I almost missed the assembly line oops while appraising this 1968 Buick LeSabre 400 this summer. The second owner noticed it not long after he bought the car from the original owner in rural Saskatchewan.
Only 14,922 LeSabre 400 two door hardtops left the factory during the 68 model year. Whoever was putting the trim and badging on the body of this car must have been distracted. Perhaps by a co-worker nearby? Or maybe deep in thought about the upcoming weekend? I’m surprised this slipped through the person doing quality control. Assuming somebody was assigned that task at the end of the assembly line. Obviously the small town Saskatchewan Pontiac-Buick dealer never noticed either.
This faux pas reminds me of the Acadian I saw parked on a dealer lot in the early eighties in Prince George, BC. Stepping around to the right side of the car the name plate said Chevette. So I walked back to the left side and sure enough, the word Acadian was on the left fender.
And what assembly line glitch do you remember seeing on four wheels?
I can’t confirm that this is original, but we bought our 1987 Chevrolet R10 Custom Deluxe in 1996 as a 1-owner truck. The badges on the outside are correct, as is the one on the dashboard. But, my steering wheel really wanted to be a GMC
My parents got a new LeBaron in April of ’78. Nothing noteworthy in terms of defects, just plenty of loose bolts, a missing LeBaron script on one side, a sun visor too long to fit in the notch, and a 14 inch rim space saver spare when the car had 15s. The Lean Burn computer setup stranded the car numerous times in the first 3 or 4 months due to failed sensors and broken ground wires and such. Typical Mopar for the time. In the fall of ’79, a failed bearing caused a front wheel to part company with the rest of the car.
My grandmother owned a 1955 Chevy BelAir Sport Coupe (turquoise&white).
On each side of the car, just aft of the doors was a gold-colored Chevy badge (see below).
On the passenger side of the car, the badge was installed from the factory upside down.
My ’87 Caprice wagon is a non A/C car. Two of the three vent pulls under the steering column are installed correctly, the third is upside down. It wouldn’t be so annoying if they weren’t trapezoid, so it is obvious and difficult to pull out.
This had to be a factory error as I can see no obvious way to correct it, and I doubt the original elderly owner had anything to do with it.
A friend of mine and I both have Focus hatchbacks. We both bought ours brand new, and they’re both practically identical SE models.
I noticed one time when following them home that one of their taillights has light strips as shown here, while the other one does not. A cursory glance around the internet seems to suggest that these lights were only installed on the Focus Electric and the European Titanium model (we’re in the US).
I remember being on a test drive with my grandfather in an Oldsmobile 98 that had a Buick badge on the inside rear door panel. Many years later, a local taxi company was using similar B and C body FWD cars as cabs, and they had a LeSabre with a Park Avenue front clip, but that was probably a collision repair. I remember seeing some pics of mismatched finish on Jeep Wrangler fender flares a couple of years ago.
Our beloved 1990 Plymouth Acclaim, while the best car we owned up to that time, wasn’t without its quirks. When we took delivery, the next day we noticed the model name on the right side of the dash – SPIRIT!
They had to replace the whole padded dash panel to accommodate ACCLAIM!
Back then, Chrysler would bend over backwards to make their customers happy – at least our Chrysler-Plymouth dealer did.
That car had a few other glitches which were happily taken care of as well, and we proudly drove that car for 10+1/2 years.
My Dad and I restored a 1959 Impala 4-door hardtop “Sport Sedan” that was a factory single-color car (Snowcrest White), but had the extra stainless steel trim on the rear doors to allow for a two-tone paint job. The holes in the doors for the trim looked like factory stamping, but the trim tag indicated a solid white car. Maybe someone picked up the wrong doors and painted the thing before realizing their mistake? Or maybe they were trying to clear the parts bin? Did Chevy expect more two-tones in ’59 and overproduce the extra trim, and then decide later in the model year to start slapping the extra trim onto monotone cars too? I guess I’ll never know.
AMC dealers receiving cars with M-A-R-B-L-E-R spelled out across the front.
You have suspect body shops for some of these minor but visible glitches.
Best I’ve heard are of a Rover 2000 (SD1) with no reverse gear and a Morris Marina with a disc brake on one side and drum brake on the other, and a Renault Fuego with no bulbs in the front indicators
I’ve always thought the upside down badges were more of a silent protest/mild sabotage from the blessed UAW than actual mistakes.
I remember Car and Driver getting a new Mexico-built Golf around 1993(?) that was built with two different colored front seats!
5 stand out very well.
1) 1984 Ford LTD with a Mercury steering wheel logo. And this was fresh off the truck
2) 2008 Chrysler Sebring- one of the first to reach any nearby dealer. One side had a bodyside molding and the other nothing!
3) 2015 Hyundai Sonata SE- the driver’s side had a lower chrome molding. The other side didn’t. No SE trim level cars are supposed to have the lower chrome trim only the Sport and Limited models
4) 2005 Toyota Camry XLE- 4 new cars were just unloaded off the truck in top XLE trim. One white car lacked the XLE badge but the other 3 had it.
