrugated dirt roads without missing a beat. The rear air-cooled engine was perfectly suited to such conditions.
Spares could be found everywhere, probably still can, and a good mechanic could have the engine out and back in a couple of hours. Maybe that's why so many were made.
Try that in a Mondeo.
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By the author's own logic surely the Ford model-T was a worse car. Worse handling, reliability, fuel consumption, no heater, doesn't compare to a modern car and so on.
I don't believe either are anything but classics; just pointing out the waste of paper this (cleverly hyped) book represents.
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By the author's own logic surely the Ford model-T was a worse car. Worse handling, reliability, fuel consumption, no heater, doesn't compare to a modern car and so on. I don't believe either are anything but classics; just pointing out the waste of paper this (cleverly hyped) book represents.
You wouldn't be suggesting that it's been given lots of coverage on the radio is because it's BBCs own book would you? Or would you be suggesting that if the worst car was really the Lada (or something) its followers wouldn't make much noise or give any publicity to the argument?
;-)
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Today's Dail Mail leader page has a constructive piece by David Thomas extolling the virtues of the Beetle and, figuratively speaking, putting two fingers up to said Richard Porter.
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What's for you won't pass you by
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You wouldn't be suggesting...
That would be very cynical of me. I did wonder how the story merited the rapid construction of one of those BBC web site picture sequence thingies normally reserved for national events or disasters though :-)
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By the author's own logic surely the Ford model-T was a worse car. Worse handling, reliability, fuel consumption, no heater, doesn't compare to a modern car and so on. I don't believe either are anything but classics; just pointing out the waste of paper this (cleverly hyped) book represents.
But the T wasn't still being sold as a new car in the eighties, was it?
Besides, as Growler says, it's a comedy book. I don't think it's been produced with the aim of advising you of what not to buy.
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