The Alleged Car: Difference between revisions

** How bad was British Leyland? Rover's [https://web.archive.org/web/20130909041639/http://www.carlustblog.com/2008/07/car-lust--sterl.html Sterling 827 SLi] was essentially a license-built version of a mid-80s Honda (Accura) Legend, one of he best-engineered cars of its day—but even Honda engineering was no match for British assembly quality!

** To top it off, BMW purchased British Leyland (by then known as the Rover Group) and reputedly ended up losing billions of dollars in the six years it owned them. Inverted with the Land Rover (sold for a profit) and MINI (kept by BMW and now bigger than ever) divisions, but still played straight with the rest of the Rover Group which was effectively given away for next to nothing.

* The [https://web.archive.org/web/20130808215655/http://www.carlustblog.com/2009/02/edsel.html Edsel's] gotten a [[Shout-Out]] in everything from ''[[Garfield]]'' to ''[[Destroy All Humans!]]'' as one of the worst cars ever made. Ironically, it apparently wasn't that bad a car (it is said to have roughly the same level of reliability as other American cars of its day), it just was [https://web.archive.org/web/20130808215655/http://www.carlustblog.com/2009/02/edsel.html marketed wrong, priced wrong, named wrong and, most of all, just plain ugly] [[Your Mileage May Vary|to most people]]. (''The Book of Heroic Failures'' quotes [[Time (magazine)|''Time'' magazine]] as calling it "a classic case of the wrong car for the wrong market at the wrong time." It had its own dealer network (instead of using Ford's existing dealers), it was priced above the stock Ford, it was introduced during a recession, given a stupid-sounding name and marketed as "America's space car" - complete with huge tail fins at a time that these were going out of style. The book claims that half the Edsels sold were defective in some way: doors that wouldn't open, trunks that wouldn't shut, push-buttons that wouldn't do anything, etc.)

* In the early 1970s, when the oil crisis forced American manufacturers to crank out small cars or die, the [https://web.archive.org/web/20130809080510/http://www.carlustblog.com/2010/12/the-chevrolet-vega-what-went-wrong.html Chevy Vega,] AMC Gremlin and [[Every Car Is a Pinto|Ford Pinto]] gave American small cars this reputation: having absolutely ''zero'' experience in building small cars, the American manufacturers, to put it lightly, stumbled ''quite a bit'' in their attempts at building small vehicles, to the extent that the Ford Pinto ''[[Every Car Is a Pinto|would actually explode]] [[Trope Namer|when crashed!]]''. In fact, Ford officials [http://motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness knew perfectly well] that the Pinto's gas tank tended to explode, could have rectified the situation, and ''chose not to'' on the basis of a "cost-benefit analysis" (basically saying "It's cheaper to let people burn to death, wrongful death lawsuits and all, than to change the car"). It's often held up as an example of why punitive damages should be legal in lawsuits. This is why Toyota, Honda and Datsun (now Nissan) became popular in the States—being manufacturers from fuel-deprived Japan, they had ''way'' more know-how on subcompact design, and the Toyota Corolla, Datsun B-210 and Honda Civic ended up ruling the day.