Bad Is a Relative Expression.(Column)

Byline: Kevin A. Wilson

My freethinker brother Scott was never much of a car guy, but he owned a Mazda rotary in the bad old pioneering days. He's adventurous that way. It was no surprise when he later became a true believer in Apple computers. Always more conventional, I had a '73 Chevy Vega. It was probably a dead heat between us on who would cloud the neighborhood in blue oil smoke first. He won, only because I melted the Vega's Powerglide trying to get it out of a snowdrift.

Scott's RX-2 showed up at home one day leading a trail of smoke so large it would have solved that little mosquito problem they had when they were digging the Panama Canal. Those early tip seals could go from "marginal'' to "all gone'' overnight. He got an F-150, a better hauler for the stuff welders and blacksmiths haul around. Or was he into masonry that year? Whatever, until the RX-2 melted down, it was nicer to drive than my Vega. In my car, rust was just starting to eat into the edges of the shock tower mounts when the tranny went south that winter of, um, let's see, 1977.

Right around that time, the woman who later became Mrs. Wilson was doing hand-to-hand combat with a Ford Pinto. So she replaced it with a Pontiac Tempest. The 'pest (that's what it said on the fender) was 10 years older, had thousands more miles on its odo, and was, oh, about 9 million times more reliable than the Pinto. Meaning I only fixed it once a month for the next three years. As for the Pinto, she'd have been better off just backing that little sucker into a pole and watching it burn.

The kicker here is that I think Dad was in an AMC Pacer wagon. That means that, for a brief interlude there, our little circle owned four of the 14 "worst cars of all time'' as recently selected by Forbes. Such lists are fun, but never complete. Other cars Forbes chose ...