Mid-Eighties Plymouth Voyager minivan. Put the pedal to the metal, and the damned thing would hardly accelerate, the motor just got louder. Probably would have been quicker if I rolled the window down and flapped my arms. And if you look at one spot too long, that part would break.
my uncles old moskvich-412, shortly before he bought a new toyota. was a fun experience though.
I rented a Pontiac Matiz in Mexico in the late 90s or early 2000s. Small, underpowered, uncomfortable and just didn’t feel very safe. I normally like little cars, but not that one. The air conditioner struggled to keep up with the August heat too.
1993 Geo Metro. Scared the crap out of me on the highway.
I’ve had 3 (the last two were actually Chevy Metros, after Chevrolet killed the Geo line). Loved 'em. All stick shifts, all base models with .8L, 3cy engines. Top speed was about 80mph with a tailwind and just the driver, 0-60 was ‘eventually’, didn’t ever get warm inside when I was commuting in the winter, the crumple zones ended at the rear bumper, there was no a/c, and all of them died at around 120,000mi. The last one died when the frame rusted through and the wheel collapsed into the wheel well.
…But they were under $12k ea. brand new (the 1st was under $8k), insurance was cheap as hell, and I got 45+ mpg when gas prices were going sky high.
I had a friend with a Suzuki Swift (pretty well the same car) I have no idea how that car lasted as long as it did carrying around nearly 1000lbs of fat asses. Although one day it gave up and dropped the engine and tranny
If he was in the midwest, probably rust killed the frame.
They weren’t good cars, but they were great cars for the money. When you couldn’t afford a Nissan Sentra, a Metro/Swift looked great.
Also, they were so easy to work on, because they were as simple as a lawnmower. One person could realistically pick up the whole engine and transmission, and there was tons of space to work inside the engine compartment. Unlike the old BMW 540i that I had, where you needed to take off the whole front end in order to get the brake master cylinder off (I think it was the master cylinder; might have been the booster or slave cylinder).
I tried to learn how to drive manual on one.
I’m tall.
It didn’t go well.
I’m 6’3" and also learned to drive a manual in one. Bonus fact: at around 50+MPH, if you stick your arm straight out the window, the drag from the wind hitting your arm will steer the car in that direction.
I don’t know how you got your legs under the steering wheel.
Chrysler Sebring. Fucking battery.
Two I can think of. The van we had to take as teenagers to work at the flea market. Long ass shifter that started at the floor of the car, so hard to drive and had to do precision driving through skinny aisles between tents.
The truck of my FIL, I had to literally stand up on the pedal , ass off the seat, to get the clutch to engage.
Also had a 1967 mustang that broke often enough I had to learn to fix it and believe me, this is not something that comes naturally to me, nor do I enjoy it. It was interesting in a way, had to do things like get the flywheel machined. But when you need a car for transportation and are poor as heck that is scary and uncomfortable.
Chrysler 200 as a rental after someone smoked my Civic, and I waited to get a new one.
The car was… Jiggly? Like the suspension was unsettling, the brakes needed getting acquainted with lest you rear-end someone, and the steering had too much play. It wasn’t enough play to convince me something was wrong, it was just shit quality.
No power. At all. Getting on the freeway was an adventure in noise and hope. Everything lagged. Fuel economy was garbage too.
Looked stupid. And my Civic si that replaced it, the econobox with a hot engine, had a luxury interior in comparison, which is saying something.
Horrible car to add to a horrible week.
I had a Lincoln mkz for a week after someone hit my car in a parking lot, insurance said I was covered for a premium sedan.
Worst car I’ve ever driven. Handled like a boat, was all flash but everything felt cheap and “jiggly” when I touched it.
Learning at the time (2012) that this was a 35k luxury car was mind-blowing. You couldn’t PAY me to drive that car again. My 20k Prius blew it out of the water in everything but acceleration, and even then it wasn’t behind by much…
Toyota Echo
I had to rent one one year because my car was in the shop for a while.
I was being cheap and I just needed a car at the time.
There is no seat room or leg room. I’m tall but not that tall and I couldn’t get comfortable in this thing.
And who the hell thought it was a good idea to put the instrument panel in the centre of the whole dashboard and not directly in front of the driver. I had a few near accidents before I adjusted myself to where the speedometer was.
We have a lot of two lane roads where I grew up. My parents used to have this Buick sedan that took diesel. To pass a slower car my mom would make sure there was nobody coming the other way for as far as she could see, then floor it and tell me to pray.
Whoops I guess I didn’t drive that. Worst car I’ve driven personally is probably a Volkswagen scirocco that had been in storage for years. It was a stick so I had to keep the clutch in with one foot and have my heel on the brake and toe on the throttle just to keep it running at a stop sign.
I had to take a van that a baby had thrown up in out in the middle of the summer to diagnose a vibration issue. That was the worst smell I have ever smelt. I still remember it sometimes and it’s been a decade since then.
