Marketplace of Ideas Blog

The Milwaukee Auto Show concludes this weekend.

On my way to Milwaukee last weekend to appear on WTMJ-TV’s “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes,” the last segment of Sykes’ radio show (before his “Deep Tunnel Awards” and “Right Stuff Awards”) focused, for some reason, on one of the worst vehicles in the history of transportation: The Yugo, a car that, had it ever been shown at the Milwaukee Auto Show, would have been exhibited in one of the Midwest Airlines Center bathrooms.

How bad was the Yugo? Someone called into the show to say that his parents had purchased a new Yugo in 1989 (at a discount of almost $900 from its original $3,990 list price), paying for it with a bank loan. And the bank would not take the Yugo as collateral for the car loan. Every time I read that, I burst out laughing — a bank that will write a car loan, but won’t take the car itself as collateral for the car loan.

Richard Porter, who converted his snarky writing and hilarious metaphors from BBC-TV’s “TopGear” into a book, Crap Cars, described the Yugo GV (which stood for what — “Godawful Vomit”? “Grotesque Vehicle”?) as having “slothful performance, woeful reliability, and build quality that gave the GV the permanent falling-down-at-the-seams appearance of an abandoned shack. Still, when Yugoslavia descended into full-blown war, at least someone had the presence of mind to bomb the Yugo factory.”

Most people have owned at least one car that generated similar sentiments from its owner, due to some combination of poor design and/or construction and non-reliability. (This is beyond the issues Toyota owners now are experiencing.) Crap Cars eviscerates such other cars as the AMC Pacer (“What it actually provided was all the embarrassment of driving a compact, with all the extra humiliation of driving a compact that looked like a turtle”), the Cadillac Seville diesel (“belched smoke clouds so dark and noxious that starting the engine was enough to have your panicked neighbors call the EPA”), the Chevrolet Citation (“as reliable as a Russian-made Rolex”) and Vega (“If this car was only a little bit rusty, it was still on the production line”), the Chrysler K-cars (“Yeah, the K-car sold well, but then so would stale white bread in a food crisis”), the Dodge Rampage (an Omni-based pickup whose bed “was about as useful as electric windows on an airplane”), the Ford Pinto (“When you’re designing a new economy car it’s a really good idea if you can remember to make sure that under no circumstances does it keep exploding”), the 1987–1994 Jaguar XJ6 (“developed on the kind of budget that BMW would allocate to a new ashtray”), the MGB (“essentially a leakier, noisier, less comfortable, and far less useful version of something once used to deliver tractor parts”), the Pontiac Aztek (“so hideous that simply thumbing through the sales brochure can bring on a powerful sensation of nausea”), the Rolls-Royce Camarague (“unpleasantly reminiscent of a fat man sitting on a bar stool”), the Suzuki Samurai (“as stable as an alcoholic on a trampoline”), and the original Volkswagen Beetle (“a dismal Nazi staff car with its engine in the wrong place and a list of in-built faults so long that it could fill every page in this book”).

My four-wheeled cross to bear was a 1988 Chevrolet Beretta, a sporty car with a V-6 and five-speed transmission. The Beretta was a buyback car, and I bought it because the price was right and I assumed General Motors had fixed the overheating problem. (That is what the literary types call “foreshadowing.”)

About three months after I bought it, I was driving from high school football game to high school football game on a late-summer day when I noticed the temperature gauge was pegged on H. So I got out of the car and popped the hood, to see … nothing unusual. No steam coming out of the radiator, no apparent malfunction; in fact, the fan kept cycling on and off as it normally would. Shortly thereafter, the Low Coolant light came on, despite the fact there was coolant in the overflow tank. (I didn’t actually check the radiator since I didn’t feel like dealing with third-degree burns between games.)

Two car dealers and one car repair place were unable over the next two years to permanently fix the problem, despite replacing computers, sensors, thermostats, etc. None of the three were ever able to confirm that the car was overheating or not.

The car had other interesting features. It would pop fuses for no apparent reason, which impressed my then-girlfriend (now wife) on a summer trip, and had other electrical gremlins. The idle was such that the engine would occasionally die when I punched in the clutch, only to restart when I let the clutch out if the car was moving. (One reason manual transmissions are better: You can push-start them.)

