It’s been sitting on my book shelf for years, and I don’t remember how I came to have it, but I figured it might be useful for Turkey Week. And it was, in an ironic way. Because this book is a turkey! OK, it’s got plenty of obvious turkeys in it too, and given that it was obviously written by a Brit, the emphasis on the endless BL disasters is fairly thorough. Although not as in thoroughly comprehensive: if you think I was razzed a bit by the P76 apologists for not doing enough research, Mr. Cheetham has obviously never heard of the word. It’s chock full of easy throw-away comments and the kind of stuff you might hear in a bar. But the real zingers are when he takes on American cars.
Like the Maverick. Ok, not a brilliant car. But how about at least getting the pictures right? In fact, what he shows here as the Maverick has me highly intrigued, because it’s some sort of Maverick concept that jostled my memory banks, but I can’t find a match for it on the web. Anybody remember it? I’d love a better picture of it: a genuine Maverick Landau.
Anyway, the author makes generalized throw-away statements like “the Ford Maverick lost its reputation to metal fatigue”.
Not only does he strike out once with the Maverick picture, but twice. Sorry, that’s a Comet. Whatever. But it gets worse.
The 1963 – 1966 Dodge Dart: a royal double screw-up. He puts in a picture of the 1962 Dodge, as the ad makes clear, and does describe the famed plucked chicken’s styling. But he calls it a compact, and its impossible to tell from the text whether it’s supposed to relate to the compact ’63 – ’66 Dart, the Valiant’s stablemate, and one of the stand outs in terms of straight-forward cars and reliability of the era.
Or the actual ’62 Dodge. And this: “the slant six wasn’t renowned for its reliability”. Yes “it certainly wasn’t one of the company’s great successes”.
OK, that was just the warm-up. Here’s “A clumsy mover that wouldn’t go around corners at more than a walking pace”. Funny, considering that the B-Body was universally praised as being the best handling big American sedan of the era, and quite formidable with the F-41 suspension. But no, in reality “these…cars understeered and sent reverberations from every bump or pothole from the suspension to your clenched-in-anticipation buttocks”. Maybe the author took a taxi ride in NYC in a clapped out Chevy once. And to top it off, “It was one of the most boring-looking cars ever designed”.
To each his own Worst Car.
Maybe the book was intended to be performance art — a satire of an increasingly popular car book genre. If you hang around book stores you know the kind: Picture books with an endless recycling of trite — and not always accurate — information.
The books produced by the “Automotive Editors of Consumer Guide” deserve a dishonorable mention. Most of us who read car blogs could easily point to a handful of stupid errors. These are not inexpensive books, either.
Now that Borders is gone and so are the Markdown book racks…where do they sell books like this now?
Around here they have 1/2 price books that carries new and used books.
In Edmonton, they have it remaindered at $5.99 at Chapters. Not a great read, but interesting photos make up for it…
Our ex-Borders in Davenport just reopened as a BAM. They have a pretty good car section like Borders, but no car books in the bargain aisles yet.
Why are you short on toliet paper?
Oh, it’s rare, but occasionally there are good car books in the cheap aisle. I got a book on the history of Jeep at a Borders years ago that is really good.
Lazy writing. It sickens me to death. I call that coffee table book writing. It’s good enough as throwaway gifts, or appropriate reading in a waiting room. Because, I gather that the intended demographic are people that aren’t really into cars. And people that are, are most of the times more well informed than the writer. What did he think? That a car aficionado or even your average ten year old wouldn’t spot those mistakes? That’s lazy, that’s just plain laziness.
I have a feeling the internet has made stuff like that impossible to sell? Because, knowledge are now at hands reach. Before, a journalist that perhaps weren’t that much into cars could edit a book about terrible cars without much prior knowledge, because he thought there was a good story to it. Before, knowledge was excklusive to those with the means, and just writing about stuff made you an authority on the subject.
Ha! The slant six wasn’t known for its reliability. I’d have to say there might be some truth to this. Its every bit as failure prone as the Ford 300ci Six; Volvo Redblock or Mercedes OM616. Many of these engines have been recalled for excessive oil consumption at mileages of over 400K. Likewise, they all have a strong appetite for regular oil changes, without which, failure is likely to occur.
Was this book real, or is it a P***take on ‘worlds worst’ books? It doesn’t just seem like it was written by someone who didn’t know about American cars, but about cars in general. I’m sure he also criticizes the short life of the muffler bearings and excessive blinker fluid consumption on the Dart.
Lol
That “Maverick” looks like something that Ford do Brasil may have made up. It has rectangle headlights with markers or turns just above them.
This guy didn’t do any research at all did he? I can understand one or two little mistakes, but jeeze..
It’s like one of those guys that forms an opinion on an entire car line based on his test drive in a 150,000 mile rust bucket from the midwest.
