The Suzuki X-90: Good Things are sometimes U-G-L-Y

Let's get this out of the way first: The Suzuki X-90, made from 1995-1997, has been widely criticized for being UGLY. Even the ads asked "What are you staring at?" The X-90 had an 86 inch wheelbase (3 inches shorter than a Miata of the time) and a targa top. It was, in a nutshell, not quite an SUV, not quite a convertible. And it was microscopic.

Owners generally like their X-90s, as a "fun" vehicle or second or third car. It has formidable off road prowess, especially for a vehicle packing just 95 horsepower, and is generally reliable. Think of it as an ugly Jeep.

The Chrysler TC by Maserati

Maserati. The word evokes thoughts of cruising down a winding road along the French Riviera at sunset on a warm summer evening, the wind in your hair and not a care in the world. Impeccable Italian craftsmanship, the latest in luxury features, and smooth, punchy power are in the svelte car.

Chrysler. Perhaps you think of Middle America, a typical car. Of course, you may think of their recent quality issues, but this is 1989 we are talking about, so you probably think of a typical car, albeit one with a safety advantage due to their early introduction of air bags.

The Maserati TC didn't have air bags at its late 1989 launch - even a Dodge Omni (made by Chrysler) of the time had a driver air bag. Of course, with the air bag requirement not taking effect until 1998, most cars didn't have even a driver air bag until about 1992. Chrysler prided itself on being earlier, with all 1990 (and many 1989) vehicles it built in the US having a driver air bag. One problem: the TC was built in Italy. Later TCs got an air bag, but by this time, most of the TCs that would ever be built had already been built bagless.

But that's just the beginning of the TC's problems. The TC was built in three different locations - stamping took place in Torino, and it was assembled in Sparone and then Milan. Two of the engines - four cylinders - were developed jointly with Chrysler and Maserati. The third, a more powerful V6, came from Mitsubishi. Mitsu-flipping-bishi.

Let's not forget about the Chrysler LeBaron GTC, which offered the same features and more color choices at little more than half the price of the TC. Of course, one may argue that the Maserati build quality was probably better, but the Maserati of the late 1980s - early 1990s was not in its finest hour. The company was nearly bankrupt. Their volume model of the time was the Biturbo, a model which was known for being unreliable. And decidedly un-sexy.

The GTC had far better build quality. And an air bag. And was available at all Chrysler dealers, not just 300 select dealers.

Seems like a simple choice, and it was: only 7,300 units were sold at $33,000 - $37,000 each.

The New Proton Perdana - It's an 8th Generation Honda Accord

Top photo: my dearly departed 2008 Honda Accord.

Bottom photo by Paul Tan.

Top photo: my dearly departed 2008 Honda Accord.

Bottom photo, once again, is by Paul Tan.

They don't come more rehashed than this - but in this case, the base platform is a good thing. If you live in Malaysia, you know about Proton, which is their largest domestic car maker. Malaysia is a car-making country - led by two companies, Proton and Perodua - and their products are pretty good nowadays. Sadly, they don't sell in the US, although they do export to Europe, Australia, and most Asian countries. 

Proton, known for their collaboration with Mitsubishi, found a different partner for the new Perdana, launched in December 2013 for Malaysian government and to be launched to the Malaysian domestic market by 2015. Proton and Honda entered a deal to share engines, platforms, and various other car odds and ends, and the first fruit has been the new Perdana, which replaces the old Mitsubishi-based Perdana made from 1995 to 2010. It is a badge engineered 2008-2012 Honda Accord... complete with the same interior, exterior, and even airbag markings. Only some details differ. 

Proton has had some safety issues in the past, but has made cars more recently that are much safer. The Perdana, based on such a stellar design, should be just as safe.

May 10, 2014: See the podcast audio version on Sound Cloud.

The Alfa Romeo Arna - Alfa + Nissan =

Alfa Romeo has announced its return to the US in 2015, after a 20 year absence. The carmaker is well known for its attractive Italian styling, and the quality is good.

Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, one of the things that hampered Alfa Romeo was dodgy reliability, and they were losing market share. On October 9, 1980, Alfa Romeo and Nissan signed a deal to form a joint venture called ARNA - Alfa Romeo Nissan Autoveicoli - and develop a small family car to turn around Alfa Romeo's sagging fortunes. Nissan had just what Alfa needed: reliable vehicles. And Alfa had the sexy design. A reliable, sexy vehicle? Why hasn't this partnership lasted? Hmm... I wonder why.

