GM's Worst

Want to know what the best-selling car in North America was last year?
Honda Civic? Good guess. Toyota Corolla? Seems obvious, but no.
Cobalt? Not even close.

The car that captured the sales title for 2008 was none other than the
domestically produced Little Tikes Cozy Coupe. Yes, those tiny, bright
red, egg-shaped cars sold a whopping 457,000 units last year, easily
besting Japan's finest with excellent fuel economy and a low, low
price. So why should you care? Because this car, which costs around
fifty bucks and is stamped out in a mould in Ohio, has better build
quality and a less plasticky interior than most GM products.

"Oh sure," you say, "Kick 'em while they're down." But let's face it:
When hasn't the General been down? The company's been a paragon of
poor product and mismanagement since the late 14th century, and as
nice as it is to reflect on the great cars they somehow managed to
build, like a roomful of monkeys bashing out Hamlet, GM has built some
real stinkers over the years.

We're not just talking poor reliability here. We're talking seats
designed by members of the Spanish Inquisition, dashboards made out of
the same flimsy plastic you find in chocolate box trays, engines that
couldn't be any less modern and efficient if they ran on coal, and
styling done by a committee of 400 people who couldn't agree on
anything except that they hated beauty so much they probably went
around on the weekends beating up swans and stomping on butterflies.

Here are the worst offenders (and there's plenty to choose from):

The Hummer H2

Given its Americatastic image, the fact that Hummer has now been
more-or-less officially sold to the Chinese seems poetic somehow.
Sure, they were great off-road, and sure, if you wanted to let
everyone know that you were a drug dealer or the Governor of
California, you couldn't pick a vehicle with a clearer image. On the
other hand, owning a Hummer was a little like going to the pet store
to get a puppy for the kids and coming back with a hippopotamus. With
tapeworms.

I must confess, I have a particular and nearly unwarranted hatred for
the H3 as a badge-engineered excrescence; the only nice thing I can
say about the engineers behind it is that they managed to make the
Chevy Trailblazer even worse, which is quite an achievement. However,
as much as the H2 was actually a much more capable and respectable
vehicle, it's the one that will have to take the lion's share of the
blame.

Not since the Cadillac Escalade has there been such a ludicrous
example of conspicuous consumption, and as the H3's release coincided
with the crushing of the last of GM's EV-1 electrical vehicles, it
pretty much turned the General into a scapegoat for environmentalists.
Not that they didn't deserve it too, but the H3 allowed Toyota to get
on the green-wagon first, despite the Japanese company's own
gas-guzzlers like the Lexus LX-series.

The Saturn Ion

A popular idea in science fiction is the idea of an orbital ion
cannon, capable of delivering a pin-point strike with a destructive
energy beam of unimaginable power. Should one ever be developed, I
propose the first set of targets to be wiped from the face of the
Earth should be all examples of this horrible economy car. That's of
course assuming their owners haven't already set fire to them by that
point.

Released in 2003, the Ion was supposed to be the "New Saturn" that
would take on the Civic and Corolla and run, ahem, rings around them.
Unfortunately, its success was blunted by weirdly confused styling, a
woefully underpowered engine and, without a hint of exaggeration, the
worst car interior in the History of Mankind.

They'd eventually make a Redline supercharged version, but as far as
I'm concerned, the Ion was all Flatline, and if you're a Saturn fan
you can blame it for the death of your favourite company.

Chevy minivans, any of them

Woe is you if you ever traded in your hot little coupe for one of
these things because of a burgeoning family. Uplander, Montana, SV6,
whatever you called them, they were basically purgatory with sliding
doors: sliding doors that frequently broke.

Early models were just barely OK, but they suffered from having a
crashworthiness level slightly higher than that of a cardboard Pampers
box. This did not go over well with those soccer moms who didn't want
their offspring to die horribly (i.e. all of them), so GM glued a
four-foot nose to the front. Crashworthiness problem solved, styling
problem aggravated. On the other hand, it's a minivan. Who cares if
it's uglier than Quasimodo on a bad hair day after being relentlessly
attacked by wasps?

Buyers care, apparently, and what's worse, they surprisingly don't
want unreliable vehicles. A quick search of a consumer-based-reviews
website popped up two representative samples. One began, "We've had
lots of problems with our minivan. Very disappointed and would not
recommend." The next one started, "What could possibly go wrong
next??!?" Uh-oh.

I stopped reading before I got depressed.

The Pontiac Aztec

Here it is: the auto journalist's favourite whipping boy. It takes a
special type of car to be the one that always gets incorporated into
the tagline, ". . . but at least it's not as ugly as the Pontiac
Aztec." As in, "The new 7-series BMW looks like it was designed by
pushing the old one down the stairs and then jumping up and down on
the wreckage, but at least it's not as ugly as the Pontiac Aztec."

Shame really, as the bizarrely-styled trucklet wasn't too terrible
elsewhere. Beneath that weird exterior beat a heart of pure . . .
arthritis, actually. However, on a kinder note, the looks were
something of an anti-theft device, and you could bolt a tent on the
back. That's it, I can't think up any more nice things to say.

The Chevy SSR

I think this takes the cake. GM's built some bad, bad cars and worse
trucks, but the SSR takes terrible to a whole new level:
ultraterrible.

For starters, it's a production convertible pickup truck. What? Who
needs a convertible pickup truck? Cattle ranchers in Malibu? Guys with
really big hats? Elvis's re-animated corpse?

Worse, because it has a folding hardtop, there's no space in the truck
bed. And you can't tow anything with it. And there are only two seats.

Still, it looks cool, in a sort of retro-futuristic way, although the
bifurcated headlamps kind of resemble bifocals to me. But for a
whopping, no, make that insane $80,000, you could just have easily
bought four classic hotrods and your own tow-truck service to take
care of them, and another pickup to carry stuff. It's not like the SSR
was any more reliable than a worked-over '48 Chev. Plus, the hotrods
wouldn't have crappy plastic interiors.

That's not even the worst part. The worst part, and something I can't
abide in a car that claims to be a factory hotrod, is how slow this
thing was. It's a two-door convertible with a 350 horsepower,
5.7-litre V-8 engine. Should be pretty nippy, right? Wrong. This thing
got to 100 km/h in about eight seconds and ran the quarter mile in, at
best, 15.7 seconds. You can do that in a Buick Park Avenue. You can do
that in a Dodge Neon, for crying out loud, and this truckvertible cost
more than $80,000.

I suppose the performance is not surprising when you look up the
curb-weight of the SSR and find that it weighs the same as that
blasted H3 or the combined moons of Jupiter. Still, it's the perfect
vehicle to point out GM's current problems: Bloated, underachieving,
off-target, and far too costly.

Give the Little Tikes people a call, GM. They'll help you out.