I spent two years simultaneously making car payments and repair payments. (Had I put pen to paper and figured out the various costs, I would have put the money into the various 100,000-plus-mile repairs the Caprice needed, even at 11 mpg.) The last straw came when, instead of getting the brakes fixed, I got the front brakes replaced because the repairer reported the front disc brakes were rusting … from the inside … on a four-year-old car that was operated 1,000 miles from the nearest ocean. Shortly thereafter, I took advantage of the post-Operation Desert Storm recession and resulting 2.9-percent financing to buy a much more reliable Ford Escort GT.

That, however, is the only truly bad (to date) car ownership experience I’ve had. My father, in part because he’s obviously been around longer to own more cars, has owned more vehicles that expanded his ability to use colorful metaphors to describe his vehicles.

The car on which I passed my driving test was a 1981 Chevrolet Malibu sedan with the base-model V-6. He purchased it as a demonstrator from a Madison Chevrolet dealership. And two days after it made its first permanent appearance at our house, a kid from up the street threw rocks at it and chipped some paint. (This is also foreshadowing.)

Shortly after purchase, we took it on a vacation to Canada and Niagara Falls. On day three of the vacation, the Malibu was rear-ended by a driver who gave a nonexistent name and address to the Toronto police, making the relatively minor repairs the result of a hit-and-run driver.

By this point, the car had already had issues. By the time we got back to Madison, I had created a page-long list of issues with the car, including the on-and-off Check Engine light (the car was GM’s first with Computer Command Control, which, well, needed refinement before installation), noises coming from the air conditioner, and, one night on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a broken seat piece that resulted in the front seat’s sliding backward upon acceleration and sliding forward upon braking.

The following six years were, from the passenger perspective, one bad experience after another. (Why one would stick with a lemon became apparent only after I experienced making monthly car payments.) The next time the Malibu took us on vacation, it acted as if it wanted to be on vacation itself: it performed as it should every other day; on bad days, it staggered from stoplights and ran miserably.

The coup de grace occurred one morning when Dad woke me up (I was a college student and was naturally sleeping when he went to work) to ask me to drive him to work. I got in my barge and drove him to work as he turned the interior of my car blue with descriptions of what he wanted to do with his car. Not long thereafter, he replaced the car with a Honda Accord.

Several years later, he purchased another demonstrator, a Buick Regal (also from a Madison dealership). And this was a pretty good car for him … if you leave out the fact that the engine and the transaxle both had to be replaced.

My previous car, a 1998 Subaru Outback on which we put all 228,000 miles, was a positive ownership experience, except for one adventurous day. My wife, then seven months pregnant with our first child, and I set out one Sunday morning for the Ikea store in suburban Chicago in search of Scandinavian baby furniture. I was a candidate for a different job at the time, so we stopped one of this company’s facilities in Chicago’s northern suburbs, then headed to Ikea.

As I made a right turn, I shifted into first, only to hear a horrible grinding noise whenever I tried to push the shifter into a forward gear. Until that moment, none of the four manual-transmission cars we had owned (including the aforementioned spawn of Satan of mine) had ever had a failed clutch.

So there we (irate husband and pregnant wife) were, on the side of an intersection north of Chicago, without working car or (in Illinois) cell phone. Fortunately, a man came along with a cell phone, allowing us to call the auto club. The auto club sent a flatbed to tow the car to the nearest Subaru dealership, in Libertyville, Ill., after which the driver charged us $4 for the towing charge beyond the $50 the auto club covered.

From the Subaru dealership, we walked to the nearest convenience store where a Libertyville police car was parked. The officers drove us (in the back, of course, where the miscreants go) to the police station, where we were able to use a phone to call an airport limousine (the least expensive option, believe it or not) to take us to Mitchell Field in Milwaukee, where we rented a car for the week for me to drive. The day, counting the repairs on the car, totaled about $1,300, with no furniture purchased.

Cars obviously are complicated machines — for one thing, they have to be able to operate in practically any weather, something not usually required of most machines — and have become more complicated with the advent of computers. (Your car, in fact, has more computer power than the Apollo Moon spaceships, a fact that blows me away every time I watch “Apollo 13.”) I’ve had many people who work in the automotive industry tell me that there are just some vehicles that resist fixing, for whatever reason.

Anyone who works in service, however, can tell you that bad customer experiences have more impact than good customer experiences, whether the customer experience comes from product or service. GM, Ford and Chrysler are still dealing with the image of bad products from decades ago, even though cars today are immeasurably better than the aforementioned Vega, Pinto and K-car. I predict Toyota will survive its sudden acceleration problem (which could be dealt with through one driver tip: the N in the shift quadrant) just fine because consumers ultimately will see it as an aberration, whereas some consumers still refuse to buy from the Big Three today because of past bad experiences.