This was the Alfa Romeo Arna. Right from the start, you can tell it's a royal screwup. From the outside, it's just a Nissan - a decidedly ho-hum looking vehicle at the time - with Alfa badges haphazardly slapped on it. It also suffered from the rather poor engineering quality of a typical 1980s Alfa Romeo. Imagine a 1980s Nissan, without the Nissan reliability. It was the worst of both worlds, and a worthless car. Somehow, 53,000 were sold, though very few remain - by 2000, just 340 remained in the UK, a major market. That indicates a 5-10% survival rate just 13-17 years after the cars were produced. It was an unreliable car, and one no one cared to keep in good shape.

Luckily, this piece of trash never made it out of Europe, and in 1987, it was canned and replaced by the Alfa Romeo 33, a much better car. The 33 was made between 1983 and 1995 (having run concurrently with the Arna during its first few years) and sold over a million units. And it looked like this:

The Mercedes Benz CLS - The World's First Ever.... 4 Door Coupe

Coupe. Coupes have two doors - or so you would think. Mercedes Benz makes coupes that they call coupes - the SL500 and SLK are two examples. Since 2005, coupe has taken on a broader meaning. Mercedes Benz, the inventor of the automobile, has come out with a 4 door coupe called the CLS. 
Built on a 2002-2009 E-Class frame stretched by six inches, the CLS slots between the E class and S class in the sedan 4 door lineup, and the E Coupe and CL Coupe in the coupe lineup. and will set you back at least $72,100 in 2014.

In the US, V8 power comes as standard with even the base CLS550 providing a scorching 402 horsepower that can haul this beast to 60 mph in just 5.1 seconds. AMG models - starting under $100,000 in 2014 - get you 550 or 577 horsepower and 3.6-3.7 second 0-60 times.

It comes with all the typical luxury accouterments a Mercedes Benz of this caliber would give you, as well as the engineering prowess that is the hallmark of this German luxury car company.

The TOYOTA Cavalier - A Chevy Cavalier sold as a... Toyota

A 1998 Toyota Cavalier

Remember GEO? Odds are, if you're born before the mid 1990s, you at least have some vague knowledge of what GEO was, but let's recap for those who forgot and those under 20: In 1988, General Motors, the grand behemoth of car manufacturing, decided to bolster their small car offerings in a world increasingly concerned about fuel efficiency. GEO license built cars from Suzuki, Isuzu and Toyota; one could buy the original version under its own brand, or the GEO version license built under joint ventures with the original companies. 

The GEO Prizm was one of these models, and was originally the Toyota Corolla. Due to trade and export restrictions and as a "payback" for the Prizm, GM built Chevy Cavaliers at their Lordstown, Ohio assembly plant and badged them as Toyotas for sale in the Japanese market. 

The Aurora - A Safety Car built by a Catholic Priest

The Aurora on display in the late 1950s.

 The story of the Aurora begins kind of oddly: a Catholic priest, Father Alfred A. Juliano, decided to build a car which pushed the art of car safety. This was 1957, a time when padded dashboards were extra cost options, seat belt wearers were as rare as Superman #1 comics, and Unsafe at Any Speed was still eight years away.

Looking at it from a 2014 perspective, some the safety features wouldn't work very well, but many have survived in cars to this day. There were seat belts - which wouldn't be required for another seven years. A collapsible steering column, which was still ten years from becoming commonplace. A roll cage. And a padded dashboard. Pretty standard stuff, but ahead of its time.

While none of the Aurora's safety features could be considered idiotic by a 1957 standard, 2014 is a much harsher judge of car safety. The Aurora had a button that the driver could push to swivel the seats rearward in the event of an impending crash, a windshield that bulged out to prevent impact, and a scoop like structure on the front end (clearly seen in the picture) that would reduce harm to pedestrians if one was hit. The latter two features were largely responsible for the Aurora being labeled one of the ugliest cars ever made.

The Aurora was built on the salvaged chassis of a 1953 Buick, with the body structure being made of fiberglass and wood. The production version was to offer a choice of Chrysler, Cadillac, or Lincoln engines and be priced at $12,000 ($100,908 in today's dollars). On its way to its first press conference in 1957, it broke down 15 times, with most of those times being related to the fuel system, which had been sitting still for four years. It arrived hours late, and there were no advance orders.