I got that book for Christmas once. A relative knew I liked books and got it for me. They also announced joyfully that my car was in it…… Never thought the SVX was that bad.
This is exactly how these books sell. A sibling or an uncle or aunt sees it and think it’s a good gift because they know you are into cars. I have a shelf-worth of books like this on cars, science, etc. It’s the thought that counts (or so they say ;-).
Yea definitely highly biased and not really based in truth. The slant 6 unreliable? Just a few miles from the truth. The Maverick’s straight 6 highly fragile? Sure they aren’t as durable as the slant 6 but far from fragile. Certainly by the time the Maverick sheet metal was wrapped around it we were heading into the emissions control crisis and it suffered the driveablity issues that plagued many others too, but the basic engine remained at least worth of a “good” rating.
Heck those crazy and resourceful Ausies manage to keep building and refining both power plants well beyond their US “best by” date, taking both engines to another level of performance while maintaining high durability.
The listed range of the Caprice does cover both the Donk and the Box and I’ve heard many here state similar sentiments about the Donk’s ride and handling. The Box of course is all together new chassis and body and while it may not have sports car handling it certainly isn’t horrible.
Well, you gave “Deadly Sin” status to the Toronado, original Seville, and C4 Corvette. Plus, you don’t like the Marauder X100!
So it’s certainly possible for reasonable people to disagree about the relative greatness or “worstness” of a particular vehicle.
Although, you definitely aren’t a lazy writer like this guy.
Somebody had to! 🙂
Keep in mind that the Deadly Sins is about the decisions GM made in these cars’ creation, and often has as much or more to do about how that reflected on GM and their eventual demise than the actual car itself.
For instance: love the Toronado; awesome car (except for the drum brakes). Does that mean GM wisely spent huge amount of money that they never recouped by building a fwd Riviera. That’s the Deadly Sin; not the car itself.
And that applies to many of the DSs. Gen 1 Seville had some genuine good qualities, but GM’s pricing was cynical, and contributed to the long-term decline of Cadillac. Maybe not right away, but eventually. If you’re going to make a Mercedes competitor, make sure it really has the features and quality, otherwise…
Marauder X100; who couldn’t love that!
I have sort of always known that you aren’t hating on the machine per se, but then I see stuff like the wretched ’84 Bonneville sharing a place on the list with things I actually like and I lose my perspective.
I saw that you added a little author’s note to the end of the Toronado piece. Maybe you could start pasting that disclaimer at the beginning of any future DS features?
Beauty is certainly in the eye of the beholder or beerholder as the case may be, so we can agree that there will always be disagreement on that, The other points though seemed to be made up to support the philosophy that American cars are inherently inferior and the specific models chosen were based on what pictures they had access to.free. .
I remember thumbing through this book at the local Books-A-Million and giggling madly. I’ll rank it up there with that Time (Newsweek?) article of the “100 Worst Cars Ever Made” in which they included the Model T.
It’s sin?
Hooking us on the automobile in the first place, thus killing the environment and advancing global warming.
Half the cars in that article were there due to a left wing political slant, not necessarily because of mechanical shortcomings.
That sounds familiar I must have seen this bible somewhere now Ill have to look for it.
Time/Newsweek…what do you expect?
I’d read that back at the turn of the 20th Century, the automobile was considered a godsend for highly-congested cities because the exhaust was preferable to the odor and disease from mountains of horse poop lining every street.
It’s a fact. The car was a huge boon to public health 100 years ago. Respiratory diseases plummeted. Runoff got a lot cleaner. You could be in the city and your clothes stayed clean. Not to mention relief from the simple disgust of breathing powdered poop.
It’s when they started putting lead in the gas and all the world’s billions started driving that gasoline cars became a problem.
Yep, especially the lead. We can trace a considerable amount of the Earth’s environmental problems to a single man: Thomas Midgely, Jr., the inventor of tetra-ethyl lead as a fuel additive and later of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). I read somewhere that someone called him the “single most destructive organism in the history of mankind” or something very similar.
J. R. McNeill, an environmental historian, has remarked that Midgley “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history.” From his Wikipedia story which is quite a read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.
When workers died and went insane from lead poisoning, he held a public demo where he breathed the fumes and washed his hands with tetraethyl lead, claiming it was perfectly safe. It took him a year to recover from that dose. This was after taking a year to recover from his research.
He accidentally died from another of his inventions. I’ll let you read about that one.
World’s Worst Car Guys would be a good book, starting with Midgely.
cool link hell of a way to go but he really was a toxic little organism.
“It’s a fact. The car was a huge boon to public health 100 years ago. Respiratory diseases plummeted. Runoff got a lot cleaner. You could be in the city and your clothes stayed clean. Not to mention relief from the simple disgust of breathing powdered poop.”
Gawd, yes.
