skinny gs

Dont forget about the early 80s diesel engines GM shoved into their cars. Any car with one was garbage. Does anyone remember the now reliable 3800 V6 Buick had started out as garbage and later evolved into the "even firing v6"? Any car with that engine was garbage. Every car made by GM with their lockup torque converter starting around late 70's is junk. Vega, Astre, Monza, citation, LTD II, i can go on and on. BTW the black caddy is a 76, they were not horrible, it was the early 80's that had the 8-6-4. What about the crossfire injection 84 corvette? When i was a kid, i was a GM guy. I had my fill of their garbage. I really HATE to say this, but it was a long time coming. Their demise didnt just happen. They took advantage of the American public for years, and probably secretly laughed at all of us fools for buying their cars again and again.

wolverine

iTrader: (9)

man my family had a town and country and that thing was a beast. pack in 7 people and go on some short road trips to sac. best times I had was with that van. never broke down on us. only reason we got rid of it was because some dumbass vandalised it

knihc2008

iTrader: (1)

My family had a Previa, went 400k without a SINGLE problem. Love that car!

blacksc400

iTrader: (4)

Where is the Beak?

Lil4X

I disagree with several of the OP's list - whoever compiled it was not comparing the particular car to its contemporaries. It's easy to say a 1958 car was poorly made or that a 1960 car was an engineering nightmare, but compare it to the competition of its day. I got my driver's license in 1959, and over the years drove all of these cars and their competitors. Today, I wouldn't think much of them, but in their day they ranged from just OK to near brilliance.

The Edsel was a perfectly good automobile. It was almost completely fabricated from Ford's parts bin using components from Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury. Even many body panels were shared to produce a car that was supposed to slot into the Fomoco lineup between the Ford and the Mercury (Pacer) and between Mercury and Lincoln (Citation). Where Edsel failed was in its marketing. Introduced as a high-end car in 1958, product planners quickly decontented the car over the first two years to re-target it as a price leader for Ford showrooms. It ended up a big, cheap car, that became spectacularly ugly.

The Corvair was perhaps GM's boldest offering. It was a "clean sheet of paper" car that put a number of advanced concepts (for an American car) into production with an amazingly short lead time. That tends to produce a product disaster - much to the credit of GM engineering, it wasn't. All-new designs usually produce too many problems to address. The Corvair had surprisingly few. Remember it was considered the American VW Bug - how close did it come? It had an all-aluminum flat six, something VW didn't have, and even Porsche wouldn't offer for another year. Like the VW, Corvair incorporated swing axles and a gasoline-fired heater, both of which worked well when compared to competitive designs. The introduction of the turbocharger on the Corvair was a first for a mass-produced American car, and the vehicle handled quite well, even compared to the vaunted British sports cars of the day. Yes, it was heavier, with slower steering and less than crisp handling, but its power - at least in sportier versions - kept it circulating on the autocross tracks even as it was derided as "American Iron" by the stringback glove set. Corvair was killed by Ralph Nader and his proto-consumerist "Unsafe at Any Speed" - the book that destroyed Corvair and created the Nader legend. If you read the book, it was filled with half-truths, accusations, and totally unsupported "test" data. Yes, with improper loading, incorrect tire pressures, and truly outrageous control inputs, the swing axles could tuck under - but only if the driver were more than stupid, he had to be suicidal.

In later years both Pinto and Chevette were attempts to build an American economy car. The Pinto was very popular and enjoyed years of success. The hatchback suffered from a rear center gas filler that was found to be an extremely dangerous design. However, the Mustang had this same tank and filler location and was never held up to public ridicule like the Pinto. Many GM cars had a similar problem with that center filler pipe, but because they were full size cars with heavy bumpers, few of them burned after a heavy rear-end collision. The Chevette was simply too small, too soon. It was generally considered to be a reasonable car, but it competed squarely with similar European cars that had a twenty-year lead in development. It lost most comparisons to its European competitors very badly.

