Famously disastrous cars that were in fact successful

They might have been poorly designed, badly built, inadequately marketed, or simply wrong for their time. There’s no shortage of possibilities. Most of them sold very badly, but several – often reviled nowadays – actually performed remarkably well on the market.

Since we think the latter are rather interesting, here’s a representative dozen of them, presented in alphabetical order.

The Gremlin often appears on lists of bad cars because of its name, its styling or frequently both. This is a little unfair. There are folks who speak highly of the car in retrospect because of its combination of power and economy (depending on which of many engines ranging from 2.0 to 5.0 litres was fitted), the remarkable stiffness of its body structure and the fact that it looked very radical for a car introduced in 1970.

Naysayers can’t avoid the fact that nearly 700,000 Gremlins were sold until the car was replaced by the very similar AMC Spirit in 1979.

This counts as a decent success. The Gremlin was handsomely outsold by the rival Ford Pinto, but it was produced by a far smaller company than any of the Big Three, all of which had much greater resources.

The British Leyland conglomerate was, and remains, an easy target for jokes about poor design, reliability and industrial relations. The Allegro, launched in 1973 and discontinued nine years later after two major updates, has had more than its fair share of them.

It looked far more dumpy than designer Harris Mann (born 1938) intended, its engines were old-fashioned, and the quality of its gearchange was questionable. Then there was the famous quartic steering wheel, which many people seem to believe was the car’s defining feature, even though it was dropped from the range at an early stage.

Now that’s all very well, but the Allegro wasn’t quite as much of a failure as it’s often believed to be. It’s true that it didn’t make enough money to drag BL out of its troubles – But on the other hand, it sold nearly 670,000 examples in under a decade, which wasn’t bad going, all things considered.

Of all the cars Chevrolet has produced in over a century, few have been as reviled as the Citation. This reputation would have come as a big surprise to the many people who were captivated by it in the early days.

This was Chevy’s first new model of the 1980s, and the first ever with front-wheel drive. Early press reports were very favourable. What could possibly go wrong?

The Citation can be counted as a huge success if you look at the sales figures for 1980 alone. In that year, more than 800,000 were sold. But then came the downfall. Only around the same number found buyers in the remaining five years of production put together.

There are several reports that the cars given to journalists for review were much better than the ones sold to customers, largely because rampant torque steer had been dialled out of them. The Citation also developed a reputation for locking its rear wheels under braking, often with calamitous results. To sell 1.6 million examples of a single model can be counted as a success, but it happened only because first-year customers didn’t realise what they were buying.

The first-generation Corvair famously had a rear-mounted engine and swing-axle rear suspension. This was a difficult combination for drivers who weren’t already used to it, namely those who hadn’t previously owned a Volkswagen Beetle – a key target for this new compact model.

In his best-selling book Unsafe At Any Speed, Ralph Nader (born 1934) strongly criticised the layout. This avalanche of bad publicity might have been expected to kill the Corvair’s chances in the marketplace, but it wasn’t as simple as that.

In fact, Chevrolet sold more than 1.8 million Corvairs during the 1960s. Its ‘interesting’ handling didn’t appear to have put people off buying it. Furthermore, Nader’s book was published in late 1965, when a revised Corvair with more conventional suspension had already been available for more than year.

Sales fell in 1966 and did not recover, but this wasn’t necessarily because of Nader. Other factors include reduced marketing by GM, the fact that the Corvair was looking increasingly old-fashioned and the soaring popularity of the more modern Ford Mustang.

The PT Cruiser, introduced in 2000, was based on the Chrysler Neon but had more interior space and 1930s-style retro styling devised by Bryan Nesbitt (born 1969).

It was well received at first, and won several awards. When production ended a decade later, the car still had loyal fans, but other people had lost patience with it. The cabriolet version, whose scuttle shake was once compared with that of a 1960 Morris Minor convertible, came in for particular criticism.

Regardless of the opinions of those who decided they no longer liked it – or never had in the first place – the PT Cruiser was reasonably successful during its ten-year life.

Total sales exceeded 1.3 million. That’s an annual average of around 130,000, but for several years this figure was reached in both the US and Europe. It was only after 2007 that public interest on both sides of the Atlantic fell away as this retro-look car started looking just plain old.

Ford was market leader in the UK for nearly half a century until very recently, and previous versions of the Escort dominated the charts for most of the 1980s.

A new Escort came out in 1990, and was immediately criticised in the media for bland styling and poor driving dynamics. Surely the famous nameplate’s run of success was coming to an end? Apparently £1 billion was spent on developing it, but we’re not sure how.

Ford responded very quickly to the bad press, and had a thoroughly revised Escort in the showrooms after just two years. As far as registrations were concerned, though, it hardly seemed to matter.

The Escort had indeed slipped behind the Fiesta in 1990 and 1991, but it regained the top spot the year after that. The update can’t have been responsible for this, since the new version didn’t appear until September. It seemed that British buyers wanted Escorts no matter what they were like.

