1990 General Motors dustbuster minivans you've already read how two Japanese powerhouses failed to compete with Chrysler's minivans did you expect GM to do any better to be fair to GM its early 1990 efforts got the interior size about right but everything else about the Chevrolet Lumina APV Oldsmobile Silhouette and Pontiac Transport was wrong the design was supposed to be futuristic instead they earned the nickname dustbuster after the handheld vacuum cleaner they so closely resembled it's hard to tell which of the three versions was the ugliest the transport with its grooved plastic cladding tacked onto the dustbusters plastic body gets our vote but hideous styling was far from these Vans worst aspect the 120 horsepower 3. 1 L V6 left them woefully underpowered the mile long dashboard made them disorienting to drive and the anti-at nose made them a pain to park GM spent years patching up these ODS to poor decision-making with bigger engines shorter noses and modified dashboards but to no avail all three versions remained failures in the marketplace leading to their Rarity today 1991 Saturn S Series Saturn wasn't just one of the worst cars of the 1990s it was one of the worst car companies brainchild of call me Roger Smith now remembered as the worst CEO in General Motors history the Saturn division advertised itself as a different kind of car company unfortunately its first product the 1991 S Series wasn't a different kind of car despite unique powertrains and Engineering it felt no different than GM's other front-wheel drive heaps of that era noisy unrefined indifferently engineered and mih to drive with build quality that was better than typical for GM but still not up to Hondo yotas standards Saturn's Innovative and expensive plastic body panels were supposed to enable frequent styling changes but that never happened because there was no money left to change the styling Saturn's all new cars factories dealerships and Workforce drained GM's corporate coffers of some billion dooming not only the S Series but most of General Motors product lines to a decade of mediocrity 1996 Nissan 200 sxs to understand how lousy the 200 sxs was you have to know how awesome its predecessor the 1991 to 94 Sentra SE was every car magazine raved about that 140 horsepower 2400 lb under the radar missile in 1995 Nissan replaced the two-door Sentra with the swoopy but bland 200 SX and we waited eagerly for the SE version only to wish we'd never seen it the Sentra se's independent rear end was gone replaced by a cheaper torsion beam and although the powertrain was a carryover the 200 sxs extra weight and bulk slowed the zero to 60 time by almost half a second the suspension was softened in the name of the two most dreaded words in the automotive business increased compliance and although motor trend's instrumented testing showed the 200 sxs to have skid pad and slalom numbers Superior to those of its predecessor the magic that made the Sentra SE so endearing was gone why is the brilliant Sentra SE not more fondly remembered probably because the 200SX SE was terrible enough to ruin the SE moniker for good 1991 Toyota Privia it seems rather ironic that Japanese companies could literally reshape what Americans wanted from their cars yet creating a vehicle that could compete with Chrysler's Blockbuster minivans was a seemingly simple task that continued to elude them witness the preia an egg-shaped odity that came to Market and immediately alienated most wouldbe buyers with its high price and Pregnant guppy styling those who did make it as far as a test drive had another unpleasant surprise waiting while most minivans had V6 power the Privia was powered by a hopelessly overtaxed 4-cylinder engine we timed an all-wheel drive 1990 Previa all track to 60 mph hour in an excruciating 13. 6 seconds and EPA fuel economy estimates were barely out of the High Teens the Previa mid-engine platform had no room for a six-cylinder engine so Toyota added a supercharger which only succeeded in making the Previa slightly quicker and significantly noisier it took Toyota the better part of the decade to figure out that the only way to compete with the Chrysler Vans was to clone them which it did with the 1998 Sienna 1995 Chevrolet Monte Carlo the Monte Carlo had a two decade run as the car of choice for gas station casanovas before quietly being laid to rest in 1988 7 years later Chevrolet destroyed the dead Monte Carlo's dignity by attaching its storied moniker to this rolling travesty which was actually the two-door version of the new second generation Lumina the problem was that Monte Carlos were known for their distinctive style but the 1995 version literally had none it was the epitome of the anonymous wheel blob from Maine to Oregon grown men with mullets threw down their halfs smoked winstons in disgust and burst into tears even the supposedly sporty z34 version managed to bleach out any personality that might have carried over from its predecessor the possibly credible Lumina z34 liberally slathered with the appalling mediocrity that was the Hallmark of mid90s General Motors the Monte car Carlo literally had no redeeming features Beyond its ability to impart seats with motion amazingly Chevrolet made no effort to address the Monte Carlos's anonymity until replacing it with a new version for Y2K a car that was as ugly as ugly could be but at least had some personality 1995 Honda Odyssey it wasn't just Toyota that got tripped up in its efforts to build a decent minivan Honda got it wrong as well a conservative company Honda waited a full decade before going up against Chrysler's unassailable Vans time you'd think the company could have used to thoroughly assess failed attempts like the aforementioned preia weird and slow the Nissan Quest too small and the Mazda MPV just plain wrong nope Honda repeated many of its competitors's mistakes and made a few of its own most notably estu the sliding doors so beloved by parents in favor of traditional hinged doors worse yet this undersized Oddity arrived just before Chrysler released a bigger and better version of its minivan which proceeded to outsell the Honda Odyssey by a ratio of roughly 25 to1 Honda flogged some to Isuzu rebadged as the Oasis and in return Honda got the poorly built Rodeo to sell as the Honda Passport it's difficult to determine which company got the worse end of that deal if the Odyssey did anything well it was proving that those those who thought Honda could do no wrong were wrong 1992 AM General Hummer H1 America's success in Operation Desert Storm turned soldiers into rock stars leading to popular demand for AM General to build a civilian version of its military High Mobility multi-purpose wheeled vehicle but Hummer H1 buyers soon discovered why the military offers such good benefits to make up for the misery of driving around in a Humvee despite being as wide as the Panama Canal the H1 offered next to no passenger space primarily because its hapless occupants had to share the cabin with the engine that engine was GM's utterly wretched 6.
