The Alleged Car: Difference between revisions

{{quote|'''[[Honest John's Dealership|Crazy Vaclav]]''': She'll do 300 [[Unit Confusion|hectares]] on a single tank of kerosene.<br />

'''Homer''': [[Made in Country X|What country is this car from?]]<br />

* ''[[Columbo]]'' drives a beat-up [[wikipedia:Peugeot 403|Peugot 403]] convertible. He seems pleased to own a foreign car. In one episode, he drives it to a junkyard where a body has been found. A policeman tells him he'll have to dump his car there another day. Columbo is shocked at the idea that anyone could think his car was junk.<br /><br />Oh... just one other thing... Peter Falk allegedly picked it out himself one day after having been pickedcast as Columbo. He saw the car in a mechanic's shop where they were apparently using it as a test-bed/oversized paperweight, and thought that given Columbo's otherwise disheveled appearance, the car would be perfect. He bought it from the mechanics and drove it to the lot that day.

* Many of the above are based on the Yugo, also known as [[wikipedia:Zastava Koral|the Zastava Koral]], or one of the many Eastern European Cold War era cars that were exported to the West to raise foreign currency; the Yugo was merely the one that was actually sold the most (in the USA), and the first since [[The Sixties]] to make it to the United States, and was thus the best known (in the USA). For Europe the most likely candidate would be the Trabbi, the Skoda or possibly the Wartburg.<br /><br />As a side note, the Yugo, based on its reputation, was voted Worst Car Of The Millennium by [[Car Talk]]. (Truthfully, there have been worse cars. Not many, but they exist. While hardly a stellar machine, the Yugo wasn't a genuine disaster. Its poor reputation is often explained by it being uncaringly treated as a disposable car and ''never'' given even the most basic maintenance, like, say, an oil change.)<br /><br />Jason Vuic, who wrote a book chronicling the history of the Yugo, noted that the Yugo at least passed U.S. safety and emissions tests, meaning it's at least better than the cars that don't get to be imported to the US. Jason Vuic puts down the next entry as being worse...

* Pretty much everything to come out of a British Leyland factory in the 1970s had a tendency to be an Alleged Car. British Leyland was an amalgamation of several other car makers who were forced to merge and nationalise, in an effort to better compete with the likes of Ford and Vauxhall. The employees were entrenched along the lines of the companies they used to belong to ([[Divided We Fall|the Austin employees would have nothing to do with the Triumph employees who in turn would have nothing to do with the Rover employees, who wouldn't want to be seen dead with the Jaguar employees, and so on]]). The unions of the various car factory workers also grew increasingly belligerent and Bolshevik under the auspices of Derek Robinson (AKA Red Robbo) and they literally would spend more time on strike than they did building cars.<br /><br />On the other side of the coin, the upper management was [[Upper Class Twit|hopelessly out of touch and behind the times]], especially when they got their way with the designers, who were typically much more progressive (Alec Issigonis' conflict with William Morris, 1st Viscount Nuffield, over the design for the Morris Minor was a case in point). In addition, British Motor Holdings (a merger of Austin and Morris) was dominated by its engineers at the expense of all else - the Quartic square steering wheel is but one example.<br /><br />It doesn't take much imagination to realise what effect these would all have on quality control.

* There is now a competition devoted to the Alleged Car: the [http://www.24hoursoflemons.com LeMons], a two-day event for cars bought and fixed up for $500 or less, excluding safety equipment. Prizes are awarded to the car with furthest distance on the track before it breaks down completely, the amount of horrible vapors that exude from it, and which one is just plain worst.<br /><br />And for those who are too proud of their beloved Alleged Car (we're looking at ''you'', [[Top Gear|Richard Hammond]]) to smash it up, there's a [http://www.carlustblog.com/2009/08/concours-dlemon.html Concours de LeMons], whose [http://www.concoursdlemons.com/participants.html show categories are worth a read just for laughs].

* It would be unfair to call such a classic vehicle as the Volkswagen Beetle an Alleged Car -- except that the earliest models had a crashbox transmission, hand-operated windshield wipers, no cabin heater, semaphore flags for turn signals, no fuel gauge (when the engine started to cough, you switched to the two-litre backup tank and looked for a gas station), and a starter crank hole. (On the other hand, those very same early models would [[What a Piece of Junk!|climb a 1:1 grade in first gear]]. That's a ''forty-five degree slant''.)<br /><br />Even a VW with all the above faults was just the most basic model imaginable - a ''normally'' equipped Bug had exhaust-(or engine-block-)heater, pneumatic windscreen washer (running off the pressure in the spare wheel) and electric wipers. There was [[It Got Worse|a worse moment]] in its history yet: the cars assembled hastily from leftover parts in the bombed Wolfsburg factory between 1946-1949 had engines which barely lasted 30,000 km, upholstery glued with horribly stinking fish glue, matte paint mostly in maroon, black or grey...

* Arguably one of the most famous examples, the DeLorean DMC-12. Despite the Lotus Esprit inspired design and gullwing doors, the car's production run seemed to be cursed from the word go. To elaborate: the factory was located in Dunmurry (a suburb in Belfast), Northern Ireland (bear in mind that this was in 1978, and it was placed [[The Troubles|right on a religious fault line]]; word is the factory had one entrance for Catholics and one for Protestants). Making matters worse alongside budget over runs, engineering hassles and production delays was the fact that almost all the workers had never had a job in their lives, much less one producing cars. the inevitable quality control problems that resulted from this were so bad that despite each car having a 12-month/20,000km warranty, many dealerships refused to carry out any work on them because they weren't being reimbursed.<br /><br />To add insult to injury, far from being the thinking man's supercar its creator envisioned it to be, the DMC-12's performance was quite lacklustre, due to it being the victim of a watering down campaign. It was originally meant to have a rear-mounted rotary engine but this was changed to a mid-mounted 2.8 litre V6 due to fuel consumption concerns, however the change in powerplant reduced performance (it was initialy figured to have 150kw of power, but the changes resulted in the car only making 110kw in 'dirty' euro trim, the US version was an even sorrier 95kw due to requirements for catalytic converters and other emissions controls) and had a knock-on effect on the cars' already less than perfect 35:65 front/rear weight distribution. In the end the DMC-12 was too slow and sluggish to convince anybody it was the real deal, and allegations that John DeLorean had taken to drug smuggling in order to pay the bills were the final nail in the DMC-12's coffin.