5) 2002 Toyota Corolla- brand new with plastic still on the floors- front and rear plastic bumpers were so far off the tint compared to the steel parts of the car. This was a silver car. The other colors weren’t nearly so far off.
Lots of bumper covers don’t even remotely match the color on the rest of the car…then the owner wrecks the car and bitches a blue streak when the new cover doesn’t match any better than the factory one that got damaged. I actually took an irate Lexus owner to the new car lot once, walked the line pointing out that NONE of them match, especially light metallic colors like that Bamboo Pearl (light green) that they put on so many RX300s.
My grandma’s 78 Pontiac Lemans had several different shades of red plastic inside, some of which faded to a nauseated pink color after the years rolled by.
That’s factory….
Well, there were these, but VW did it on purpose…
Grandmother’s last Buick Electra was a ’73 regular 225, but had ‘Limited’ badge on the dash. Wasn’t worth fixing.
C/D had a [’91?] Mercury Tracer long term test car with one seat having mismatched trim.
Can’t blame UAW, since car was built in Mexico.
We had a new Crown Vic as part of our work fleet that came with Mercury badging on the trunk. Apparently nobody noticed during the PDI, nobody at work noticed until I pointed it out. The Ford dealer replaced the badging when it was brought to their attention.
In Spain in the seventies it was very common to find Seats and Renaults with different parts from different generations. Usually they tried to get rid of the older generation parts and some cars are called “between series” because they share components from two generations.
So, what’s up with the Saskatchewan plate in the front and the Alberta plate in the back?
EDIT: I get it – ’68 plate up front. Is it the original plate for that car?
My grandparents had a ’94 DeVille Concours. In the brochure you could see the plain DeVilles had the wreath and crest emblem on the D pillars while the Concours had none. Yet theirs had one on the driver’s side and none on the passenger side. Always bugged me for some reason.
It reminds me of something a silly young person would do to be different or rebellious- to take the emblem off and mount it again upside-down. Or an elaborate practical joke, to humiliate the owner of the vehicle.
In 1981 my grandparents and parents both bought Buick Centuries, my mom’s in powder blue with dark blue vinyl top and my grandpa’s in silver and silver top. On my grandpa’s, the right rear fender had a Century badge while the left rear had a Regal badge. He never had it fixed.
That being said, they ended up being pretty good cars. I was sad when they traded in the blue ’81 in ’89 for a LeSabre because I was hoping to inherit it. As it was, I didn’t own a car until almost 10 years later when I got out of college.
Minor example- an early 2000’s Corolla with baby blue paint would be awesome but I don’t think Toyota ever made it this way. Note that whoever repainted it didn’t redo the COROLLA lettering on the trunk lid.
It’s probably off by no more than 1/8th to 1/4th of an inch, but these days it shouldn’t happen at all….
Sloppy dealer stickers irritate me as well…
A buddy during my last year of undergrad (circa 2003) received a then-new Toyota Vibe from his parents to replace his aging Dakota pickup.
I say Toyota Vibe because the car was properly meant to be a Pontiac Vibe, but they installed a Toyota steering wheel.
Keep an eye on the 09 and up Rams with the letters on the doors- our salesman had one and it looked like a drunkard eyeballed it and called it a day…all the letters were crooked and the Hemi badge was off as well.
my late father [not a great driver] once had a 1954 dodge sedan. He smucked the front end just before trading it in on the next whatever[ I can’t remember what!] One of my dad’s childhood buddies had a body shop and he grafted on a 1954 Plymouth front clip…needless to say, it fit perfectly! It was only after dad had got a very generous allowance for the trade-in that someone actually noticed that something was amiss…
In my albeit limited experience, adhesive emblems with separate letters are shipped such that the letters CAN’T be applied funny, as long as the letters are kept in the foam or paper template, or even have clear tape on the back of the letters, like the image attached…peel off the yellow backer, apply the letters as a group, then peel the clear tape off the shiny/exposed side and you are all set. You can get the whole thing crooked, but the characters should be in proper relation to each other, unless someone cheaped-out and re-used the old emblem(s).
Not a fan of two-tone paint with the fat, multi-color stripes separating the colors…lots of Ford trucks with those stripes nowhere close to straight.
My boss bought ordered a new IROC-Z back in 85 … No damage or repair , only 4,000 miles in 1992 , one day i was washing it for him ( garage and detail shop ) and i noticed the “I” on passenger door was upside-down . ( graduated vertically thin to thick) He never noticed before , i assume the decals would have been on a single transfer sheet … Worker must have wrinkled and cut one off another …
And i just bought an ’87 suzuki savage motorcycle , the left tank decal is upside down , factory paint and factory clear over deacals . 100% sure it was QA missed .
The overpaid and overrated UAW workers of that era used to like to install one model nameplate on one side of the car and then another on the other side of the car. There would be Dodge Volares and Plymouth Aspens, Ford Comets and Mercury Mavericks. Seen them in real life on new lots.
The only thing that has really changed is that there are fewer UAW workers and fewer badges to engineer.