The Cadillac Cimarron was a Chevy Cavalier with a nicer interior that doubled the MSRP of the vehicle. Overall, it was a nice effort, the V-6 delivering enough power to move the vehicle rather smartly, and the interior no longer shouted "I am a cheap car!" to passers-by. It was a rather nice interpretation of the Chevy by Cadillac. But there were two problems. Handling was problematic - having softened up the Cavalier ride to cosset Caddy customers, it wallowed badly. Heavier sway bars solved some of the problems but combined with relatively soft springs and short suspension travel of the struts, it produced some rather squirrely results at 8/10ths or better. The biggest problem was that sticker price. Caddilac image and compact "economy" car are conceptual oxymorons. The public simply wasn't buying a tiny prestige car.

The big Caddy had similar problems with trying to scale back fuel consumption in the wake of the 70's oil embargo. The 350 V-8-6-4 was a disaster, and most owners ended up disabling the valvetrain that propped cylinders open to reduce pumping losses while disabling the ignition on opposing cylinders. Even worse were the 350 Diesels that fell or flew apart after a few thousand miles. With all of GM's experience in diesel power, you'd think they would have known better.

The MoPar minivans were works of marketing genius. Mating a reasonably well proven 4-cyl, and later a V-6 to a FWD automotive chassis, they simply grafted a box body behind the firewall of their successful K-car and the concept took wings. Successive generations would become larger, but the concept remained the same - even to today. VW is now selling their own variant of the T&C, bringing the marketing cycle full circle. The original K-car that saved Chrysler Corp. (Omni, Horizon) was a re-tooled, scaled up VW Rabbit.

Cars fail in the marketplace often due to really miserable marketing - or for being a solution for which there was no problem. Automakers don't always read the public mood correctly, or they are blindsided by a gas shortage, or economic collapse. It's easy to accuse Detroit of really dumb moves in hindsight. Viewed in their historical context some represented some pretty wise moves. Corvair's aluminum engine, refined in the Vega, taught the auto industry to build an aluminum engine that is standard today. Fuel injection and computers evolved along with ignition systems to provide engines of incredible reliability and efficiency. We've learned a lot of lessons in the last fifty years, but except for a few setbacks, we've come a long way.

O. L. T.

iTrader: (17)

It makes a hell of a redneck Lambo replica though.

sleeper408

iTrader: (6)

LOL..... I remember seeing a few of these with the Lambo kit. Just awful!

Indio

iTrader: (1)

Very informative post Lil4X, adds some perspective, there are some real bombs here but high depreciation and bad fuel economy does not a lemon make.

mmarshall

Lil, with all due respect (and you are a great poster), you give this car WAY too much credit. I understand the reasons for its production (I grew up with it, back in the 60's just like you did). It was a classic POS, any way you look at it. Among many other things, I remember, at the gas station, just trying to keep them full of oil...that, alone, was bad enough, even apart from the MANY safety problems I described in my earlier post.

I don't always agree with Ralph Nader, but his chapter about the Corvair in the Unsafe at any Speed book (which I've read, cover-to-cover) was right-on. The rest of the book, admittedly, had truths, half-truths, and speculations.


The original Cimmarons used the same basic 1.8L four that the other J-cars did. That engine as simply too small for the heavier Cadillac.....which had more weight than the other J-cars due to equipment and trim. I test-drove a Cimarron in 1981 when it first came out.....it was one of the slowest new cars I've ever sampled.



I agree with the other posters that the Cadillac V-8-6-4 and GM 350 diesel engines were both disasters, but that was more the engines and not so much the whole car itself, so that is why I didn't mention them. The Fiero and the Corvair, as far as I'm concerned (for different reasons), stand as Detroit's two biggest all-time goofs.

kit cat

iTrader: (6)

MR-S and Previa WTF?

Lil4X

I had a best friend and eventual college roommate who had the great good fortune to own, in succession, a '58 Edsel and a '62 Corvair. His Edsel was a thing of beauty in turquoise and white (the height of '50's fashion), but his high-end Citation was equipped like a Lincoln and similarly expensive to repair. Not the kind of car a starving college student needed.

It was powerful, unconventional in appearance, and considering some of the other offerings in the market at the time, rather attractive. A lot of the stying was the result of having to marry unrelated body panels to a single product, but the first year or two weren't bad efforts. By 1960 the styling was a total disaster.

