√The worst cars ever sold in Australia | Drive Flashback

In 2008, Harvey Grennan took a road trip with some truly sour automotive lemons. This is his Rogues’ Gallery of the worst cars ever sold in Australia.

Story originally published in Drive on 20 September, 2008

Mention very bad cars and the name that usually springs to mind is the Leyland P76. This was not so much a bad car as a badly built car. This was Leyland Australia in its dying days with a dysfunctional management giving orders to get cars out the door whether they were finished or not.

The missing bits could be added later.

Introduced in 1973 when it won a car of the year award, but gone from the showrooms within two years, the design of the P76 had much to commend it. The wedge-shaped body was penned by no less than Giovanni Michelotti and the V8 version had the first all-alloy engine in an Australian-made car.

But the P76 was doomed because of trouble in the executive suite and on the shop floor. Strikes disrupted the supply of parts and incomplete cars rolled off the production line to be cobbled together later in the yard. Not only was the finish quality poor but a series of mechanical problems like an oil-guzzling V8 gave the car a bad reputation for reliability.

Even Gough Whitlam called the P76 a dud.

The worst car I have driven was a rear-engined Skoda 1000 MB in 1966. There was not a single kind thing you could say about the Skoda. It was, in a word, dangerous.

The tragedy was that before the communists took over after World War II, Czechoslovakia was a world leader in automotive technology, creating radical breakthroughs such as the Tatra T97, which was plagiarised by Ferdinand Porsche to become the VW Beetle.

Skoda today is a very different story with the departure of the Russians and the arrival of VW. These clever Czechs are back in play.

Thank goodness Australia was never afflicted with those other East European exports, the East German Trabant or Tito’s Yugo, although the “Trabi” is acquiring something of a retro-renaissance in Europe among masochistic Gen Y trendies.

The Russians built worse cars – the Moskvich and the Volga – but the Yugo gets a mention because it escaped across the Atlantic and has been called the worst car sold in the US. Yes, worse than a Ford Edsel or Chevy Corvair.

This was also in the era of the early Japanese cars, the worst of which was possibly the Datsun Cedric. Perversely, this was an innovator of sorts as it came with all the bells and whistles absent from other cars of the time.

Amazingly, a radio and heater were standard. But dynamically it was a horror – a veritable barge on sponge springs with pathetically small drum brakes.

We will not canvas the Ford Prefects and Consuls, the Morris Oxfords and Majors or the Hillmans and Humbers of the 1950s. Nor will we interpret the merger of local US and British interests in 1965 in Chrysler Rootes Australia as a comment on its contribution to automotive excellence.

Other post-1960 cars that rate a mention in any discussion about cars only enthusiasts could love include just about any Triumph, the unrefined but impossible-to-kill Datsun 120Y and any Fiat that was within 100 kilometres of the sea. Several Holdens are on the list – the Sunbird, the Camira and the short-lived and short-of-breath four-cylinder VC Commodore.

The Camira was touted as the first “world car”, sold in the US as a Pontiac, in Britain as a Vauxhall, in Germany as an Opel and in Japan as an Isuzu. Despite winning a gong for car of the year, it was badly screwed together and the engine kept running long after you turned off the ignition.

But even today the design has its defenders.

Almost all British marques built by British companies make the list – not that there are any left.

The apocryphal story about Jaguars is that you needed two – one to drive while the other one was at the garage.

Testing a Land Rover Discovery in the early 1990s the dashboard cover fell off in my lap. Rover sedans enjoyed a similar reputation for years. Quality improved for the three prestigious badges under the brief ownership of Ford and BMW but all three are now in the hands of Indian and Chinese proprietors.

Thankfully, the British motor industry is now largely run by the Japanese.

The final nominations for the worst cars sold in Australia are as follows.

Morris/Leyland Marina 1972-75

Named in 1999 by Classic & Sports Car magazine in Britain as the second worst car (the Allegro was the “winner”), the Marina must rank high on the Aussie list, too.

