[Closed] Worst car in the world?

Vauxhall Vectra 1.8L, 1998/9. Honest to God the most uncomfortable car it's ever been my misfortune to have to sit in for more than five minutes.
Yugo, not sure of the model but based on a Fiat 124. Terrifying thing to drive, no power-assist on the brakes, you just kept pressing harder on the pedal, hoping something might happen to slow it down, the steering was vague, you had to keep turning the wheel to correct the car as it wandered gently from one side of the road to the other, and finding a gear was a challenge in itself, putting a wooden spoon in a large bowl of porridge and stirring it around would be more precise.
Apart from that, they were, well crap, actually.
And the cheapscate boss I worked for at the time had three of them as company cars...

My old Rover 200. Will it start today? This is what I asked in 1999.

Vauxhall Vectra

I raise you the Opel Ascona I had to drive one summer.
At least the Lads Riva estate we drove the previous summer had the good sense to make life exciting by bursting into flames one day on mrs_oab....

"Worst cars in the world" ?

Anything from Birmingum from the BL factory...

Made car building a joke.

Rover 214 from back around 90 something, when you met a fellow owner you could compare lists of what had fallen off. Then prepare for the next bill.
My favourite was the fact that they fitted 2 different braking systems to the same model and year....

Had a mate who worked for RAC back in the day, reckoned there wasn't a day that he wasn't called out to a Rover.

My brother's Vw Bottle. Had to adjust the timing before starting it every time. Still pissed off he took my car for a summer job up north and left me with The Beetle as a runaround.

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/EOT

Vanden Plas.

Classy.

Gobuchul, I'm convinced that was in the designers head when they drew up the Nissan juke.

You're all going about this the wrong way. All the cars above you knew weren't good so the fact they were awful was not a surprise. The worst cars ever always promise to be good but are crap. I give you:

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The ad promised a great drive and it was based on the Golf which had a decent reputation. Drove one as a rental and it was so unbelievably boring and numb to drive it really was awful.

On the other hand I've owned the following 3 cars and they all were crap cars bu they were great because they were better than I expected:

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954cc of awfulness in a roly-poly body but you could just drive it flat-out everywhere and never got stuck in anything, so much fun!

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Slow, heavy and awful to drive but as a festival car it was unstoppable.

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Was a gifted cheap runaround for me and my sister for a while. Used hardly any fuel and just got on with it. Tiddly little 12" wheels were great in the snow and tyres were stupidly cheap!

Awful cars can be magnificent, it's all about your expectations.

That Allegro is probably worth a small fortune now, though!

And wasn't the Vanden Plas just a trim level? Like the Ghia was in Ford cars. Just coachbuilders who allowed their names to be used.

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Crass.
Brown.
Tasteless.
Pointless.
Ugly.
Inefficient.
Boorish.
Devalues the brand.
Usually driven by people I'd soil myself to avoid.

Also any other premium status-trinket sporty SUV.

Anything vauxhall up to say, just before 2018.

British cars from the 70s and 80s were pretty shoddy, but nothing came close to the Yugo in my experience. They were just unfixable, but even if you did manage to fix one, it still would have been the worst car ever (although I've never had the pleasure of driving a Trabant, to be fair). If there was an emergency and I needed to steal a car to escape and had to choose between a Ford Prefect and a Yugo, the Ford would be a no-brainer.

That's only from the cars that I've personally driven though, that Hoffman surely has to take first prize, that is special.

Almost forgot, a top spec Mk6 last generation Escort.

Never been in anything that felt so cheap.
Everything was shoddy from the trim to the suspension.
Even uglier than a brown Macan.

Always the last pool car left at the end of the day, no redeeming features whatsoever.

Rusty, yes, have to agree with you're that brown spunk chariot. There's one locally that's even more crass as it has a reg plate 'M4CAN' or some other such hilarious play on letters n numbers. Needless to say, it's in a new estate, with lovely tasteful LED lights lighting up the Lego.