2 L naturally aspirated diesel which made up for its stupendous lack of Power with an ere exuberance of noise though to be fair it fought an exuberant battle trying to outshout the H1s moaning Drve Line and roaring tires AM General tried to address the noise problem by fitting a gas engine Chevy's venerable 5. 7 L V8 which only succeeded in making the painfully slow H1 even slower when GM bought the Hummer brand it figured out that the best way to sell Hummers to civilians was to spin them from civilian Vehicles like the Suburban and Tahoe hence the runaway success of the H2 1995 BMW 318 somehow BMW American organization got it into its corporate head that it needed to capture its young upand cominging customers at an even younger age so it imported the three series compact as its entrylevel model hitting the self-imposed $20,000 Target price about $36,000 in 2024 meant using a small 1. 8 L engine and ditching the e46s multi-link rear suspension for the old e30s trailing arms and if you think this sounds like a bad idea you should drive the car the 318t couldn't even keep up with a Dodge Neon not the SRT4 but the ordinary neon which was more than a second quicker to 60 and cost half as much handling was fine one of the few expectations the 318 met but the ride felt as if the front and rear suspensions came from completely different cars because they did the silly styling same wheelbase as the three sedan with body shortened by 9 in apparently with a sawsall did it no favors it took 4 years and a pitiful 25,000 sales for BMW to realize that a slow ugly ill- riding car did nothing for its brand image no matter how cheap the pricing 1991 Mercury Capri Ford decided it needed a competitor for the MX5 Miata but instead of working with Mazda a company that Ford partially owned Dearborn cobbled together this wield mishap from Parts bins all over the world the car was based on the Australian Market Ford laser which ironically was a reskinned Mazda 323 hatchback the Capri was poorly assembled in Australia and despite being marketed to young women sold at old man brand Lincoln Mercury dealerships rather than follow what they knew about such Vehicles Ford exec went shoulder deep into customer clinics which convinced them that the most important attributes in a convertible sports car were comfort and practicality that explains why unlike the Miata the Capri had front-wheel drive and a vestigal back seat it also explains why unlike the Miata no one bought the Capri we've always thought the car's name was misspelled move the r between the C and the A and you get a much more suitable moniker 1993 Volkswagen EuroVan Volkswagen having given America its first minivan in the form of the FED transporter probably figured it knew a thing or two about how to compete against Chrysler's all conquering minivans Volkswagen was wrong the EuroVan was little more than a glossed over commercial truck and as a minivan it was too big too heavy and way the hell too slow its 2.
5 L 5-cylinder engine mustered a mere 109 horsepower and 140 lb feet of torque and given the deadly combination of a steep hill and a stiff headwind it felt like it might lose the battle to keep the nearly 2ton EuroVan moving granted VW had no problem selling slow Vans to stoned hippies in the 1960s but now that the Mi generation had traded their weed and tie DY for kids and IRAs they demanded something better sales were so dismal that VW pulled the EuroVan after just one year the EuroVan returned in 1999 with six-cylinder power but buyers were no more re receptive compared to other minivans even lousy efforts like the aforementioned preia and first gen Odyssey the Euro Van's pitiful sales numbers look like a rounding error 1994 Ford Aspire the Mazda designed Kia built Ford Festiva was a runaway success in the late 1980s and early 90s so when time came for a replacement Ford and Kia figured they knew what they were doing instead of going back to Mazda these two unlikely partn took it upon themselves to Cobble together a bigger and more bulbous car using the same mechanical bits the resulting aspirate drove as if it had been designed by firste engineering students the unassisted steering was slow and heavy grip was lousy body roll was outright comical and refinement was non-existent and this was just at City speeds which was about all the festivas carryover 1.
