A heap of dungers

So you think your car's a load of rubbish? ALASTAIR SLOANE can find you some that are a great deal worse.


The Daily Telegraph's motoring writers and its readers have assembled a list of the worst cars of the past 100 years.

Britain's National Motor Museum at Beaulieu, in south England, is about to open an exhibition that brings together the worst and the best.

The biggest battle for museum manager Roger Bateman was finding examples of cars that appeared in the worst list - and convincing owners to put them on display.

That was a bit awkward, he said. The owners were enthusiasts and obviously loved their cars and wanted to defend them, not display them for ridicule.

Is the museum expecting makers to cause a row? After all, the Jaguar XJ220, McLaren F1 and Volkswagen Beetle appear on the list despite their critical acclaim over the years.

"Not yet," Bateman said. "But that may change when the doors open. We don't expect to get any negative reaction from the manufacturers but we suspect some enthusiasts might not be too impressed.

"Anyway, it's not us, it's the newspaper which put the list together."

The London newspaper's writers and readers compiled the 100-worst list to mark the millennium and the end of the first century of motoring - and to deliver a riposte to the much-hyped Car of the Century promotion, which installed the the Ford Model T in the motoring pantheon.

Significantly, the VW Beetle featured in both. Here are some of the newspaper panel's bad and ugly list.

Alfa Romeo Alfa Sud (1972-83). This pert little car was a Jekyll and Hyde. It was - rather ominously - manufactured in the shadow of the volcano Vesuvius on the outskirts of Naples, a site chosen under the Italian Government's regional development scheme.

The Sud was fun to drive but cruelly prone to rusting, like many good Italian cars of its day. It had a good engine, sounded great, but was handicapped by a rather plasticky interior, dubious reliability and freefalling second-hand values. Canny Sud owners enjoyed a brief, bitter-sweet love affair - and quickly sold.

AMC Pacer (1975-80). This short, ugly, overweight, underpowered, thirsty and dynamically dismal car inspired the famously scathing British headline: We drive the AMC Pacer - and wish we hadn't. AMC soon withdrew from Britain.

Armstrong-Siddeley Sapphire (1952-58). This square-set, overweight horror seldom achieved better than 17 litres/100km from its 3.4-litre six-cylinder engine and was sarcastically known as the rich man's Rolls-Royce, thanks to notoriously poor reliability and high running costs.

Much the same applied to the ...

Aston Martin Virage (1988-92). It looked only partly finished, with highly variable panel gaps and strange inset headlights. Its claimed 230kW felt barely enough to pull it out of its own weighty shadow. Ghastly build and dreadful engine installation added to the horrors.

Austin Allegro (1973-83). Given the nickname All Aggro, this car was pitiful. The most charitable explanation is that it was part of a successful communist plot to destroy Britain's motor industry.

BMW 850 coupe (1989-99). This model proved that BMW isn't master of the universe after all. The huge car was lacking in most areas, including a criminally cramped cabin, lacklustre performance, anodyne handling, and all the charisma of wet sand. A second-hand snip, but who would want one?

Chevrolet Corvair (1960-69). This costly mistake for General Motors was the car that launched the career of safety campaigner Ralph Nader. In extreme cornering the inside rear-swing-axle tucked under and caused rollovers. Corvairs are now favoured by collectors who don't drive them much.

Chrysler Viper (1992-). Uncomfortable and badly made, with a cacophonous truck engine and a soft-top that Daily Telegraph motoring writer David Vivian aptly described as being like a crashed hang-glider. It is very quick but unpleasant to drive and absurdly overpriced.

DeLorean DMC12 (1981-82). British taxpayers spent millions on this - proof that stainless steel is an excellent material for making kitchen sinks.

Ferrari 4000i (1979-89). All Ferraris are good, right? Wrong. The 4000i was a cynical marketing exercise which betrayed the Ferrari ethos. This was a big stumbling nag, not a prancing horse. Too big, too heavy and mostly fitted with a three-speed automatic, it should have been taken to the knackery.

Ford Capri 1300 (1969-74). Billed as "the car you always promised yourself" - unless it was the base model, which had the power-to-weight ratio of a housebrick. It was soon axed, the only quick thing that ever happened to it.

Ford Edsel (1958-60). The archetypal motor industry disaster. The Daily Telegraph's David Burgess-Wise called it Ford's most costly mistake - an estimated $400 million. Less certain is the cause of its failure. Was it an economic recession or the stylised representation on the grille of female genitalia that kept customers away?

Ford Scorpio (1995-98). With its gaping and ingenuous smiling mouth and fat, matronly rump, this was one of the silliest-looking cars of the century. As the sum of idiotic body parts, it was widely ridiculed during its short life, sold miserably, and its unlamented early demise is proof that style matters.

Jaguar XJ220 (1992-94). Never before has a car that cost so much sounded so awful. For its exorbitant $1.5 million price-tag, the ill-conceived Jaguar supercar was a visual firecracker that became a damp squib when its meagre V6 rattled into life.

Lada Riva (1982-). This spartan vehicle, essentially a Soviet-built Fiat 124, went on sale in 1970 but was known in Europe as the Riva from 82. Rough and rugged are two of the kindest words that spring to mind. The same money spent on a tractor would have delivered a lot more fun.

McLaren F1 (1994-98). Schoolboys tell you this is the world's most amazing car. Adults acknowledge that it's the world's most amazing waste of money - and not just because the annual service can cost the equivalent of $30,000. But the F1's thrusting central zone allows egotistical millionaires to demonstrate amazing car control as they cruise along motorways at 30 per cent of the car's top speed.

The McLaren doesn't have a sun visor, presumably because owners wear shades all the time. Fair enough, anyone who buys a car like this must be blind.

Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR (1999). Like the McLaren, a missile designed to win the Le Mans 24 Hours. It was as unstable as it was fast. Drivers were blamed on the first two occasions the thing took off and flipped without explanation, so Benz went ahead and raced anyway. The third time it happened, on live television, the penny dropped. Merc withdrew, later scrapping its sportscar programme.

Trabant (1959-90). Made, incredibly, of pressed cardboard, this East German effort was the butt of many jokes, the most notable: How do you repair your Mercedes-Benz S-Class after it has hit a Trabant at 240 km/h? Switch on the headlight washers.

Triumph Stag (1970-77). Basically a roofless Triumph 2000, this had a disaster-prone V8 and a T-bar safety hoop, evidently to hold the monocoque body together. The stablemate TR7 (1975-81) was a stodgy two-seater sedan masquerading as a sportscar. Its wedge-shaped body was its only distinctive feature. A distinguished designer, on seeing the TR7 in profile, walked around the car and said: "Oh no, they've done it to this side as well."

Volkswagen Beetle (1945-). Hindsight still cannot explain the popularity of this car, with its abysmal handling, constipated sewing-machine engine and poor packaging. Clever marketing persuaded millions of otherwise right thinking people to buy Adolf Hitler's dream car and call it cute. Ferdinand Porsche stole the original design from Czech carmaker Tatras Hans Ledwinka, who was jailed for Nazi collaboration. Subsequent compensation payments nearly broke Volkswagen.