2004 Renault Laguna estate. It was comfy, went well, big enough, even looked good IMO. However, you had to keep a hand on the dash to "earth it" else it would cut out, switches didnwhat ever they wanted, to do any work on it you had to take everything apart and the plastics were so brittle they'd brake for every job (new air filter meant new air box, new MAF and inlet hose!)

Anything vauxhall up to say, just before 2018.

Slow, heavy and awful to drive but as a festival car it was unstoppable.

I had a car with brakes like that 🙂

Worst car i've driven - Dacia Sandero, had two as courtesy cars, one was bad, the other abysmal.

Most disappointing car i've driven - A6 sline - no feedback made it bland to drive, and low profile tyres made for a noisy uncomfortable ride.

Citreon 2CV. Parents had them when I was a kid. Just terrible, no redeeming features at all, as far as I am concerned.

Citreon 2CV

Don't even go there.

You're now on 'the list'...

😉

Crass.
Brown.
Tasteless.
Pointless.
Ugly.
Inefficient.
Boorish.
Devalues the brand.
Usually driven by people I'd soil myself to avoid.

Also any other premium status-trinket sporty SUV

😆

No way 2CV - awesome vehicle - when the roads got flooded, I used to go 'wading' - aircooled engine with a simple points/breaker on top of the engine meant it could handle deep water quite well until it started to float 8O. Skinny tyres and long-travel suspension meant it was pretty capable offroad too - and 2 people could lift it if you got stuck.

To go with the Allegro VDP, there was also the Wolseley Princess

Surely your well noted arthritic knee notices the fact that the wheel the seat and the pedals are not aligned In Vauxhall's.

Anyway trabants not a bad car is you take it atface value... A basic car of the people. A mate has one i like it

I'll go for the austin Allegro or the Austin princess.

To go with the Allegro VDP, there was also the Wolseley Princess

Wasn't that known as the "flying turd" ?

BMW M5, always broken, cost me a fortune and everyone hated me.

From my experience, the
1.8petrol vectra 'life'
.9l Renault captur
Escort 1.3L and

For the most crap but awesome:

2.0 440GLT
A Bedford rascal works van and
1.1 AX, which I would take up onto Dartmoor in the snow with no hesitation. Awesome little thing. A friend had a fast version (GT?) and that much speed, that little protection coupled with being a passenger and him being a lunatic, scared the crap out of me.

Imagine it was more fun as the driver.

Mid 90s Renault laguna.

Hated it so much that when it spat a valve I just left it at the side of the road and called a scrap dealer to pick up for free even though it was probably an easy fix and worth a bit at the time (7 years old)

Hateful French piece of plop.

Rover 214si. So cheap that rover havevit black plastic inserts instead of fake walnut. Gearbox used to fall apart on a regular basis

Second worst car, fiat 127. Leaked so badly from rust I had to put holes in the floor

Had a Mk V Escort 1.6 Ghia that seemed to have little to redeem it.
Vectra 1.8 estate was definitely the worst car I've owned though. Dull drive, uncomfortable, crap fuel economy as the engine was underpowered for its size & my one broke down so many times I grew to despise it.

The worst car I've ever "owned" was a Ford Fiesta company car in the mid- to late-90s, a Mark 4 I believe. It had a normally aspirated 1.8 diesel block and it was one of the most insipid, gutless, hateful cars it's ever been my misfortune to spend any time with. On the motorway on my commute there was a stretch of road which had a gentle incline for, I don't know, half a mile or so; hitting the bottom at about 80mph (probably its top speed) with my foot to the boards I'd be doing about 55-60mph at the top.

At the time I was doing quite a lot of mileage and the thing just wasn't up to it. It curled up its toes inside of six months, so work gave me... another one. I think I killed four of them before they finally relented and gave me an Astra. I thought I'd never drive anything as shit again, until relatively recently...

My current car is a BMW (not by choice, don't hate me). It was off the road recently and the repairers sent me a courtesy car. I thought, ooh, this might be something interesting.

It was a Nissan Micra.

Ye gods, it was like a timewarp back to 1980. Everything about it felt cheap, e.g. the inside of the fuel filler flap was just unfinished metal folded over itself to hide the sharp edges. My old 1977 Fiesta was more refined than this thing. The only way you could get any use out of it was to rag the knackers off it, which every other driver prior to me had clearly also discovered.

