20 cars that aren't as good as you think

All – or, at least, most – of these cars have some mega plus-points, but they also have reputations that are a bit larger than life. We take a look at some, and explain why those reputations can be over the top:

The lovable Land Rover is hailed, quite rightly, as the grandfather of all civilian off-roaders, and how these very early vehicles can still perform in the rough is impressive – were you to submit your Series I to some farm life. ‘Dual-purpose’ is where the concept falls down.

While there’s no disputing it can, legally, be driven on tarmac, the experience is one that should be kept as short as possible in the best interests of your spine, teeth, joints and nerves as the leaf springs, chassis girders and hefty, turning axles make their jarring progress. Think of it as not really a car, and keep to the fields, and you’ll be fine.

That a cheap, 1930s economy car design should survive on sale for some 60 years, and sell 21 million examples, is of course a phenomenon. It is, though, one celebrated today by people who would find a Beetle an appalling prospect, as it certainly did not set the pattern for the modern car. The rear-engined layout, and weight bias, is not the most forgiving.

And by the mid 1960s – the Beetle’s heyday, especially in the US – the flimsy structure, complete absence of safety systems, and poor brakes was anachronistic in the extreme. “But it’s so reliable,” people said; or were they getting confused with the ease with which you could work on it? Yes, there’s charm, but the Golf couldn’t come along soon enough…

Here’s another car whose venerability, like the Beetle’s, has given it an aura that usually makes it immune to proper analysis. Introduced in 1962, it had monocoque construction and solid performance with all the inconveniences – sweaty cockpit, heavy steering, leaky hood, rust traps aplenty – that a sports car owner was expected to overlook.

British Leyland decided not to bother replacing the car, especially as most of its rivals were discontinued so that by the B’s demise in 1980, this living antique was the default sports car option. That’s why it led the classic car boom, until the Mazda MX-5 came along and proved that, yes, wind-in-the-hair for two could actually be done really, really well…

General Motors styling boss Bill Mitchell, like his predecessor Harley Earl, had this fixation that a home-grown roadster for the US highway should be something vast and imposing, while the late 1930s Lincoln Continental which evolved into the Continental II of 1956 had an enormity that no-one from Europe would consider remotely sporty.

So when Mitchell conceived his “American Ferrari” in the 1963 Buick Riviera, it became a skyscraper to Italy’s bell tower. It was an enormous hardtop coupé with a 6.6-litre V8 engine, admittedly beautifully styled, but a turnpike cruiser and not a sports car. It wafted along like a bed at the Beverly Hills Hotel, with vague steering and even vaguer brakes. Rolling sculpture for sure, but no Ferrari.

For about three years in the 1970s, the Alfasud Ti was the most exhilarating small car on the planet. Its grip, handling, verve and sheer joie de vivre wowed everybody who tried it. Then the Volkswagen Golf GTi arrived, and the Ti slunk into its shadow. The Ti, like all Alfasuds, is a classic case of a critically-acclaimed car that was often a disastrous prospect for actual ownership.

The magazine road-tester would have it for a week and then reluctantly hand it back, having raved about the way it drove. But then the beguiled buyer would watch the car disintegrate and corrode often mere months after taking delivery. You just didn’t get any of that with the Golf.

Rolls-Royce money was required to purchase this targa-topped Bristol in 1975, along with the turbocharged Beaufighter edition of five years later. The separate chassis traced its roots back to the 1940s, although no doubt the car was still pretty capable, being fast, riding well and having a perhaps unexpectedly competent level of road manners.

Unlike a Rolls, though, or even an Aston Martin, with their handbuilt engines, you were getting in the Bristol a V8 power unit from a Canadian truck and – apart from a gleaming walnut dashboard and plump leather seats – parts from other cars that were somehow thrown into the mix in a haphazard way. The eccentric coteries of Bristol owners loved them, but connoisseurs quite rightly tended to head off towards the Porsche 928.

As one of Pininfarina’s most acclaimed production car designs, the Lancia Gamma Coupé is a familiar 1970s high spot on the car enthusiast’s timeline. Its saloon counterpart was and remains utterly overshadowed by it. Technically, it became an extension of the Lancia Flavia in using an all-aluminium, four-cylinder ‘boxer’ engine driving the front wheels.