The trouble with our Really Smart Set is, history started on the day they were born; and all the things humanity learned, from social customs to practical inventions…don’t matter or are mistakes.
This criminalizing of the car is a good illustration: They’re willing to trade imagined problems and slight inconveniences, for REAL problems – that KILL PEOPLE.
Horse excrement was only one problem. Sheltering and caring for the beasts took space and energy and money; and I recall reading that close to a hundred horses would drop dead in New York City – EVERY DAY. And of course they just lay there until some crew of sorry sods hoisted them out…no front-end loaders for them.
But our self-designated elites…are incapable of learning from history.
I have “the world’s worst aircraft” and “the world’s worst warships” and they are much better than this one. Their publisher must have had the budget to hire an editor and fact checker.
The “Worst Weapons” volume is also very well done; as an amateur military historian I found very few errors. Somehow I missed the “worlds worst aircraft”, I’ll have to keep my pupils peeled…
I have WWA/C, but it’s in the barn and a long walk tonight. Another good one is Bill Gunston’s _Back to the Drawing Board_, with his own take on less-than-successful aircraft. Not a whole lot of overlap, partly because BttDB likes covers a lot of aircraft that kind of work, but not as well as they were supposed to. Of course, the student-designed plane that never took off fits as a failure…
By the way, I love the comment about “lousy springs” on the front end of the ’62 Dodge. If memory serves me correctly, didn’t Chrysler products of that vintage use torsion bar front suspension?
Correct. Superior handling.
Not according to the Leyland apologists their P76 is superior to Chryslers torsion bars
Chryslers did have tighter handling than most of their big-car contemporaries, but that was primarily a function of stiffer spring and damping rates (and to some extent the geometry of the front A-arms), rather than the actual springing medium — you could have achieved the same effect with coils. The real advantages of torsion bars over coils was that Chrysler didn’t need to use different springs to maintain the same ride height with different engine combinations, the way they would have with coil springs; they could just adjust the spring preload.
For some applications, torsion bars also provide packaging advantages, although I don’t think that was a big factor for Chrysler’s passenger cars. The Toronado and FWD Eldorado, for example, used torsion bars so that the spring wouldn’t interfere with the front driveshafts.
I just read an article in Collectible Automobile on the 1957 Chrysler lineup, and the reason they went to torsion bars on the ’57s was to make the cars lower. The rooflines on those cars was much lower than the ’56s, and in fact one of the reasons the swiveling seats came out a year or two later was to address the problems some folks had getting in and out of them. That the torsion bars improved handling was an added bonus.
This, coming from a writer in the land of the reliable MG? Son-of-a-gun! Whoda thunk it!
I can’t think of anything else to say…
Paul, I have a book with that concept Maverick in it. It’s called Cars Detroit Never Built, by Edward Janicki. It was published in 1990 I believe. I got it with saved allowance the summer Days of Thunder came out! Anyway, I’ll check it out when I get home and report back.
Oooh, I have that book too. Must find and scan.
If one of you wants to send it to me a scan, that would be great.
I seem to remember that Maverick having a separate, removable rear trunk, like cars of the ’30s. It also had freestanding taillights, which you can sort of see in the picture above.
I remember seeing this book in the bargain section at Barnes & Noble a few years ago, and I specifically remember the ’77 B-body’s inclusion. That was probably when I realized the book wasn’t worth its ~$5.99 price tag.
The writer clearly didn’t spend much time in America during the ’80s. There were much, much worse domestic cars on sale at the time; the B-body was one of the best, provided you didn’t get the diesel or the THM200.
Never heard of this guy – but plainly, he doesn’t know a THING about his subject. The Slant Six slander is obvious and previously noted; he also called the bulletproof Ford sixes used in the Maverick “fragile.” And jumped on its “lurid colors” – which were in ad copy more than in the cars themselves. Actual models tended to the white, brown, gold and blue.
He can’t tell the years of Dodge apart even with an advertisement reprinted on the page, to help him. And on, and on…to where he damns the 1977 GM full-size line, probably THE best of the General in my lifetime.
Clearly, the wanker knows NOTHING about cars; was just vamping on print. Why? A bet? A Labour Government grant for “authors”? A contract with someone? It amazes me…every ONE of us here, author and commenter, is a better, more informed, writer than he’s shown us he is.
That book…was a waste of perfectly good trees.
According to Wikipedia, he’s an English actor.
I guess this book would be about like having Jay Leno do a Full, Complete History of American Cars.
Same level of FAIL.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Cheetham
I guess this book would be about like having Jay Leno do a Full, Complete History of American Cars.
Jay Leno sucks (IMO) as a TV host/comedian, but I honor and recognize his vast experience and knowledge regarding automobiles, especially minutiae.
I too have to defend Leno.
Leno the car guy is awesome, from steam cars to obscure modern monsters he has no limits (Blastolene’s Pissed off Pete is one of my favorites). Like one of us if we hit the Powerball.
