Cars today are nearly homogenous in that they’re rolling tributes to practicality, frugality, safe-ish understeer, dampened throttle response and five star safety ratings. With manufacturing processes improving every day, it’s becoming nearly impossible to say a car truly sucks without deferring to pure preference. But there are some black sheep in the bunch - there have to be.
As some may have noticed, I’m a bit of a used car buff because I try to buy value per dollar, not dollar per budget, but as I’ve ranted about before, cars both new and used are getting better in terms of quality. So much so that a typical exchange between a customer and a dealer need not occur until the day the customer misreads the oil change interval and misses the number by a factor of 10.
However, in a typical scenario in the bell-bottomed malaise era of automobiles, the car would’ve been back at the dealership that afternoon for a laundry list of faults that would’ve given lemon lawyers a reason to skip their weekly Cialis.
What cars made in the last decade, if any, are truly bad in terms of quality, performance, style and longevity?
I’d love to hear your responses and come up with an unofficial definitive list of cars to avoid at all costs. I’ll limit these to cars sold in the US, since I know Europe has some seriously questionable examples running around.
Tavarish is the founder of APiDA Online and writes and makes videos about buying and selling cool cars on the internet. He owns the world’s cheapest Mercedes S-Class, a graffiti-bombed Lexus, and he’s the only Jalopnik author that has never driven a Miata. He also has a real name that he didn’t feel was journalist-y enough so he used a pen name and this was the best he could do.
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