For that matter, there were no orders whatsoever.

Only one was made.

Zagato Elcar: Furiously Junky

In 1975, Consumer Reports compared the CitiCar and the Zagato Elcar. The CitiCar was found to have major handling problems, inadequate safety, and short battery life. At $2,946 ($12,856 in today's dollars) it was expensive.

Blue Book Value on a 2008 Honda Accord as of April 3, 2014 is $27.22 cheaper than a CitiCar (adjusted for inflation), and a whopping $2,335.76 cheaper than the Elcar.

Believe it or not, there was a worse option than the CitiCar. The Zagato Elcar was Italian built, but even the CitiCar outclassed it. At $3,475 ($15,164.76 in today's dollars) it was more expensive than many real cars of its time - cars that had to meet safety standards. It was built by Zagato, a famous design studio, in Milan, Italy and imported to the US by Elcar Corporation.

The Elcar offered three motors - 1000 watt, 1500 watt, and 2000 watt. (For comparison, a microwave is usually 1100-1200 watts). The suspension was notoriously shoddy and collapsed during a braking test from 30 mph. That same Consumer Reports test also saw the car spend over half of the testing period (74 days) under repair.

The Elcar claimed to be cheap to operate, but it was costly to repair and far more expensive to buy than a conventional gas compact car of the time. 

The Bricklin SV-1: Kinda Like A Delorean

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A Bricklin SV-1 in Florida.

Malcolm Bricklin is a name you should know in the automotive industry. He brought Subaru to America in 1968, which after a rocky start, makes some of the best reviewed, safest, and just generally good cars on the road. He left Subaru to start his own car company in the mid 1970s, closed it, imported Fiats for a while, brought Yugoslavian cars to the US, and more recently tried to bring Chinese vehicles from the company Chery over here. He specialized in bringing car companies over here while they still built crap, but if Subaru's any indication, the man is capable of success.

He didn't "bring over" the Bricklin. After selling his stake in Subaru, which had begun to leave its crap phase, Mr. Bricklin decided he wanted to build his own car, which was built from 1974-1976.

The SV-1 - which stood for "safety vehicle" - looked great on paper. The car was made of dent resistant fiberglass-acrylic body panels, the same principle as a 1990s Saturn. The acrylic skin held one of five colors, reportedly those most visible on the road - Safety White, Safety Red, Safety Orange, Safety Suntan, or Safety Green- and was molded to the fiberglass. There was no paint - if the color faded, a simple wax job would restore it to its showroom look. Unfortunately, in practice, it was crap - temperature changes did weird things to the car's body. Gullwing doors, like a modern Lamborghini, were also used. These could crap out as well, with the system strange and complex to 1970s mechanics and the doors prone to failure. This could trap occupants inside - not exactly befitting of a "safety vehicle"!

The vehicles were powered by a Ford V8 making 175 horsepower; some of the early 1974 models had an AMC V8 making 220 horsepower. It was considered a challenger to the Corvette at this time - my 2011 Honda Accord V6 makes 271 horsepower, so that's how far we've come - but some of the reviews of the time pointed out that the build quality could tend toward the crappy side.

Ah, what the crap, here's some 1970s pictures of the Bricklin factory.

The Isetta: The Most Unsafe Car Ever Built

The Isetta was a tiny "bubble car" with seating for two released in 1953 by an Italian company called Iso, which was later responsible for a range of high performance cars. There was also a VELAM Isetta, built under license in France, and a Romi-Isetta, built under license in Brazil. The most common Isetta, and the one this article talks about most, is the BMW version. BMW's Isetta was re-engineered over the Iso model, with none of the parts between an Iso/VELAM/Romi Isetta and a BMW Isetta being interchangeable. The BMW Isetta featured a 300 cc one cylinder motorcycle engine that could get it up to a terrifying 53 mph / 85 kph.

Perhaps the oddest feature of the Isetta is the idiotic positioning of the door. The front door held the steering wheel and dashboard of the car and was the entire front end of the car. In the event of a crash, occupants were to exit through the canvas sunroof.

In 2010, BMW showed a concept microcar called the i-Setta, a successor in spirit to the original Isetta, but without the boneheaded front door design. If it's like most modern BMWs, it will be safe.

You've come a long way, BMW.