At a time when six cylinders denoted cachet in this market sector, it was a perplexing choice to go for a large, 2.5-litre four.

Buyers had to balance an excellent pure driving experience on every front, five-speed manual gearbox and terrific roadholding included, with design flaws that included engine cambelt issues and worrying vibrations, and grave concern at patchy quality. Executive car owners also liked automatics but Lancia refused to offer one until 1983… Potentially it was a great car, but a poor product.

Every British car enthusiast loves the beefy, five-door Rover with its V8 engine and Ferrari Daytona nose. It could almost be the law that you have to. Yet in the race to perfect the luxury sports saloon, it was BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi and possibly even Saab that set the pace.

It wasn’t just that the SD1 swapped its P6 predecessor’s racecar-like rear suspension for an old-fashioned live axle.

It was that Rover’s workers consistently failed to deliver a quality job to those company bosses and city lawyers who were rooting for the marque. The German models were better cars overall, and spent more time with their owners’ gravel than on the ramp in the workshop. Only the British police were forced to stick with it for reasons of patriotism.

Is the Tesla Cybertruck going to be the Delorean of the 21st century? Quite apart from the fact that they both share hugely impractical stainless steel panels, seasoned industry watchers can sense a similar syndrome of pointless reinvention propelled by the hubris of an industry maverick. John Z De Lorean set out to teach the car industry a lesson by producing his idea of an ethical sports car, but it was a disaster.

The car wove together a Lotus chassis, a Renault engine and gullwing doors that were not to be trusted; it had a short run of fame, and once it had sunk Porsche could get on and dominate the 1980s.

The car that replaced the Ford Cortina in 1982 among the then hugely important fleet buyers had quite a task on its hands: to offer radical modernity and dependable familiarity at the same time. So while a great big fuss was made of its aerodynamic lines, underneath it was all old-school rear-wheel drive and Cortina-style Pinto engines.

And while by no means awful to use, the Sierra hardly impressed, the later Cosworth-engined and turbocharged 4x4 excepted. Its new feature, a lift-back tailgate, also got a lukewarm reception, obliging Ford to add a four-door Sapphire to the range in 1987 that toned down the infamous “jelly-mould” profile. And while all this was going on, Vauxhall and Opel’s acclaimed, front-wheel drive Cavalier simply leapt ahead in the fleet sales charts.

This two-seater Cadillac was the product, so they liked to boast, of ‘the longest production line in the world’. That meant that the bodies were constructed by Pininfarina in Italy and flown to the States for assembly in an ‘air-bridge’ operation in expensively-modified Boeings 747s – all of which was, really, of no tangible benefit to any buyer, and extremely costly.

The two-seater styling was also by Pininfarina, but was pretty unmemorable, with none of the character of the open-top Merc SL or Jaguar XJS. Introduced in 1987, the final cars in 1993 at least came with Caddy’s excellent Northstar V8 engine.

The Sportrak, or Feroza as it was alternatively known, was a very good choice for thrifty mud-plugging in the early 1990s – the sort of thing every country estate manager would want, with four-wheel drive and a reasonable 1.6-litre engine from the Daihatsu Applause which, while not able to make it go like the clappers, was perfectly adequate. Along with the contemporary Suzuki Vitara, the Sportrak was the first compact sport-utility vehicle.

Yet history is sometimes unkind to pioneers. Just five years after the Sportrak’s launch, along came the Toyota RAV4 and re-set the benchmark. The key difference? The RAV4 had a monocoque structure and was genuinely as capable on-road as off it; the Sportrak had a ladder frame chassis that the Romans would have recognised, and so would always be tiresome on the open road.

This nameplate gave the world some interesting muscle cars in the late ‘60s, but by 1988, not so much. If ever you were swayed to buy a car based on the allure of its name then this has to be the nadir; an ageing Opel/Vauxhall Astra, built for maximum cheapness in South Korea by Daewoo, and sold across the USA as an entry-level Pontiac.

All the emphasis was on the bargain-basement nature of the offering, but any compact offering from Honda or Toyota would surely have been better, and a lot less plasticky.

Something went quite awry between the unveiling of the 1989 Buick Park Avenue Essence concept car and the 1991 production Park Avenue. The former hinted at a dynamic new image for large US cars, but when the latter arrived it was little more than the usual softly-sprung sedan with its formerly rectilinear corners shaved off.

