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The Alleged Car: Difference between revisions
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''Carcacha, bit by bit. Please don't leave us! }}
* Los Melodicos's hit "La Cacerola" is about a man having a car that is ugly and slow, but being still proud of his "saucepan" becuse it still somewhat reliable and attracts a lot of women.
* The [[Barenaked Ladies]] lapse into [[Sarcasm Mode]] with "If I had a million dollars / I'd buy you a K-car / A nice Reliant automobile". Chrysler under Lee Iococca (the same Iococca sacked by Ford after the [[Every Car Is a Pinto|Pinto]]) built these boxy, early front-wheel-drive econoboxes from [[The Eighties|the 1981 model year]] to save the company from ruin during a recession and fuel shortage. They were inexpensive, cheap repair parts were plentiful and fuel mileage was good - but they were much less reliable than their Japanese rivals and needed repairs more often. The ad campaign had the company president personally claim [[We Don't Suck Anymore|if you can find a better car, buy it]] on TV in a [[We Don't Suck Anymore]] reminiscent of Victor Kiam's old-style electric shavers ("it lifts and separates") of the same era. At well under $10k new, they weren't aimed at millionaires by any stretch of imagination. Clunky and laughable by modern standards, but at the time front wheel drive was an innovation and a radical change from the existing Detroit lineup. A decade later? They didn't hold their resale value.
* [[Bob Rivers]] does this at least a couple of times; ''My Toyota'' (parody of The Knack's ''My Sharona'') to mock the 2010 Toyota recalls, and ''The Day My Lemon Died'' (parody of Don McLean's ''American Pie'') describing abandoning a broken, smoking vehicle at roadside.
* Diesel's ''[[wikipedia:Sausalito Summernight|Sausalito Summernight]]'' (1981) starts with "We left for Frisco in your Rambler / The radiator running dry / I've never been much of a gambler / And had a preference to fly..." and goes downhill from there, with "The engine's stomping like a disco / We ought to dump it in the bay" as the approximate low point.
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** 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.
* 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. 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 [https://web.archive.org/web/20130909100251/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].
* 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
* 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.
** As a further illustration of the incompetence of American auto manufacturers of the time, the exploding gas tank was not a problem until the ''second year'' of production. The first production year automobiles were perfectly safe; which makes sense, since most of the car was by Lotus, with a Ford body dropped on it. It wasn't until 1972, when they started doing everything themselves, that the problems started. Interestingly, the problems that plagued the Pinto did not necessarily translate to the Mercury Bobcat or Ford Mustang 2; both of which were nothing more than a modified Pinto chassis with a different body dropped on top.
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** The Dodge Neon earned large amounts of critical acclaim upon its launch in 1994 and was a huge success in both the showroom and on the track, as well as being a very influential design and concept that all of today's compact cars are modeled after to some extent. However, the quality/reliability problems that plagued early models (Its tendency for head gasket failure being the most notable), its "cute" design and the fact that many were turned into "rice burners" during the street racing fad of the mid-2000s lead to the Neon being a common Alleged Car today.
** The redesigned, front wheel drive 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme was praised by critics upon launch and is considered to be a good car in its own right, but the disastrous "This Is Not Your Father's Oldsmobile" marketing campaign used to launch it was a massive failure that caused sales of the Oldsmobile brand as a whole to crater, leading to the brand's eventual demise in 2004. The 1988 Cutlass is thus considered to be [[Creator Killer|the car that killed Oldsmobile]]. As a result, today they are undesired and valueless.
** If the last Oldsmobile rolled off the line in 2004, and the last Neon in 2005, all of these cars are at least {{#expr:{{CURRENTYEAR}}-2005}} years old. The few still on the roads are rapidly nearing the end of their useful lifespan, but are not yet old enough to join the likes of [[What Could Possibly Go Wrong?|Ford's Edsel]] in the hallowed ranks of truly classic cars. That means that the few still running are by now in mostly poor condition, only adding to the negative reputation - as discontinued vehicles drop in value more rapidly.
* The Goggomobil Dart. "If you needed a sudden burst of acceleration, it was best to jump out and run". (A certified lunatic in Germany has fitted [http://www.deutsche-werke.de/goggo2.htm one] with a 9-cylinder, 10-liter radial aircraft engine. It out-accelerates Porsches.)
* The Fiat Ritmo/Strada, which, due to using recycled Soviet steel, was infamous for quickly rusting away. Dunno if any exist anymore, much less working ones. By the way, [[Fun with Acronyms|FIAT]] was often [[backronym]]ed as "Fix it Again, Tony", or "Failure in Automotive Technology".
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* Yahoo automotive contributor Tim Cernea has several of these stories, the most tropeworthy being his [http://voices.yahoo.com/the-best-car-ever-owned-11309842.html?cat=27 1965 Ford Falcon Ranchero.]{{Dead link}} In true handyman fashion, he described the car losing its fuel tank on the highway as "a minor setback".
* The G-Wiz is a very tiny electric car. Ok, technically it is legally a "Heavy Quadbike" in Britain for it's extreme lack of power. It has extremely poor acceleration, you can't use any of the electronics such as the radio, since it will kill the G-Wiz's very small battery life, and basically disintegrates in a crash.
* And then there was the [[Great Depression]], in which motorists couldn't afford to maintain (or, in some cases, even fuel) cars they'd acquired as luxuries in the [[Roaring Twenties]]. More than a few broken-down vehicles were abandoned during the [[Grapes of Wrath]]-like trek westward out of the [[Dust Bowl]]
{{reflist}}
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