Published: April 29, 2016, 2:25 AM
Updated: May 5, 2016, 3:29 PM
Questionable choices
In retrospect, some COTY choices raise the question, what were they smoking?
By Jeremy Sinek
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Sometimes Car-of-the-Year jurors just get it wrong
Contrary to what some skeptics may think, auto reviewers and car-of-the-year jurors do not have psychic powers. A day or a week driving the latest mutt-mobile can’t possibly reveal that five years down the road it will turn out to have the reliability of a crack-head. And, when all goes according to plan, journalists do not crash-test cars, so don’t blame original reviewers of the Ford Pinto for failing to discover it would very likely auto-ignite if rear-ended. That all said, sometimes even when judging the vehicle in the here and now, Car-of-Year jurors get it wrong. With all the above in mind, we present 15 cars and light trucks that with hindsight weren’t quite as good as was thought at the time.
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Chevrolet Corvair – 1960 Motor Trend Car of the Year
Motor Trend established one of the first Car of the Year programs, in 1949 and in 1960 its award went to the all-new Chevrolet Corvair. In engineering terms, the Corvair with its rear-mounted air-cooled engine was both radically innovative (for Detroit) and shamefully imitative (of the VW Beetle). Either way, the Corvair is now forever linked with the treacherous handling alleged in Ralph Nader’s seminal book, Unsafe at Any Speed (Editor’s note: notwithstanding that it shared those traits with the beloved Beetle, where they caused no fuss at all). The editors of Motor Trend might be forgiven for failing to forecast that outcome.
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Fiat 124 – 1967 European Car of the Year
The boxy Fiat 124 wasn’t really a bad car. Indeed, its mechanical specs – coil-spring rear suspension, four-wheel disc brakes, available twin-cam engine and five-speed gearbox – were unusually advanced for a 1960s econobox. The biggest knock against the 124 is the car it beat into second place: the BMW 1600. The 1600 was the seminal compact sport sedan that evolved into the 2002 and truly put BMW on the map. The 124’s main contribution to posterity? Fiat licenced the design to Russia, which turned it into the VAZ-2101, better known in export markets as the Lada 1200.
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Chevrolet Vega – 1971 Motor Trend Car of the Year
OK, you can’t blame this one on Motor Trend either. At launch the brand-new Vega seemed to be a stylish, good-driving car with an advanced SOHC aluminum engine (of which a high-performance version was later developed by no less than F1 engine supplier Cosworth). It took a couple of years before the Vega became the poster car for everything that was wrong with the US auto industry in the seventies – i.e., “widely known for a range of problems related to its engineering, reliability, safety, propensity to rust, and engine durability,” as described by Wikipedia. Oh well.
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Citroen SM – 1972 Motor Trend Car of the Year
What were they thinking? The Citroen SM was a hyper-complex luxury coupe from a brand virtually unknown in the U.S. (“Citron? Isn’t that French for lemon?”) It looked other-worldly and drove much the same way, while maintenance required not one but two rare-as-hens’-teeth dealer networks – Maserati for the engine, and Citroen for the rest of the car. It’s surprising Citroen managed to sell any in North America, let alone the 2,400 that it did sell in 1972 and 1973. Then it had to be pulled from the U.S. market because its variable-height suspension could not consistently meet new 1974 bumper-height standards. This one is on them.
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Ford Mustang – 1974 Motor Trend Car of the Year
There are many good reasons why millions of fans revere the Ford Mustang – but the Mustang II is not one of them. Launched in a time of oil crises and strangling emission controls, it was dramatically downsized from its muscle-car predecessors. Smaller isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except that Mustang II shared its engineering with the notorious Pinto econobox. Initially you couldn’t even get it with a V-8 – just a 2.3-litre “four” and a 2.8-litre V-6. Even when a 302 V-8 did appear for 1975, its output was a feeble 122 horsepower. MT justified its choice at the time by calling Mustang II an “outstanding concept of affordable luxury and prestige in a small package.” We call that an outstanding failure to grasp the concept.
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Simca 1307/Chrysler Alpine – 1975 European Car of the Year
How many of us have even heard of this car, let alone remember it? Exactly. Originally launched by Chrysler’s then French subsidiary Simca, the 1307 (Chrysler Alpine in the U.K.) was a front-drive hatchback at a time when rear-drive sedans were still the norm in its size class. It neither set the market on fire nor set enthusiasts’ hearts aflame. Nobody published a coffee-table book about it. The real measure of how badly the pan-European jury got this one wrong: the car that placed second – a fairly distant second -- to the Simca that year was the first-generation BMW 3 Series.
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Audi 100/5000 - 1983 European Car of the Year
Actually, as a design the Audi 100 was a genuinely deserving winner. It really did advance the state of the automotive art. Car and Driver called it “about as close as you can get to the car of the future.” All that counted for nothing, however, when ham-footed American consumers and the TV “investigative” show 60 Minutes conjured up the infamous Audi 5000 sudden-acceleration scandal. Throw in some other unrelated quality issues, and by the time Audi was exonerated over the unintended acceleration, it was also almost extinct in the U.S. Who could have predicted?