The reputations of both the Pinto and of Ford itself were badly damaged by the car’s safety record, which included a tendency to burst into flames when something else ran into the back of it.

This is the kind of thing that could bring a manufacturer to its knees. In the case of the Pinto, that’s not what happened.

Despite huge negative publicity, the Pinto remained a very popular model and Ford’s first subcompact sold in America. Total production from 1970 to 1980 exceeded 3.1 million, and topped half a million in 1974, the year concern about the car’s safety began being widely expressed.

Sales did fall immediately after that, but Ford was still building nearly 200,000 examples annually up to the point where the Pinto – and its nameplate – were discontinued.

‘Lada Classic’ is not an official name, but a general term for the Fiat 124-derived saloons and estates produced by Russia’s AvtoVAZ from 1970 to 2012. Popular in their home country, where they suited the roads very well, the cars were also exported elsewhere, including to the UK. Here they were widely regarded as a joke, except by people who liked the idea of buying a brand new car for very little money and didn’t care what anyone else thought about it.

Say what you like about these Ladas, they found a lot of buyers. At the time they were discontinued, AvtoVAZ said it had built nearly 18 million of the things. Longevity obviously had a lot to do with this, but if the figure is correct it implies average annual production of more than 400,000 examples every year from the breakup of the Beatles to well into the career of Taylor Swift. What manufacturer wouldn’t accept a few jokes in return for a performance like that?

The Marina is one of many cars often lazily described as among the worst ever built. Given some of the horrors that have been inflicted on the motoring public over the years, this is a wild exaggeration, but it’s true that British Leyland’s mid-sized model of the 1970s was a long way from being great.

It was designed quickly, using old technology, and required further development after it had gone on sale. Years before it met its end, it was considered very old-fashioned compared with rival models. A failure? Yes, sort of.

The Marina never captured buyers’ imaginations to the same extent as its early rival, the Ford Cortina, but it was among the UK’s top sellers for a while, and did reasonably well overseas.

Over 1.1 million are believed to have been produced, and nearly 40 percent of them went to export markets. The car may today be thought of as even more awful than the Austin Allegro, but it achieved nearly double the smaller car’s sales in roughly the same time period.

Possibly the cutest car Renault ever produced (if you like that sort of thing), the Dauphine was a replacement for the immediate post-War 4CV with a larger and more powerful version of the same engine.

Very popular in France, the Dauphine is remembered in the US as a miserable failure. There were several reasons for this, including but not limited to its tendency to rust. As with many things, though, it’s actually a bit more complicated than that.

Initially, the Dauphine was very popular for a small imported car in the US as it surfed a mini-boom in ‘second cars’, and was impressively profitable for Renault. Its sudden fall from grace created financial havoc which nearly brought the company to its knees.

Overall, though, it was a big hit. It took Renault just four years to build one million examples (the 4CV had taken 14 years to reach the same figure), and total production from 1956 to 1967 was on the high side of 2.1 million. The American view notwithstanding, the Dauphine was a triumph for Renault.

The 601 was by far the longest-lived model produced in what was then known as East Germany under the Trabant brand name. Its most distant ancestor, the P50, was reasonably modern when it appeared in 1957, but the only slightly improved 601 had long since become one of the motoring world’s greatest anachronisms when it was discontinued in 1990.

It was the kind of car you would buy only if there was no alternative. How could the wretched thing possibly have been a success?

The answer to the previous question is that the 601 was a success precisely because there was almost no alternative in its home country. Customers had to wait for years between payment and delivery (unless they paid well over the odds for a secondhand example) but at least they would eventually have a car, and therefore freedom of movement.

Estimates of how many were sold vary wildly, but the figure is believed to be around three million, vastly more than the car deserved. If the East Germans had had access to what was available across the border in West Germany, it’s unlikely that any of them would even have considered buying a Trabant. Indeed, when the country reunified former East Germans promptly bought Volkswagens and Trabant went out of business.

Like other British Leyland cars of the 1970s, the TR7 suffered from delayed development, quality problems and industrial action. It didn’t help that the Rover V8-powered TR8 derivative, sold only in North America and widely regarded as being the best of the lot, was introduced very late in the production run, and never had the chance to sell in large numbers. There was also the question of the car’s styling, which was very controversial at the time.

The TR7’s discontinuation very nearly marked the end of the Triumph brand. It was followed only by the very different Acclaim, which was hardly a Triumph at all but a version of the Honda Ballade.

From what has just been said, it’s easy to think of the TR7 as a failure. It certainly didn’t sell in anything like the same numbers as the Austin Allegro or the Morris Marina, but as a decidedly non-mainstream car it could hardly have been expected to.

In fact, it was the most successful of all Triumph’s TR sports cars, and the only one to sell more than 100,000 examples.