Leno the “star” I don’t really get.
You can see a preview of one of his other books here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/google_preview/2163438.Vintage_Cars
The website I got it from has glowing reviews of his books, all by the same one user.
I have that vintage cars book, it’s not bad. It’s basically a picture book with little text, but there’s some very interesting cars in it: pre-war Rileys, Frazer-Nashes, Lagondas, etc.
I almost got this book a few years ago at a B&N. It did have some good pictures, but that’s about all. I did get Automotive Atrocities: Cars We Love To Hate for Christmas one year, now that’s a good one, and funny! Another amusing ‘lemon’ car book is Crap Cars. It’s pretty light reading, but funny too. I remember the summary on the Renault Alliance: “It makes you want to walk to work, even if you drive 70 miles a day”.
It’s called “just makin’ stuff up as you go along”. Some hack with a deadline who’s bound to be right about something just by accident. I did see this on a remainder table somewhere and put it back after reading an entry or two.
Just today (!) at Powell’s Books I saw another one to avoid – something called “Crap Cars”. Much in the same style and for the same purpose, it’s been around for awhile. Appropriately, it was not in the automobile section, but in the gift/novelty area.
I got a copy at The Warehouse ($7.99) and yeah it’s the worst. I think his name’s a pseudonym/joke = Craig Cheat-em? I don’t think he ever talked to his photo researcher: about 1/3 of the pics are wrong, from Aztek to Zaporozhets (both show the wrong cars) – usually obviously contradicted in the text. Incredibly lazy, he just uses the same captions regardless : rust/ fragile/ bad handling blah blah… e.g. I had an Austin 3 litre and yes it was a shed but it was actually great handling for big car with its hydro susp.
The fact the 77-90 b Caprice is on this list is testament to the absolute lack of credibility this author has. It was one of the most successful model runs of all time. Reliable solid and despite the claims of the ahem author one of the smoothest riding vehicles of its era. I would suggest before you write a book you actually drive the cars on the list. Also to suggest the Chrysler slant six was a bad motor makes one wonder if you have your head so firmly inserted into your posterior the gasses have caused permanent brain damage.the slant six is arguably the most reliable passenger car engine of all time. There’s many examples that have travelled over a million miles. What in the hell drugs is he on?
I have this book, too. I have a fascination with failed (and failing) cars and car companies, or just weird one-offs, like the wood-bodied car that a Car & Driver editor made in 1981. I think that even the worst cars have some interesting qualities to their shortfalls.
For example: the Skoda 1000/1100/100/105/110/Estelle/125/130/135/Rapid (especially the Rapid). They were developed on the same sort of budget that GM would use for interior trim in the 90s, but they still look kind of neat, and not too outdated. The Rapid even looks kind of cool. Their shortfall, of course, is hideous unreliability. The Soviets wouldn’t allow Skoda to redesign their car to look or be more western, so they were stuck with their original rear-engined design from 1960. The cooling system stretched from the front of the car to the back on the later models. That was quite a problem waiting to happen. But: they drive well, and loyalists of these cars are loyal like Volvo owners.
The Volvo P1900: This car is usually mentioned as a footnote to the much more successful P1800, but in doing so, you can’t really find pictures of one. I’ve seen it, and it’s not pretty, so not much missed there. Still, I think Volvo’s decision to make a tractor-engined sports car was very amusingly optimistic the first time, and very deservedly so once they’d shaken the bugs out (looking at you, Pressed Steel. Car bodies do not belong outside before painting.)
The Ford Pinto: It doesn’t really explode. It explodes into flames. That’s completely different.
The Chevrolet Vega: Lots of people liked the way it drove, in the early tests I’ve seen in Popular Mechanics (optimists, all of ’em). A capable car, but who knows how much more capable it would have been if they’d cared enough to make it properly.
The Toyota Crown: I wonder why these didn’t sell well in America. They had the right size. Maybe the curtains weren’t modern enough. Heeheehee.
Toyota’s odd fixation on naming all of it’s early cars Crown. Wierd.
Volkswagon’s Thing. Gee it’s ugly, but very, very functional.
Pontiac Aztek: It should have had something wilder than a tent attachment. Maybe an air suspension for off-roading, and twin turbochargers, and a cooler that comes out of the back floor (and leaves room for the folding camp table).
French cars: Not successful here, but man, I think they’re neat.
Russian cars: Almost ditto, but I don’t want to own a Lada Riva as much as I want to own a Panhard Dyna.
My favourite wierd (almost) one-offs: The Mohs cars and the Panther cars (not the kit cars, the 6-wheeled monstrousities).
I think the overall creativity invested even in a bad car is very very interesting. (Why did Citroen make a rotary engine?) (Why is the carburettor on a Hyundai Pony II plastic?) (How do Saturn’s plastic body panels age?)