Accidental Blogger

I am not much of an automobile aficionado.  For me a car is a convenient instrument for getting from point A to point B, not a social statement. As long as I can see over the steering wheel, my feet reach the pedals, the vehicle fits in my garage, accommodates my grocery, is painted a color I like and has reasonable safety ratings and mileage per gallon, it is good enough for me. I hate car shopping. Which is why I let my husband, who delights in mind numbing vehicular nitty-gritty, choose my cars. (Ladies, don’t get agitated. This is not a man-woman thing. I am just not very interested. If a car measures up to my mundane criteria, I don’t much care about make or model … and I reserve the sole veto power after a test drive.) So when I came across this Time magazine compilation, I browsed through it with some interest only because it is the "worst cars of all time" list.  That made it a more engrossing read than the fawning, over the top showroom jargon of sensuality, grace, power, elegance and status enhancing qualities associated with the "best" automobiles. The "worst" list is perhaps also more interesting and its colorful language more convincing because nobody is trying to sell us anything. In fact its whole point is to alert us to automotive follies, past and present, foreign and domestic. Here for example is the withering put down of the Renault Dauphine, the worst car of 1956.

The most ineffective bit of French engineering since the Maginot Line, the Renault Dauphine was originally to be named the Corvette, tres ironie. It was, in fact, a rickety, paper-thin scandal of a car that, if you stood beside it, you could actually hear rusting. Its most salient feature was its slowness, a rate of acceleration you could measure with a calendar. It took the drivers at Road and Track 32 seconds to reach 60 mph, which would put the Dauphine at a severe disadvantage in any drag race involving farm equipment. The fact that the ultra-cheap, super-sketchy Dauphine sold over 2 million copies around the world is an index of how desperately people wanted cars. Any cars.

The list tracks the 50 worst cars since 1899 to present with accompanying photos and description of the features which qualified them as a clunkers. I was not surprised to see the perennial lemon Edsel, the volatile Pinto, the unmanageable Corvair and the East German Trabant ( the car that gave communism a bad name) among the all time duds based on style, safety and engineering. Included are also lesser known flops – comical, ugly, ambitious, lugubrious and just plain impractical.

I was somewhat surprised to find the 1909 Model T on the roster. I mean, come on! What was the gold standard for motor cars in 1909? How many other machines on wheels were on the tarmac for a decent comparison?  Wasn’t any car, including the Tin Lizzy, however junky and tinny, an improvement on the horse and buggy? Then I realized that the criticism isn’t based solely on defects of design and failure of mechanics. The Time writers have also taken into consideration the harmful philosophical impact some automobiles have had on our society. Ford’s  efficiency in churning out Model Ts set the tone for the assembly line culture of 20th century industrial manufacturing which later became the target of Charlie Chaplin’s satire, Modern Times .

It put America on wheels, supercharged the nation’s economy and transformed the landscape in ways unimagined when the first Tin Lizzy rolled out of the factory. Well, that’s just the problem, isn’t it? The Model T — whose mass production technique was the work of engineer William C. Klann, who had visited a slaughterhouse’s "disassembly line" — conferred to Americans the notion of automobility as something akin to natural law, a right endowed by our Creator. A century later, the consequences of putting every living soul on gas-powered wheels are piling up, from the air over our cities to the sand under our soldiers’ boots.

Ouch! This made me take a closer look at the list and some of the better known socially troublesome cars. The automobile after all is more than a vehicle of transportation. It is also a civilizing (or uncivilizing) trend setter. 

According to the authors, some recent domestic debacles from Detroit are the 1995 Ford Explorer, the 2000 Ford Excursion and naturally, the 2003 Hummer H2 which its critics claim contributed to GM’s emerging image as the Dick Cheney of car companies.

1995 Ford Explorer:  How could the best-selling passenger vehicle in America 14 years running, the mother of all mom-mobiles, the beloved suburban schlepper of millions, wind up on this list?  In its very success, the Ford Explorer is responsible for setting this country on the spiral of vehicular obesity that we are still contending with today. People, particularly women drivers, discovered that they liked sitting up high. Even though more fuel-efficient minivans do the kid- and cargo-hauling duties better, people came to prefer the outdoorsy, go-anywhere image of SUVs. In other words, people became addicted to the pose. And, as vehicles got bigger and heavier, buyers sought out even bigger vehicles to make themselves feel safe. Helloooo Hummer. All of that we can lay at the overachieving feet of the Explorer.

More blistering commentary on the other two behemoths here and here.