The worst car I've ever "owned" was a company car in the mid- to late-90s, a Mark 4 I believe

So what was it?!

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Surely it's an easy win for the hateful, lethal, and it's-so-c**ppy_it's_not_even_really_a_car_car G-Wiz!

Taking some objective criteria:

Terrible value for money, that means at least 50% more than equally capable vehicles that do the same job.

Fragile plaasticy trim. So much so the salesman looks nervous every time you try to open a cubby-hole.

Lots of things to go wrong, unnecessarily complicated, why use a handle when an unreliable motor can be used instead.

An engine that looks OK on paper but sounds like a tractor and has a really narrow power band.

The steering and handling of a plumbers van with a 100kg of copper pipes on the roof.

At risk of upsetting some people on here I give you the current T6 Cali.

So what was it?!

Rats, now edited, thanks for that. It was a Fiesta.

I had a tata faux 4x4 jeep thing it had a Peugeot box with a Mercedes engine joined by elastic bands.
Only one brake circuit ever worked and suspension would fail on a bi hourly basis. Dogpoo

Is Lancia cars still going?, they were pretty shocking for rust and failures.

Worst car I've driven was an old VW beetle, you were virtually passed out with the fumes after a few hours driving, heater, wipers etc didn't work very well.

Austin Maestro Clubman. Now there is a car that'll bore the tits off beige

Worst one I ever owned was a Citroen ZX Volcane. Had other ZX's, they were a fine design, and the Volcane turbo diesel at the time had all the right ingredients to be a proper good car. Sorted chassis, pokey diesel motor, economical. Except this one was wrecked when I bought it. there's no way the list of stuff I had to fix was there when I test drove it. I'm convinced the robbing shisyer of a trader I bought it off swapped the plates between the one I tested and the one collected.

Worst car I ever had was a Ford Sierra 1.6l It was expensive to buy and quickly turned into a rust bucket. It was 3 years old when I bought it and had to scrap it a year later.
So I bought a Lada Riva for £50 and ran it for 3 years no problem Steering was like steering a boat, driver side window had to be wedged up, and heating was either off or full but I sold it after 3 years for £30.

God I hate Vauxhalls

I read the first three points and assumed you were talking about a Zoe edukator 😉

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Second one I was reluctantly talked into buying (from my parents). It's already had everything fixed, they said. Nothing else left to go wrong, they said...

Both lasted about 6 months. Never again. I won't ever buy a Ford based on my experience of those two cars.

trail_rat - Member

I'll go for the Austin princess.

Only car I know to cause my father to swear in front of me 1981 IIRC

2 years later he thanked me for persuading him to buy a Golf

do love ford fiesta horror stories 🙂 back in the mid 90's I got to see much of the body work production (from drawing office to shell) at dagenham. Oh my god what a shambles, the shells would be at about 10-12 at a time driven on a airport style trolley system down the a11 from one side of the plant to the other in all weathers before paint :). When we arrived at the fabrication plant we were advised not to touch anything as it was so so dirty. When we were also doing work for Nissan in sunderland it was so clean you could have eaten off the floors !

Mini metro,.......in yellow

My MK2 Fiesta was totally unreliable, plagued by electrical failures.
Got so fed up I scrapped it, it was in mint condition too.
Weirdly the best car I've had was a Morris Ital complete with velour upholstery , tinted windows and vinyl roof.
Thing just kept running and no rust either 😯

I had the displeasure of driving a Tata pickup a few years ago.
The cheapest nastiest most basic interior I've ever sat in, the gaps between body panels were hilarious!
I doubt it had ever been 4wd, it handled like a tractor on ice.
Truly terrible, but they were cheap, and didn't break down!

Worst one I ever owned was a Citroen ZX Volcane

And it used to randomly cut power at low speeds so I took it back under warranty and got a Clio RSi (you'd have thought I'd learnt not to buy French) but that was a cracking little car.