A few unusual features included a pushbutton control for gear selection was built into the steering wheel hub - right where you'd expect the horn button. The horn was connected to a concentric chrome ring inside the steering wheel arc. It had to be the bane of valet parking attendants everywhere. You had to show the poor guy where the gearshift was every time, otherwise you'd never get your car back.

When the heater controls malfunctioned, my roomie found that all of the vents, valves, and flaps were controlled by ONE motor driving a plastic cam plate the size of a saucer. A forest of push-pull cables connected the cam to the various valves and doors to select what and where air was directed. Replacing that cam and motor cost almost as much as the car was worth by 1963. He traded for a Corvair, and the small car was a revelation - in more ways than one. It was relatively simple and trouble-free - that being a good thing because nobody but a Chevy dealer could work on it. It was about as an exotic as a car could get in the early '60's, short of something that employed improbability drive.

Socially it was a popular little vehicle. It got attention, but while higher on the food chain than a VW, Renault, Fiat, or similar contemporary rear-engined European cars, the Corvair was almost a sporty alternative. You weren't ashamed to be seen in public with it - something that Chevy got right. The Ford Falcon against which the Corvair was pitted was obviously cheap, totally uninspired, and appeared on no student's wish list. I can't explain how this was accomplished, given the rather odd styling of the first generation Corvairs, but it was a slight improvement over the dowdy falcon. The second generation Corvair managed to be quite attractive, but by then Nader had published.

From an engineering standpoint, the Corvair was a milestone. Developed in just a couple of years, it incorporated so many "firsts" it was as though a spaceship had landed in Detroit and got itself duplicated on the assembly line. Having worked with companies bringing new technologies to market, I learned the "clean-sheet-of-paper" approach while satisfying, is almost never successful. You end up with so many bugs in prototype testing you don't even know what their source could be. You spend the next two years playing Whack-a-Mole, before giving up and going back to something more conventional and changing one or two things at a time to arrive at your new concept through evolution. It is a measure of Chevy's genius that this car was ever produced, even though it wasn't perfect.

Performance-wise until it got the multiple carbs or the turbo in late '64 - '65, it was a bit of a slug. It was a bit heavy compared to its competitors, steering was slow, thanks to the unboosted recirculating ball steering box and the somewhat porky proportions of what was supposed to be an "economy" car. While it would kick a LOT of the cheaper American Iron to the curb on a winding road, it was easily a match for most foreign cars of a sporting nature . . . at 8/10ths or below.

That's when the demons at the unexplored edges of the envelope began to show up. I recall the stylishly wide tires were reluctant to give up grip, so when you broke that heavy rear end loose - say in a vastly overcooked corner, it happened all at once with little warning. It was not impossible to correct, but it took a little finesse. Having put quite a few miles on the car myself, I knew what lurked out there at the edges of the envelope and saw fit not to go there.

I always suspected Nader's test procedures were designed to exacerbate the flaws in the Corvair's handling at the limit. No one in his right mind would have entered a turn at the high velocities his films showed, then when the rear end broke loose, alternately jerk about a turn of steering wheel lock in either direction, each "correction" improperly timed, actually causing the tail to step out in progressively wider arcs. Try that in a Suburban or a similar heavy solid axle vehicle today. Without electronic stabilization I can guarantee you a rollover.

The point is, with incredibly foolish control inputs, any car - at least those without an electronic nanny to prevent such stupidity, can be rolled. The Corvair got a bad rap not because it was "Unsafe at Any Speed", but because it was not designed to be driven by a suicidal idiot. Maybe it should have come with a warning.

Cabinetman

My mom's first "luxury" car was a Cadillac diesel. Needless to say, my family has owned BMWs, Merecedes, Volvos, Acuras and a few Lexus but no more American luxury sedans. She was looking at the new CTS recently and my dad reminded her of the only other Cadillac they ever owned. Now she has a '09 LS460. I know it isn't fair to judge current models against a 25 year old car, but crappy cars leave a lasting impression.

MPLexus301

iTrader: (3)

C&D actually called the old Spyder the best handling car ever.

mmarshall

A number of auto-enthusiast publications have given that award to the Lotus Elise.

bagwell

tell this guy his car is a P.O.S.




that Pinto is da bomb....





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