World's Worst Cars

The annals of motoring history are riddled with heroic failures: cars that could have been great and should have been great, were it not for the circumstances surrounding their birth. Then there are the duds: cars that should never have made it past the prototype stage, but were pushed into production by cost-cutting committees chasing a quick profit.

The World’s Worst Cars takes a detailed look at these motoring mistakes – old and new – and asks the pertinent questions. Why did they ever reach the showrooms? What went wrong? Why were they so unreliable, and what kind of person actually bought them?

This study of motoring’s underdogs looks at cars from across the globe. North America’s disaster stories include the deadly Ford Pinto, the controversial Chevrolet Corvair and the plainly ludicrous AMC Pacer, which pretended to be a compact car, but was as big as some of the Detroit iron of the 1950s. Britain’s contribution includes numerous machines from the British Leyland era, from the awful Austin Allegro to the pointless Austin 3-Litre. From the rest of Europe, we’ve included Fiats that were built by robots with no welding skills, Lancias that rusted like shipwrecks and hideously dull executive cars like the Peugeot 604, which tried to take on Mercedes-Benz and spectacularly lost.

From East Germany’s Trabant to the DeLorean, each car is illustrated with full-colour studio photography, annotated to show particularly bad, dangerous or ugly features. Informed and (mostly) affectionate text, written by a motoring expert, brings each car and its history to life, alongside archive images from the car’s ‘heyday’. Featuring more than 150 of the cars that we love to hate, this book is the perfect celebration of the world’s worst automobiles.