Chris Harris on... bad cars

An interesting question posed by social media recently – what is the worst car you’ve ever driven? 

Where do you start? A long time ago, now I come to think of it, because there are very few bad cars these days. There are plenty of hateful cars, but we mustn’t confuse them with things like the original Daewoo Matiz – a budget new machine from the late-Nineties that acted as a one-stop marketing tool for secondhand cars that didn’t roll over if you attempted a fast three-point turn. 

What makes a car bad? Not being able to deliver in its chosen category – nothing more, nothing less. And this is why so many of the bad cars I’ve driven have been supposed ‘drivers’ cars’. Delivering on the promise of an exciting, competent driving experience is much harder than making something spacious with decent heated seats.

I once drove a Saab 9-3 Turbo with a silly name that read like an IKEA toilet seat, which didn’t so much torque steer as force the driver to have at least three directional options once they accelerated. You just didn’t know where it would end up. 

Most TVRs didn’t work, but I was part of that shameful generation of hacks who never told the full story out of some misjudged sense of national pride. A Cerbera once locked me inside on a hot summer’s day – funny until you realise the only way out involves a foot and broken glass. The same Cerbera’s seat mount then failed as I accelerated at some stupid speed, leaving me effectively on the back seat with no connection to the steering wheel or pedals. Yes, the Cerbera will never be remembered as a bad car, but that one was an absolute s**tbox.

Alfa touted the 156 GTA as its answer to the BMW M3, which is about as ambitious as me downing five pints, playing chopsticks and anointing myself the new Beethoven. A car has to be shambolic to nullify the effect of that gorgeous V6. I had to change a rear puncture on the test car – once I’d seen how cheap the rear suspension components looked, I didn’t ever want to drive it again.

There used to be plenty of Korean and eastern European cars that kept magazine columnists busy with easy comedy fodder, but I was late to that party. I missed the FSO Polonez and Lada Samara. The first Skoda I drove was a Octavia, and it was brilliant.

There’s a Ferrari on my shortlist: the 575 Maranello. The 550 was a honey, but Ferrari softened it and added more power for the facelift, and the result was as disappointing as you’d imagine a V12 Ferrari would be if it couldn’t do more than 55mph on a bumpy A-road without scraping its guts along the ground. 

The worst normal car I’ve driven was probably a Geely. I’ve no idea what model it was because I was too busy trying to wrench the gearlever from second to third, something I never actually managed to achieve. I remember thinking “how the hell can this company expect people to pay for this thing?”. That year, Geely bought Volvo; now it has stakes in Mercedes and Lotus, which at least shows the rate of change in this bizarre industry.

Ford was still making the Escort when I started doing this for a living. Those last MkVs were probably the worst cars I’ve sat in, because they were terrible to drive and poorly made, yet so many poor sods had to drive them. For such a ubiquitous product to be so crap showed how wrong Ford had got it. It’s why the car that replaced it, the original Ford Focus, is still one of the best cars I’ve ever driven.