At the turn of the Millenium I had an Astra van as a company vehicle and although it was uncomfortable on long drives it was ok. Then one week, one of my co workers needed the Astra but let me use his car, unfortunately this happened to be an FSO Polonez, which has to be the most despicable piece of sh1t to be called a car. It had absolutely no redeeming features, so I parked it up in the factory yard and caught the bus for the rest of the week.[img] [/img]

Ford Orion - we had one as a pool car BITD. Awful to steer - heavy/unresponsive- bastid to park. Had a collection of exterior and interior trim on the back seat after it had fallen off.

There's a lot of bollocks spoken about Rovers on this forum. Unless you've had one and I've had a few you can't really comment. The best one I had was a bog 216Si 110bhp. Yes it had a head gasket at 90K but that's it. Just routine servicing. Much more reliable than the poxy 306D we had before it. Similar fuel economy and it could really shift. Handled great as well. Apart from the cosworth models everything Ford did pre focus was utter sh!te. I still have nightmares about that Peugeot.

1.8 Petrol RangeRover Freelander, blowing a headgasket was just expected followed by the viscous coupling, and everything inside would just stop working, windows, clock, sunroof, doorlocks etc

Usually driven by people I'd soil myself to avoid.

Also any other premium status-trinket sporty SUV.

I think they'll be grateful for you avoiding them and might consider a side benefit of their car as being the ability to easily annoy reverse snobs and narrow minded people who judge others they don't know based on the car they drive. I don't blame them !

Had heaps of cars over the past 30 years and even the crap ones have had redeeming features. The Rover 75/ MG ZT was a decent car BTW. As was the 2CV.

Worst car? Citroen C4 Grand Picasso. I've had some good Citroens but this was the most poorly made, unreliable, overcomplicated piece of junk I've ever owned.

Doing any job on it was a total nightmare as everything disintegrated in your hands.

Had 10 Saabs. All great.

bodgy - Member
Citreon 2CV. Parents had them when I was a kid. Just terrible, no redeeming features at all, as far as I am concerned.

Same, might have a different opinion now it's a "classic", but as an 18 year old it was slow, noisy, uncomfortable and embarrassing.

2CV - hoot to drive. Had one at a place I used to work that we used as a runaround between sites. Un- rollable! - we tried everytime we had to drive it!! You could almost reach out the funny little window & touch the road 😯 Loved that thing 🙂

In 2000, I was tasked with driving to Barnstaple to install some software. My employer at the time had a wealth of pool cars and there was a certain pride taken in providing some decent cars for staff.

Unfortunately, on that particular week, everything was suddenly unavailable. No Puma, no Hyundai Coupe, no Audi A3...I was summarily issued with the "emergency" pool car, a 1994 Vauxhall Astra diesel with well over 150k on the odometer.

Having just stepped out of a Golf Mk2 16v, I knew I was going to hate the damn thing. By the time I reached the M25, I had a nagging back ache, because the steering wheel was offset two inches to the left. The steering didn't seem to do much, nor did the brakes and throttle. The ride was bouncy and incredibly jarring. Oh and the seats were terrible.

I've harboured a visceral hatred of the Mk 3 Astra ever since, a truly dreadful car that should never have been signed off. Your early 1990s Ford Escort is quite rightly held as the zeitgeist of piss-poor value for money, being utterly crap in every way, yet one of those handled like a track car compared to the Astra I drove.

I was going to say that this was a tricky one, but it's not. The worst car in the world was my M plate Rover 620 SLDi.

I have no idea what trim level SLDi stood for, or what amazing stuff I got, but it lunched a gearbox and gradually broke so much stuff, I was glad to sell it on eBay and watch it leave my life (in 3rd gear only and leaking oil from the crankcase). I only bought the car because that Perkins 2 litre diesel was supposed to be efficient. I told myslef that was the last time I would buy a car based ona spreadsheet.

An honourable mention goes to the Austin Ambassador. It was just a tarted up Princess and was simply appalling. I'm glad my dad swapped it out for a Rover Vanden Plas.

Hey!

My first car was a squits-coloured Allegro, you bastids.

