ORIGINAL: Yankee
Interesting... I think Motor Trend has alot more apologizing to do - for instance, there wasn't any mention of them naming the god-awful Shamu-looking 1991 Chevy Caprice as their 1991 Car of the Year. Sorry to mention a Chrysler product, but naming the 1976 Aspen/Volare as their car of the year wasn't exactly the best of thinking either (and didn't the AMC Pacer with the 1975 COTY?)
I guess alot of these were victims of the "seemed-lie-a-good-idea-at-the-time" syndrome. I remember when the Renault Alliance was introduced in '83 - a HUGE marketing campaign, the old fuddy-duddy AMC was finally energized with European cars - sure they were absolute POSs, but we wanted them to succeed - guess we couldn't see the forest for the trees, ultimately.
Agreed, those two should also be on the list. The thing that is simply dellusional to me is when I hear people criticize GM for dropping those whalemobiles. They were dropped because they weren't selling nearly as well as they used to sell. Granted, I don't agree with the strategy that they replaced it with (large SUVs-a-plenty), but if they would have brought over the Australian RWD platform back then it might have worked. If they remained in production, they would be exactly in the same situation as the Crown Vic, so long in tooth, braces wouldn't repair the damage, only selling to cops and taxis fleets, and being used as a symbol of how outdated and out of touch the car manufacturer is.
The Aspen/Volare were another horrible one that should have been on the list considering that they just about killed Chrysler. My father had one for his 3rd car. Interestingly he liked it; however, he also likes his 04 Taurus so he is a glutten for punishment, and seems to like the worst offerings that the market can dish out to him.
This one line to me sums up why to a high degree that the automotive press keeps getting it wrong over and over again.
"'[T]hese replacements for the Tempo and Topaz are very different than Chrysler’s Cirrus,' we wrote in the 1995 10 Best issue. 'The Contour is a smaller, tauter car. It has a tighter back seat but more aggressive road manners.'"
They put too much emphasis on things like this on the wrong cars. Who cares if it has more aggressive road manners? It's a FWD, weak I4 & pathetic V6 offering, automatic transmission, base level nameplate sedan. This is not a car that is meant to compete against $40K-50K BMWs, it is meant to compete against domestic equivalents and sedans like the plain as vanilla Camry & Accord. If it lacks space, style, room, power, quality, etc. It isn't going to succeed.
I just love their reason for choosing the Malibu back in 1997, because it was unlike the bold moves of the cloud cars and Contour. That explanation provides a better argument for why it should have been called out for the failure of making a competitive offering. I mean, how much more obvious could it have been that the car was a foolish move when the best thing they can say is it didn't push the envelope. I mean GM was loosing sales in the car market for years by then. How could offering more of the same be a good thing? What I just love is the fact that these fools selectively enforce these rules and choose the obviously inferior offering while deciding that the most obviously superior offering is the weakest contender.