Its handling was once described as “a skip on wheels”. Its running gear was taken from the Morris Minor and other Leyland nasties dating back as far as 1948 and in Australia engineers managed to shoe-horn in a six-cylinder engine, which made things worse.

Apart from the archaic mechanicals hiding under a modern body (styled by Roy Haynes, the man who designed the arch-rival Ford Cortina) it suffered from the same quality issues all Leyland cars faced.

Lightburn Zeta 1963-66

The diminutive plastic-box-on-wheels Lightburn Zeta hit the market with quite a splash, appropriate for a car built in a washing-machine factory.

It was made by whitegoods maker Harold Lightburn, who had ambitions to knock Holden off its perch with this ugly fibreglass station wagon – with no rear door – powered by a two-stroke lawnmower engine. The gearbox was set up so that the car could go as fast in reverse as it could go forward – a frightening 100km/h.

Salesmen never took the whole family for a test drive because they couldn’t be sure the Zeta would make it. Not surprisingly, only 343 Zetas made it out the showroom.

Lada Niva 1983-98

While the Russian-built Niva had offroad capabilities of Siberian proportions, it had an appalling reputation for quality and just about every mechanical and electrical component was prone to failure.

Its ill-fitting vinyl interior was arguably the roughest ever built. The word “spartan” didn’t do it justice.

The pitch made by its new Perth-based distributors when it was reintroduced here in the mid- 1990s was novel. I was treated to an expensive lunch in Sydney to be breathlessly told that the problems with Nivas were fixed because they were rebuilt on arrival on our shores. Jaguar, with all the brickbats it copped over the years, never tried that one.

Hartnett 1951 and 1957

“Father of the Holden” Laurence Hartnett resigned as managing director of Holden just before it launched the first “Aussie” car in 1948.

He had lost his battle with Detroit for a truly indigenous design so he set out to build his own. This was the flimsy front-wheel-drive Hartnett with a 600cc flat-twin engine and performance to match.

Due to production problems only 120 cars were built, but Hartnett wouldn’t give up. In 1957 he began assembly of the Lloyd-Hartnett, a German Borgward also with a 600cc engine, but this too failed when Borgward was put out of business. Hartnett then got a glimpse of the Japanese Datsun Bluebird in 1959 and imported 100 of them. The rest is history.

Chrysler Centura 1975-77

The Chrysler Centura was a shocker, even for the rust-prone, drum-braked 1970s.

This was a French Simca assembled in Adelaide of panels so poorly pressed that they were coaxed into place on the production line with rubber mallets.

Chrysler preferred selling the front-heavy six-cylinder version because it was the cheaper, locally made “Hemi” engine, but the bored-out French four was a much better-balanced, if unprofitable, car.

The Centura was too little, too late to compete with the Cortina and Holden Torana and lasted less than three years in the showroom. It was replaced in 1977 by the successful, Mitsubishi-sourced Sigma.

HD Holden 1965-66

This was the controversial, rounded Holden which replaced the record-breaking and still-loved EH in 1965.

It was known as the “liver scooper” because of the protruding sharp edges on the front fenders around the headlights.

As sales began to dwindle Holden hurriedly redesigned the body and launched the facelifted HR only a year later. The major change was to square off the sharp edges around the headlights.

The HD had other vices, being heavier than the EH but retaining its narrow track and brakes.

The HD holds the inglorious title for the shortest production run of any Holden but now is becoming collectable for that very reason.

Ford Taurus 1996-98

Ford Detroit has long believed its Antipodean outpost should adopt a US model instead of persevering with the Falcon.

The third-generation Taurus was brought to Australia as a “prestige” model above the Falcon to test consumer reaction.

Virtually every external and internal design feature was oval-shaped giving the car a droopy look, the work of expatriate Aussie stylist John Doughty.

The disastrous AU Falcon later took up some of the oval design cues and had to be hurriedly restyled.

The oval Taurus laid an egg in the showroom and disappeared from view after only two years. In the US it lost its top-selling status to fall behind the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord. It was a lemon not in the quality sense but in the taste buds of buyers.

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