Worst car I have driven? A tossup between the pool hyundai i10 which was just cheap and nasty and borderline dangerous probably from abuse as a pool car - it didn't go in straight lines, it crashed, banged and bounced over bumps in the road and understeered really badly or the hyundai people carrier i800 I hired that was just a huge wallowy sluggish thing with an awful 3 sp plus overdrive auto box. The 130 tourer was conversely rather nice.

I love 2cvs even as an 18yr old driving my mothers one

mines was the much hated mk3 fiesta up there in a 1.8 diesel flavour.

the worst car ive actually owned was a hyundai lantra 1.6 SI owned since new by my parents, passed down to me when i graduated to replace my aging rusty good running escort.....

it was built for someone much smaller than i , i had to lie back in the thing to drive it or my head was in the roof , this gave me back pain , it was nasty for gettting bikes in and it was also horrendously unreliable....infact 2 weeks into my ownership the ecu died

2CV - Had one at a place I used to work that we used as a runaround between sites. Un- rollable!

I've owned very few cars (I'm on my 4th in 30 years) but I've hired an awful lot.

The one I was most reluctant to hand back, surprisingly, was a Kia Venga. The hire co I use is also a dealer and their hire fleet tends to be the top of the range, feature-laden behemoths that are difficult to sell - so if I book 'something like a Zafira' I tend to get given a £50k V Class. So the Kia was a bit of a surprise to get given and its the comfiest, best thought out, most intuitive car I've ever driven.

The one I couldn't hand back quickly enough was a Renault Megane with 'Speed Adaptive Steering' - totally counter intuitive having the rate for response from the steering wheel changing with speed. Fine when you're actually steering - going round bends - but just staying in a lane on a straight motorway seemed to require thought and effort - surprisingly draining on long trips.

I feel a twinge of sadness when reading about how utterly crap the Austin Princess was. The design was cutting edge - the first car which parked its' wipers below the bonnet line and it was front wheel drive too.

It's just a shame that it was built by British Leyland, who managed to cock up practically everything.

I won't bore everyone with tales of all the crap cars I've owned - Hillman Imp, MG Midgets, Fiat 127, Triumph Herald, Metro, etc. However, on a similar subject I saw an old Renault Scenic in a car park yesterday with a big 'Renault Scenic Owners Club' sticker on the back window. Be proud of your crap car!

For some stupid reason, my girlfriend at the time and I bought a fiat 126bis in 1996. It was truly dreadful in every way. Scared the living daylights out of me on every motorway journey as it'd get trapped in the wheel track of lorries in the slow lane (where it belonged).

The horizontally positioned 27bhp engine "drove" the rear wheel through a 4-speed box, with a crash 1st gear all hidden under a hatch in the boot floor. Rear suspension was by lethal swinging arm which had various degrees of camber depending on how much crosswind there was.

Front suspension was by shared leaf spring which also pretended to be the lower wishbone in attempt at a sort of double wishbone setup. It had kingpins that required greasing every week, lest the hub carriers seize up, like an austin 7.

The cooling system had the radiator in the nearside wheel arch which didn't have enough airflow or fan capacity so you'd have to run the heater all the time. Except the heater fan switch didn't operate through a relay, so the things used to burn out resulting in smoke emanating from the instrument binnacle.

It allegedly had hydraulic brakes. I suspect the middle pedal was just a telegraph annunciator to some rodents in the hubs.

It remains the only vehicle that I've ever spun on the public highway.

My first car was an Austin Maestro, bastard child of the despised Allegro, which was pretty shocking. But then it was cheap, easy to fix, and expectations were low from the outset, so it's not the worst I've had.

That honour goes to the Fiat 500 (new shape). It's a jaunty little car to be sure, but in terms of engineering it's unbelievably crap, every part supplied by the lowest bidder irrespective of whether it works or lasts. After 2yrs everything was worn out, falling off or breaking, even on the day I got shot of the fekkin thing!

Fix
It
Again
Tomorrow

I've ranted on elsewhere, several times, about my Fiat Doblo in this esteemed organ so won't go on about it here, but the worst hire car I've ever had was a Vauxhall Corsa, circa 2004.

