Ripped from vwvortex (like most of nfs4's threads).
Car makers spend £billions perfecting their new cars. They spend literally years in development and with the millions of miles that will flow under the wheels of hundreds of prototypes, it's a wonder they have any faults at all.
Happily, while robots now build cars, they're still designed by humans and we still make mistakes no computer is going to pick up. In fact, the entire history of the automobile is strewn with the corpses of cars that came to market complete with a potentially fatal flaw already lurking under the metal.
The latest is Ford's fabulous new GT supercar. It's almost as if no single car deserved so much good press, and after the avalanche of bouquets that showered down on its head from the moment the world first clapped eyes on it, some malevolent force reckoned it was time for at least one bucket of steaming manure. Which is why Ford has had to notify every GT owner not to drive their car another inch until a faulty suspension component, which could cause a wheel to come loose, could be changed. The car credited with getting a good Ford story onto the front pages for once is now attracting attention for all the wrong reasons.
A-Class mk1: done in by an elk
But for a design flaw to become a really serious headache for a car manufacturer, nothing helps quite so much as the first time they find out about it being when the car is crashed. By a journalist. Such was the fate that befell the Mercedes A-Class. Before it was launched in 1997, a Swedish hack managed to flip one while simulating a dramatic attempt to swerve around an errant moose. Mercedes could have tried to tough it out but, for very good reasons, it delayed the launch of the car, modified its suspension and incorporated an electronic stability programme. They then gave the car back to the journalist who pronounced it cured. Crisis averted, it went on to becoming the fastest-selling car in the company's history.
More recently still, in 1999, Audi offered to modify its TT coupe because of complaints from German customers that they could lose control at high speed. Audi never acknowledged any problem nor did it officially recall the car but it still modified the suspension and fitted a rear spoiler free of charge to all customers who asked which, as it turned out, was most of them. It was done, says Audi, not because there was anything wrong with the car but to maintain consumer confidence.
It's a lesson Audi had learned the hard way. In the 1980s it sold a car called the 5000 in North America which gained a reputation for 'unintended acceleration'. What would happen, said its alleged victims, is that you'd climb aboard, start the engine and then, all by itself, the car would go berserk until something hard enough stopped it.
Audi 5000: owners complained of phantom acceleration
The phenomenon was not new. Indeed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had investigated of 2700 cases of unintended acceleration from over a dozen marques and every one concluded that driver error was to blame. So Audi stuck its ground - it did not believe its cars would suddenly go mad and there was evidence, such as bent accelerator pedals, that customers were actually standing on the wrong pedal. But if ever there was a Pyrrhic victory, this was it. Consumer confidence in Audi evaporated, sales dived and took years to return. It seems the customer is always right, even when the stupid schmuck is demonstrably wrong.
But if the Audi 5000 did not have a fault, many others did. The Chevrolet Corvair, was a radical, beautiful roadster of the 1960s, with a revolutionary, rear-mounted engine. Unfortunately the combination of the engine being in the back and a rather primitive form of suspension led to peculiar handling characteristics in certain circumstances. So unusual, indeed, that it led safety campaigner Ralph Nader to write a book about it titled: 'Unsafe at any speed'. That book was its death warrant.
But the Corvair was not the only car with alternative handling. When the Skoda Estelle went on sale in the UK in 1977, consumer groups were so appalled by its manners they persuaded the Department of Transport to investigate what they saw as its wayward nature.
MK1: Mike Hawthorn's demise
Remember the Jaguar MK1 - the transport of choice for every 1950s bank-robber? It suffered from a rear track that was too narrow and it's been claimed this was a contributing factor in the accident that claimed the life of Mike Hawthorn, the then F1 world champion, though he was also going much too fast in atrocious conditions.
You risked your life in a 1973 Moskvich 412 in an entirely different way. The Consumer's Association branded this reasonably incompetent but otherwise apparently harmless Russian import 'dangerously unsafe' and, tautology aside, they had a point. So sharp were some of the interior fitments that you could survive an accident in one unharmed only to suffer the indignity of being stabbed by your own car whilst trying to get out.
Delorean: rust-proof but scratch-persistent
Other cars suffered from faults of construction rather than design. My mother had a Lancia Beta coupe in the early 1980s that you could almost hear fizzing it rusted so quickly. Alfa Romeo's Alfasud was built in an all-new factory by people who'd never built cars before using dirt-cheap Russian steel which also oxidized in next to no time at all.
John Z DeLorean's great idea was to construct his ill-fated gull-wing supercar from unpainted stainless steel, guaranteed never to rust. The problem was it scratched if you did much more than sneeze on it. Those doors also meant it was almost impossible to get out of if you turned one over or had a garage with a low ceiling.
Ford has produced a couple of belters in its time too. First was the Edsel, not only one of the ugliest cars ever built (rivalled only by the AMC Pacer which we'll be meeting shortly) but also one of the least reliable. It arrived on a tidal wave of hype in 1957 and was stone dead three years later. It suffered from parts that went wrong, parts that failed to fit together and, most bizarrely, parts that weren't fitted at all. Those looks, that name and its soon legendary unreliability were its undoing.
By contrast, all it took to undo the 1970s Ford Pinto was the location of the fuel tank behind the rear axle line. Being inside a stationary Pinto watching someone about to smash into the back of you soon became an all-American nightmare. Pinto drivers took to using prominent 'Hit me and we blow up together' bumper stickers.
Ford's deadly Pinto: 'Hit me and we blow up together'
But for sheer silliness, we're still scratching the surface. Remember the AMC Pacer mentioned earlier? Its great design feature was to have a passenger door that was much longer than the driver's door so your children could safely and easily climb into the back. Great idea. But then they had the even greater idea of selling it in the UK with right-hand drive. Unfortunately they couldn't swap the doors over too, forcing your children to climb aboard on the same side as the traffic.
I have a particularly soft spot for the 1977 FSO Polonez which arrived in the UK boasting convenient, practical hatchback bodywork; at least it would have been practical had they thought also to install a folding rear seat
The 1956 Facel Vega Excellence was about as exotic as cars came and, to prove it, it had four doors with no supporting structure (known as a B-pillar) between each pair. This meant that if ever all four were opened at the same time, so weak was the car's body that it would flex enough to ensure you couldn't close them again.
And if you were wondering why none of the marvels of 1970s British Leyland have been mentioned until now, it is simply because I wanted to save the worst till last. We'll forgive the Morris Marina, just about the worst handling car of its era. We'll turn a blind eye to the beautiful Triumph Stag's appallingly unreliable engine and cast our gaze on the Austin Allegro.
Not for nothing was this known as the 'All-Aggro.' It had a square steering-wheel, which was interesting, and so little rigidity that the rear windscreen popped out when you jacked it up. But I remember it for two more reasons: one a design fault that should never have seen production, the other a quirk of fate so beautifully apt you wonder whether it could have happened by accident alone.
Allegro: slippery in reverse
The design fault affected the 1750SS model, the sporting Allegro. And if this sounds like a contradiction in terms to you, imagine what a proud owner felt when he walked up to it in the morning and discovered all four tyres were flat. BL failed to mention that those sexy alloy wheels were, in fact, porous.
The quirk of fate is simply this: at some stage and for reasons unknown, someone put an Allegro in wind-tunnel facing the wrong way. It was only then they discovered the Allegro had better aerodynamics going backwards than forwards. Says it all, really.
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