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BangShift Question of the Day: Which Failed Car Brand Has the Worst Reputation in America?


BangShift Question of the Day: Which Failed Car Brand Has the Worst Reputation in America?

So yesterday I was driving down the road and nearly crashed when an old Peugeot 505 passed me going in the other direction. I had not seen one of these things in years, let along spoken to anyone who actually owned and drove one. The car appeared to be in shockingly good shape with shiny paint and no visible smoke belching from the exhaust pipe. It was like seeing Elvis ride by on a unicorn.

Peugeot had a terrible reputation by the time they folded up their American operation in the early 1990s. So bad that they have not ever considered returning to the United States to this market, even 20 years after the waved the white flag in the first place. This whole scene got me to thinking about the many car companies which have failed, both the companies based here and those that came to the US market and failed. The list is really long. Kaiser-Fraser, Renault, Austin, Yugo, Alfa Romeo, Bricklin, Fiat (the first time around before they owned Chrysler), the aforementioned Peugeot, Rover, Triumph, and on and on.

With respect to the failed American brands, their problems seemed to be less based in quality of construction and more based in quality of competition and the simply cost of doing business. The larger companies simply spent the smaller ones to death. The others, well look at that list again. The foreign brands produced some truly hideous crap in the 1970s and 80s before people finally gave up buying their junk.

Today’s question of the day: What failed car brand has the worst Reputation in America?

 


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11 thoughts on “BangShift Question of the Day: Which Failed Car Brand Has the Worst Reputation in America?

  1. OKSNAKE08

    Sterling, probably no one remembers it but it was Lucas electronics from hell attached to a nice looking sedan with a beautiful interior that fell apart as you drove. Powered by Acura they sold the brits a failed trans design, then took partial ownership stake and ended up suing themselves absolutely epic fail. Unfortunately I worked for a dealership that sold them and boy were the customers pissed , not that you could blame them, they spent Jag money on a half assed crossbreed whose value went to zero almost instantly.

  2. Matt Cramer

    I think in terms of reputation, and how it stacked up to other cars sold at the time, it’s hard to beat the Yugo. Renault may come close, with the Dauphine, Alliance, and LeCar – call that trio the Three Strikes and You’re Out. But Renault is at least still in business elsewhere. Trabant could have flopped worse if they were sold here, but they weren’t. Triumphs had issues, but so did everything else in the malaise era, and you could tell yourself it was the price of owning a sports car. But I wonder if the Faraday electric cars may end up worse. Yugos existed. Faraday has taken a lot of customers’ money – they will need to deliver or pay the piper.

  3. Loren

    A friend’s parent’s mid-’70s Fiat was falling apart in and out at 50K miles. They chose to not fix the blown muffler and you could always hear them coming. I remember his dad, a Lockheed engineer, in the driveway replacing bent valves after timing belt failure multiple times. It was a good thing for that car the national speed limit had lowered to 55 as you wouldn’t really want to be in it going any faster. People did like the X1-9s but after leaving, I never would have imagined that Fiat would be able to come back to the U.S. market in any form. Interestingly, that family also had a thing for, and better luck with, Dodges with big V8s (little cars, big cars, nothing in-between)…who’d have thought that someday the Fiat guys would be building the Mopars.

  4. Anthony

    Peugeot was a well built car. Nice to drive and durable everywhere else in the ,world, not cheap either, problem was dealership network completely sucked,parts supply was bad too. They shot themselves in the foot.

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