I had to pick a colleague then drive it from Nantwich to Leeds for a meeting wit one of our customers. When I got to Andy's he thought there was a 2 cylinder dumper truck coming down the road, not me in the Corsa.

It was diesel (don't think there was a turbo) only seemed to be firing off 2 cylinders and bearing in mind it was January the heating didn't appear to work either.

The journey down the M62 was quite interesting. The snow was building up along the motorway and the engine was so noisy only way to hear travel news was to have the radio so loud the widows were rattling. It would only do a max of about 65mph on the flat and because of the weather I was never sure if it was the steering or the snow that was causing it to drift constantly to one side.

Both front seats had collapsed so were more like sitting in deckchairs.

Having got to Leeds one of the meetings were cancelled due to the weather (others couldn't get down from Newcastle on the train) and the first meeting could have been done over the phone, so we had to endure the whole journey back in that hateful car, only ti find that our exit on the M62 was closed and had to travel on to Warrington to get off.

I've had a pathological dislike of Corsas ever since.

Then there as the Alfa Arna - a car jointly designed and built by Italians and Japanese. However, Nissan designed it and Alfa built it - a recipe for disaster.

It also had internal disk brakes and spark plugs so inaccessible that a small child would struggle to get to them without dropping the engine out.

Worst car I've ever driven was my in-laws Renault Megane Scenic. Awful interior, awful/borderline dangerous performance. Just an all round right POS.

Awful cars can be magnificent, it's all about your expectations.

I learned to drive in a Vauxhall Chevette. I was not expecting the gear lever to come away in my hand as I attempted a three point turn outside the Ale House opposite Leeds Uni as my dad was buying beer. More than three points may have been needed. Or indeed pints. (Managed somehow to jam it into 2nd to get home. That was fun.)

I think people are confusing reliabilty with genuine crapness.

I think you'd struggle to say a Fiesta was the worst car in the world when millions of people bought them and they generally were reliable for them over billions of miles......

It should be a car that had no right to be on the road, that was particularly dangerous or badly thought out to such a degree that it was extremely difficult or challenging to drive.

There is an obvious special award, a unique place in design hell, reserved for the wonderful Ssangyong Rodius though....

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odd lack of American cars here - massive thirsty engines that pump out some seriously terrible emissions, size of a barge and handle like them... my mate has an authentic bluesmobile to drive to gigs in with the band when we do full on blues bros tribute, it's a right load of nightmare and I'm glad I don't own it

rusty makes a good point about those Porsche things, the Bentley Bentayga is also pretty disgusting, they are 2.1m wide and the legal requirement for a carriageway in the UK is 2.4m !!!

I had a ZX I liked and it was replaced by a truly awful ZX, it had a turboless diesel engine and the suspension was rotting - it set itself on fire because someone did a dodgy wire repair and I shed no tears when it went

odd lack of American cars here - massive thirsty engines that pump out some seriously terrible emissions, size of a barge and handle like them... my mate has an authentic bluesmobile to drive to gigs in with the band when we do full on blues bros tribute, it's a right load of nightmare and I'm glad I don't own it

TBH US cars are a product of their environment. Old ones are shit, but old cars worldwide were shit - especially pre-70s when the Japanese 'invented' quality control and reliability.

Anyway - I've taken a few days to think about this.

The worst car I've ever owned was a Mondeo LX Diesel - it was brown, it smoked like Doc Cotton, it's the only car I've owned that broke down whilst I was driving it and left me stranded - I've had other refuse to start, or 'play up' but it's the first and only car that ever just gave up and left me in the middle of a roundabout - all over a £12 sensor, no warning either by dash light or driving oddly - drove until it didn't. When I went I had my pregnant wife and son in the car - felt a complete failure. The interior smelled terrible, everything was nasty, the steering went all over the shop, the brakes were suggestive.

But... there's not point calling it the worst car in the world - it was probably okay when it was new, I don't think anyone would ever take any pride in it - are people proud of bargain basement spec Fords, but when it was new it probably did the job quite well - 10 years and 115k miles later it was a total liability, but as my Wife reminds me every time I mention the hateful thing, it got us through a tough time and I paid a grand for it, ran it for a year and sold it for a grand (best not to think about the £600 MOT in between).