Haven’t driven a load, but I’ve test-driven a Fiat Bravo (diesel). The sightlines were terrible, and it handled like a tractor.
Smart car 2 seater. Drove it for work for about 6 months. You’re a target for bullies, the wind is scary, lorries sometimes can’t see you and they can get to 90, which is interesting.
I can live with all that, I’ve driven vans and lorries that were in much worse condition. I had a Morris van that was so crap it’s engine seized trying to do 50.
No, the Smart car was the worst car mainly because I’m 6 6. It was like being a sardine driving it’s can. I could do it, but it was not a pleasant experience.
The transmission in those things is an amazing level of suck, too. It’s this bizarre automatic manual thing that’s just awful to drive.
They’re not so bad if you drive one often enough. I had one for five-six years and drove it only in tiptronic, shifting while lifting off the gas. In automatic mode yeah it’s dog.
This was the gas version that needed premium fuel. I drove it daily on the 401 for awhile.
I thought it was a decent enough car, got it barely used very cheap due to it’s wild depreciation which was a good thing, until it started needing serious work that made no sense to do. At the end it was worth as much as a new set of tires for it, as in nothing.
Porsche measures their automatic gear changes in milliseconds. Smart measures them in geologic time scales.
I truly don’t understand why they didn’t put a CVT in those 2nd generation cars (the ones sold in North America). It’s the perfect application! Small car, not a lot of power, efficiency minded.
If the smart car was made today it probably would have a cvt. But an extremely budget car back then, cvts weren’t as common.
Jeep. All of them. Rickety. Not built well. Terrible gas mileage. Bad on highways. Bad on city streets. I literally got bruises on my butt on an off road trail in one of them. Just absolute shit cars.
They’re terrible street cars but offroad there’s really nothing more capable unless you plan to custom build a rig. If you want a smooth ride offroad it will be way to soft for on the road and vice versa. Jeeps from the factory are designed on a compromise between the two so they’re not really good at either. The build quality on modern jeeps is absolutely terrible though and the majority of jeep owners never use them for what they’re intended for so I generally agree with you. But ride in a jeep that’s properly setup for strictly offroad driving and you’d be amazed.
Are Land Cruisers not a thing in the USA? Because they are the ultimate off-road vehicle.
I’m sure you have the Hilux and there is no place where I’d choose to take a Jeep over a Hilux.
I don’t think they are available in the US but the Suzuki Jimny is the perfect off-road vehicle for me.
It’s an extremely fun vehicle to drive!
We call that car the “Sierra” in Australia. Perfect beach/dune car. Not ideal for rougher terrain, though. In fairness, the biggest thing it has going against it is the narrow wheelbase. It doesn’t fit right on the tracks made by all the other 4x4’s. If all those tracks had instead been made by narrower vehicles, it might not be so bad.
A coworker bought a Jeep and I said “Oh wow, Jeeps are great vehicles! …unless you drive them on roads.”
Nothing more capable provided it’s a Wrangler and one of the newer higher spec ones where they actually give you functional equipment like 37" tires and lockers. The old ones were build with crappy parts that needed to be swapped out before they could be truly capable and the entire rest of their lineup is pure garbage both on and offroad.
The only selling feature of any Jeep vehicle is the classic round front lights and the grill design … it’s like owning an Apple product, people just want to be seen in one.
Chevy Suburban. I volunteered to drive for a university course field trip and it’s what I got stuck with.
- Unresponsive fatass brick of a vehicle. I mean, come on, a minivan has more cargo space and the same passenger capacity without three light aircraft worth of inertia.
- Dashboard sucked. It took me a solid three minutes to find the button shifts. (I know these can be done well - Honda does them right - but the PRNDL was fucking laid out in a thin row at the side of the dashboard. Huh?)
- Overtaking damn near anything would redline the (very new, less than 10k miles) engine.
My uncle owned an 80’s suburban. That thing was an absolute tank… and not in a good way. The steering had so much play in it, you had to turn the wheel about 45 degrees for there to be any input.
A fedex truck actually ended up t-boning him, and the truck flipped. He was fine. Suburban wasn’t. Probably for the best.
Overtaking damn near anything would redline the (very new, less than 10k miles) engine.
While this suggests it might have been underpowered, how high the engine revs during acceleration in a modern automatic transmission vehicle is determined by software that operates the transmission and the driver’s control inputs, not how old the engine is. The designers of the car probably decided that was the best way to deliver the performance you asked for. They may even have been correct in that assessment.
I rented a 2020 Mitsubishi Outlander in 2022 and it was amazing how unresponsive it was. It’s a small SUV with the engine of a hamster. It has a “sport mode” that really struggled to get me up some hills in Colorado.
Also, the rubber seal for the door, on 3 of the doors, was constantly feel off and could be worn as a second seatbelt.