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Pontiac Grand Prix – 1988 Motor Trend Car of the Year
Between 1976 and 1999 Motor Trend had separate awards for domestics and imports (which side of the domestic/import divide was that supposed to help, do you think?) In ’88, an all-new Honda Civic range was in the running for the import trophy and MT gave it to the CRX Si version. For the Detroit gang, the new Grand Prix took the honours, for reasons that utterly escaped us then and now. Its front-wheel-drive architecture was new for GM but already old hat among most rivals, and nothing else made it anything resembling a game changer.
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Lincoln Continental – 1988 AJAC Canadian Car of the Year
Back in 1988 the fledgling AJAC award program also split the candidates into domestic and import categories, but then a single overall winner was chosen from the two category winners. The import winner was the Acura Legend, but in the final run-off the domestic winner prevailed. Um, why? Far from returning the Continental nameplate to its one-time glory, this Gen-8 design shared a front-drive platform with the Ford Taurus, powered by an anemic 3.8-L V6. If you ever see one these days, it’s probably sitting on its belly in a driveway with its air suspension terminally deflated.
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Lincoln Town Car – 1990 Motor Trend Car of the Year
OK, we’ll grant the 1990 Town Car one thing: its more rounded, aerodynamic body was a bold departure from its angle-iron predecessor. But under the skin it was the same old same old, a luxury car still riding on a beam rear axle in an era when even most econoboxes had independent rear suspensions. The greatest indictment of the Town Car’s win, however, is to list some of the other cars that were new for 1990 and didn’t win: Audi A8, Acura Integra, Nissan 300ZX, Mazda 323/Protégé, Mazda Miata, Lexus LS400, Infiniti Q45…
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Chrysler Cirrus – 1995 North American and Motor Trend Car of the Year
How quickly we forget. The Chrysler Cirrus (and its Dodge Stratus sister car) was quite dramatically styled for its time, and technically sophisticated. It was not only named Motor Trend’s domestic car of the year, but also overall North American Car of the Year in the second year of that new but arguably more democratic program. But then … blaah. No real sales success, no street cred, no cult following of enthusiast owners preserving the Cirrus for posterity. When it came due for a redesign the name changed to Sebring and the Cirrus nameplate floated back into the sky.
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Ford Expedition – 1997 North American Truck of the Year
Even the moderating influence of the Canadian jurors couldn’t prevent their majority American colleagues from endorsing this symbol of conspicuous consumption. Perhaps the Expedition was a fine example of what it was meant to be – but what it was meant to be is exactly what was wrong with it. Nothing better illustrates NA Car of the Year’s failure to grasp the concept in 1997 than the Truck of the Year finalist that didn’t win – the original Toyota RAV4. The compact CUV category that the RAV4 invented is now the largest-selling vehicle category in North America. The 1997 RAV4 was a pioneer. The Expedition was a dinosaur.
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Mercedes-Benz ML320 – 1998 North American Truck of the Year / AJAC Car of the Year
We won’t even try to understand why this body-on-frame SUV ended up as AJAC’s 1998 Car of the Year. But we do understand why the industry and CotY were excited about the ML320. It was the first luxury SUV made by Mercedes, as well as the first Mercedes built in the U.S. – and for a Mercedes it wasn’t even especially expensive. We soon found out the cost of the low price. Even the visible interior fit and finish fell far short of the quality expected from Mercedes. And as time went on, multiple reliability woes confirmed that the cheapness was more than skin deep.
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Saturn Aura – 2007 North American Car of the Year
Winning this award failed to cast much of a glow on Saturn’s flagship sedan. The Aura wasn’t a bad car, but it wasn’t a great one either. Sales were ho-hum, reliability middling, and then it was gone. After its third model year (2009) the Aura was dispatched to the footnotes of history along with the entire Saturn division (and Pontiac, and Saab …) One of the cars the Aura beat out for the 2007 Car of the Year award was the Honda Fit, which at the time was arguably far and away the best car in its class.
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Mazda CX-3 – 2016 AJAC Utility Vehicle of the Year
Everybody loves the Mazda CX-3. It looks sharp, it’s fun to drive, it’s fuel-efficient and it’s available with all-wheel drive. So why is it in this list? Well, first, a utility vehicle should have some actual, you know, utility. The CX-3 doesn’t. By CUV standards – and even compared with other subcompact CUVs – its cargo area is tiny. Secondly, a utility vehicle is a sub-species of light truck, and according to official industry definitions, the CX-3 isn’t one. Government fuel-consumption requirements list cars and light trucks separately, and NR Canada’s Fuel Consumption Guide lists the CX-3 in the cars section. Great little AWD car, though.
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