Skip to main content

Jeremy Cato picks the worst designs of the past 85 years

Open this photo in gallery:

1976 Chevrolet Chevette: Awful to look at and worse to drive. GM kept producing this horrible little car right through 1987. The nightmare of rental car fleets everywhere.GM

1 of 10
Open this photo in gallery:

1980 Chevrolet Citation: A front-drive abomination and utterly unreliable, to boot.

2 of 10
Open this photo in gallery:

1980 Cadillac Seville: Another disastrous front-driver born of the oil-crisis desperation sparked by the OPEC boycott in 1973.

3 of 10
Open this photo in gallery:

1982 Chevrolet Cavalier (pictured)/1982 Cadillac Cimarron: Chevy needed a front-drive small car and this was the first of them. GM sold mountains of Cavaliers over the years, enough to turn off mountains of buyers for decades to come. The Cadillac version was the Cimarron. Yes, there was a Cadillac version. Shocking. And you wonder why GM went bankrupt?

4 of 10
Open this photo in gallery:

1989 Geo Metro: There are only bad memories of the Metro, a horrible little three-cylinder runabout supplied by Suzuki.

5 of 10
Open this photo in gallery:

1990 Chevrolet Lumina APV: Ah, the infamous Dustbuster design. The plastic body panels often fell off or simply came loose and rattled all the time. One of the most hideous cars ever made. The dashboard was so expansive, you could toss a dozen large pizzas up there and never see them again.The Associated Press

6 of 10
Open this photo in gallery:

1997 Cadillac Catera: Underneath that exceedingly plain sheetmetal was a German Opel. So both Germans and Americans should be ashamed of themselves.

7 of 10
Open this photo in gallery:

2001 Pontiac Aztek: If one single design drove GM straight into court protection and a government bailout, the Aztec is it. The term “Aztec” has become synonymous with cynical, ugly incompetence. When you say, “What an Aztec,” everyone knows exactly what you mean – and it’s not good.Pontiac

8 of 10
Open this photo in gallery:

2003 Saturn Ion: More plastic body panels. On the Ion, the gaps were so wide you could drive a Metro between them.

9 of 10
Open this photo in gallery:

2007 Chevrolet Malibu Maxx SS: A deadly dull and disproportionate box. How anyone at Chevy could allow the “SS” name on this thing is beyond understanding.Tom Drew

10 of 10

Interact with The Globe