Second place was probably my Honda Accord - Honda's boring but totally reliable yeah? Nope, even when it was new it had a small number of known faults that Honda quietly tried to remedy, even laughably - the headlamps were notorious for filling with water, the fancy election boot broke all the time, the sat-nav was DVD based and the discs and lasers wore out - not a biggie, buy a tom-tom or a map? Nope, because EVERYTHING in run by the sat-nav screen, so no disc, no air-con, blowers, radio etc etc. Oh, and it leaked exhaust gases into the cabin - not great that, it was a great car ruined by a long list of faults that Honda fixed for the facelift model, but not for existing owners who'd paid as much as £35k, but again it would have at least worked flawlessly for new owners.

Nope, the worst Car in the world (or worst car I've ever had first-hand experience of) was the MG TF 160.

MG Rover approached my office in the early 2000s desperate to shift some cars, they offered a brand new one to whoever in the office could shift the most of their cars (we were at the time the largest fleet leasing co in the country) for a year. I didn't win it, but my mate did - he drove it for a bit, but he had 3 kids and school runs to do so eventually it ended up in our car park for anyone to use whenever they fancied - for the first couple of months it was names in a hat for the chance to have it for the weekend, within a month it was free to whoever wanted it, it didn't move much.

Its problems were 3-fold. It wasn't as cool as a Saab convertible, or even a 3 series, but then it was a much cheaper car, but whilst people who like sports cars would love an Elise, or a MK3 MR2 or an MX-5, the MG just looked dumpy, but it was still a 2 seater droptop so without the need to actually pay money for it should have been popular.

It wasn't fast, not even close - despite being the top-of-the-range 160, it was annoyingly slow, it felt slower than the junior reps Polo Diesels. I don't know if it was broken, or it just felt it, but it was less exciting to drive than the boring 2.0 Boras were had. You sort of sat really high with this oddly angled wheel, and it sort of droned from here the three, it was supposedly VVT like a Honda VTEC or Toyota VVT but it hated being revved out, but still it should have been okay for posing.

What sealed it was, sadly it was crap. If you had to sum it up, it would be crap. It's all in the eye of the beholder and all that, but for a 2-seater convertible it wasn't very good looking, the MG F was too safe and sensible, it was a sports car for daily mail readers, but the TF was worse - like all the later MGs that were restyled it looked like some terrible boy racer body kit - the body was all curved and smooth, the new bumpers and stuff had sharp corners and were very square they just didn't match. The interior was worse, it was like either they didn't have a penny to spend on updating it, or they didn't dare upset the handful of Rover faithful who still bought the things (probably both) so it had this fake plastic old world style interior, plastic chrome, plastic wood, that gash hexagon badge - the best bits were the MK2 Golf window switches.

For a sports car, it was completely numb and uninspiring to drive, it drove like a cheap FWD hatch, but it was a mid-engined RWD car, I've no idea how they managed to do that. My Mk2 MR2 that was 10 years older drove beautifully, you felt all the effort they went to to make a small mid-engined car, this felt like they want a mid-engine to say they had one, but didn't care why.

Finally, though, it just broke down a lot, sometimes it wouldn't start, it has less than 5000 miles on it, but if we didn't start it once a week, it wouldn't start at all without a set of jump leads. I've left 15-year-old Golfs in a garage for 6 months and they'll still start, bits of the interior fell off, 2 of the centre caps of the wheels fell off.

I know they had a bit of a following now and I'm sure their owners love them and will tell me I'm wrong, or all cars do that - but in my mind it was a crap car from a dying company that had decided decades before that "if it ain't broke" could be applied to car design whilst their competitors kept refining and refining their cars until they were so far behind they couldn't sell enough to raise the money to design new stuff.

Trio of shoddy French cars

A 306 which arrived with a combination of clear and tinted windows
Citroen Xantia with leaking suspension
and a Renault megane with shonky electrics

Buying one French car was clearly a mistake but 3 was stupidity, they deserve their reputation for making shoddy cars