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Classic Cars 50 Worst Cars of All Time
298 messages, Last post on May 11, 2009 at 1:53 PM
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Merkur XR4Ti Ask anyone who owned one.
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| An old friend of mine had a poopy brown Pontiac Phoenix (X-car) in the early 90s....there were some hills it simply couldn't tackle. Another friend had a Bronco II at the same time, in high school...on one steep local hill he actually had to give up and back down it. Yet my less than muscle car of an old fintail can pull it without a problem. | |
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Replying to: samdog (Nov 19, 2008 6:28 pm) That's one of the reasons I get a bit nervous about all these European transplants Ford is bring over. GM Opel or Ford of Europe, they don't have a good track record holding up in America. Hopefully things have changed. |
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This wasn't the Pontiac intermediate, but, rather, the Opel-designed 4 cylinder Pontiac-badged small car, built by Daewoo. It served as a replacement for the Chevette based T-1000, if I remember correctly. Anyhow, although I never had the misfortune of owning one, fortunately, I understand that this car was a pretty bad car, at least in terms of reliability. The fact that I still see one on the road now and then, though, and as recently as last month - which is pretty unbelievable to me - suggests that it may not be bad enough to be one of the 50 worst. Maybe it's just the 51st worst car of all time. I'm sure some of you remember these rather awful cars. It was yet another failed attempt by GM to compete with the Japanese. The Opel (Kadette) on which the LeMans was based would have had to be a much better car than its Daewoo built counterpart, in terms of build quality, at least. Come to think of it, I think the Chevette and T-1000 were based on the Opel Kadette too. It's a good thing that GM didn't come out with Oldsmobile, Buick, and, heaven forbid, Cadillac versions of this Daewoo subcompact. Can you imagine the ad copy, "And now for you happy Cimarron owners who would prefer something even smaller, for your urban driving needs, Cadillac is proud to introduce the all new Cadilette. Now available at your local Cadillac dealer, at prices starting at $9,995...*or just $10,495 for the Premium, leather edition." |
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Replying to: hpmctorque (Nov 19, 2008 8:03 pm) The headlight switch knob came off in my hand when I turned them on the first time. Another demonstration of GM's death-wish, to my mind. They weren't satisfied with killing Cadillac - no! They had to start killing off the great names from their past too. Of course they weren't the only ones. When I get to Hell, I'm going to ask to vist the circle where they keep the guy who OK'd the "Mustang (sic) II. The cruelest thing about that abomination was that it really wasn't any smaller than the original 65 Mustang. It just did everything worse. Now, back to the Daewoo LeMans. My local mechanic of choice one time showed me a De Mans that had hit one of those reflectors that they put along the interstate. You know, the little reflectors that they put up on metal stop-sign posts? It darn near totaled that little Daewoo. He was horrified by the lousy sheet metal in that thing. That fact that one still exists is merely an example of the law of big numbers. One in a million survives the rust, one in a million doesn't blow up, one in a million doesn't hit anything.. Sometimes all those one in a million odds come together in the same car. Somewhere there is a museum quality Yugo, is it not so? 
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Replying to: lokki (Nov 20, 2008 7:51 am) I was at a car show in Cincinnati when they first displayed that thing. Get this - they had a whole display bragging about how it was close to the size of the original T-Bird! What a bunch of IDIOTS. Nobody's mentioned the Ford EXP - at least they didn't ruin another great old name with that rolling disaster, a car about which Iacocca said "the young folks will just eat this up." Oops!  
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Replying to: texases (Nov 20, 2008 8:16 am) I think the wheels were off a Mercury Linx or a Topaz too. 
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Replying to: hpmctorque (Nov 19, 2008 8:03 pm) Come to think of it, I think the Chevette and T-1000 were based on the Opel Kadette too. You have it backwards, there were Opel Kadetts long before there was a Daewoo Industries but the T-Cars were descended from a Brazilian-built Chevy Chevette which eventually spawned the Opel Kadett C (1973-79). Daewoo's version was the comically named Daewoo Maepsy (a clone of the Isuzu Gemini). I don't think the Daewoo/Pontiac LeMans (Asuna GT/SE in Canada) ever had an Opel variant. Wikipedia-Daewoo LeMans.
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while Cadillac never offered one, thankfully, there was some aftermarket company back in the 70's that would take a Chevette and outfit it with a pretentious little grille, nip and tuck the rest of the sheetmetal here and there, and try to stuff in a leather interior and some other appointments that were supposed to give the illusion of a luxury car. I forget the name of the company or what they called the car, but I do remember seeing one on eBay once. Horrid little thing.
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Replying to: fintail (Nov 19, 2008 12:58 pm)
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