The 3.8-litre V6 engine wasn’t half-bad, especially in supercharged Ultra guise, but this was not a car to hurl around enthusiastically because its bench front seat was unsupportive and its ride soft and wallowy.

A column gearchange and mediocre refinement meant it fell well short of any BMW or Lexus standards, and yet this car was actually exported to Europe as some kind of totem of American prestige. Ultra-kitsch value today, mind, assuming you could dig one up.

A car boasting some massive claims – such as 1012bhp in twin-turbo form, 225mph top speed, and a 0-60mph figure of 3.5sec – that seemed at definite odds with the world’s smallest and least well-capitalised ‘supercar’ maker.

Gullwing doors were another feature that you’d rather have, if at all, engineered by Mercedes-Benz rather than some bloke in a West of England shed.

Actually, the Fighter T barely existed as a production car, although about a dozen standard Fighters were made, all with Dodge Viper V10 engines. And were the aerodynamics at all credible? Everything else so ridiculously rapid tends to need spoilers and air dams to tether them safely down, but maybe Bristol was taking its aircraft heritage seriously, and aiming high?

The 1990s and early 2000s was somewhat of a golden era for two-seater sports cars, and this Honda should have gleamed the brightest, especially with its 2.0-litre engine being one of the most powerful non-turbo units ever installed to a road car – a scarcely believable 240bhp dished out at a screaming 8300rpm.

Unfortunately, in the hands of the most experienced drivers, the overall recipe was deemed to be not quite right, despite all the attention on getting a 50:50 weight balance.

Flaws include unresponsive electric power steering, an awkward driving position, and a frightening tendency to snap oversteer that would catch you out alarmingly. In its favour are a fantastic six-speed gearbox, drop-dead gorgeous looks, and classic status today, but a lot more brilliance was expected from the home of the NSX.

The Phaeton was intended as a limousine for the shy but rich individual who didn’t want to lord it in a Bentley, but in fact this car only came to life precisely because it shared its 6.0-litre W12 underpinnings with the Bentley Flying Spur.

The Phaeton itself was the pet project of VW’s scary chieftain Ferdinand Piëch, anxious to give Volkswagen the range-topper he felt it deserved – and it was said, to keep his Audi guys on their toes - but the reception for it was lukewarm.

Fantastic machine, but overrated for its subtlety next to the Bentley, and very much unwanted today by comparison. If Angela Merkel had designed a luxury car, it would probably have turned out like this.

The top 10 most powerful cars on sale in the year the mid-engined French supercar was launched started at No10 with the 612bhp Porsche Carrera GT or Mercedes-Benz SL65 AMG and culminated at the No1 with the 987bhp Veyron. The Bugatti could also manage 253mph, making the quad-turbo, W16-engined two-seater the world’s fastest car.

But was it really, really worth all the mountains of extra dosh for a car that – in the real world – had power and velocity that no-one could actually use? It was also 2.0 metres wide, making it one of the most cumbersome of city-drivers, and there were 10 radiators to keep topped up. And it was extremely expensive to both buy and operate.

The raw performance largely remained from the old days, with 300bhp and prodigious, four-wheel drive grip as the 2.5-litre boxer engine rocketed the car to 60mph in 4.8sec. But no matter what the marketing and statistics relayed, the character had been lost in Subaru’s quest to broaden its hardcore Impreza’s appeal and align it with Germany’s performance best-sellers.

The familiar three-box shape, with its giant rear aerofoil, was gone, and in its place came a blander-than-bland five door hatchback. Then, Subaru’s cost-cutting team combed through the interior, making it as cheap and coarse as they could. It seemed like a shameful way to treat an icon…

The 2.0-litre two-plus-two seater was designed to get back to basics with its rear-wheel drive and skinny tyres, and you did indeed get quite a basic car. And not necessarily in a good way: inside, it was claustrophobic and cheaply finished. Oversteer was the major characteristic of the handling – okay for some weekend drifting on a disused airfield, possibly a liability on rain-soaked public roads.

And there was a distinct lack of torque right in the middle of the rev range, which kind of put the kybosh on spirited everyday driving. None of it had to be this way, as Mazda’s all-round excellent MX-5 continued to demonstrate. The new GR86 takes the GT86 recipe and improves it.