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40 Cars That Went Down As The Worst Vehicles In Auto History

Cameron Eittreim July 21, 2021

8: Mercedes Benz CLA-Class (2013)

The CLA-Class had a specific purpose to be an entry-level Mercedes Benz model. The price tag was right but the design and the features weren’t, which is why consumers didn’t gravitate toward it. The dashboard design was about as confusing as you could get and performance was underwhelming.

Pretty much the only reason that any drivers purchased a CLA-Class was to flaunt the Mercedes Benz logo. The actual fit and finish of the vehicle are far below what you’d expect out of a car from Mercedes. For the most part, the CLA-Class was a tremendous failure for the Mercedes brand in general.

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7: Mitsubishi Outlander (2014)

The Outlander is one SUV model that drivers knew was on the market but never really considered. Its design was far below the other SUV models on the market and its powertrain was outdated. In 2014 the company decided to do a redesign of the model and it fared poorly with the public perception of the company.

The styling looked like something out of a cyborg movie and the reliability was questionable at best. Mitsubishi’s small dealership network made finding repairs for the Outlander a pain, and the price tag was quite high for what you got.

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6: Nissan Versa (2014)

Nissan needed a compact car to compete with Honda and other automakers. The Versa was billed as the answer to this problem, but the car had a lot of drawbacks. Like the Mitsubishi Mirage, the Versa was very cheaply designed and this contributed greatly to its downfall.

The Versa just didn’t resonate with consumers as the design was poorly executed. The performance was lackluster at best and the reliability of the Nissan CVT transmission is questionable. Consumers just didn’t gravitate toward the Versa and Nissan had a very tough time selling these to the public.

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5: Chevy Spark (2014)

Throughout the past 40 years, Chevy has always had some sort of a subcompact on the market. The Spark was probably the worst received of these with a design that consumers balked at. The Spark was smaller than almost anything else on the market and the underpowered engine didn’t help.

If you lived anywhere but an urban setting, the Spark just wasn’t a feasible design. The underpowered engine wasn’t very effective at highway speeds and you felt undersized in traffic in a crowd of SUVs and trucks.

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2011 Scion tC - 2012 Scion tC — Photo Credit: Toyota

4: Scion TC (2014)

The first Scion TC was lightning in a bottle and consumers gravitated toward it well. The redesigned model, on the other hand, was lacking in about every facet. At this point, Scion was just trying to grasp at straws and stay somewhat relevant. The TC just didn’t do that and the car was about as universally panned as you could get.

Eventually, the Scion brand was phased out by Toyota shortly after this and the TC became a thing of the past. The car just didn’t connect with consumers the way that the original model had connected almost a decade before.

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3: Scion iQ (2015)

The final car to wear a Scion badge was about as sad as the brand’s decline into obscurity. When Scion originally hit the scene, the brand was a smash hit, selling. But somewhere along with the line, things got skewed and the brand lost its focus. That period in the mid-2000s shaped the brand’s sad future.

The Scion brand we had at the end of 2015 was a mere shadow of that image. There was no more trendy advertising and there were no more unique cars. Instead, we got a Smart For-Two with a Scion badge slapped onto it.

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2: Mazda 5 (2015)

The Mazda 5 never stood a chance to be a sales success. It was smaller than almost any other minivan on the market, and that market was shrinking. Mazda had never sold a lot of minivans and the 5 was just a victim of this. The small dimensions of the car were no match for Americans.

A fair amount of these models went to rental car lots, and then the model was quietly discontinued in favor of crossovers. The Mazda 5 had a lot of unique potential but it just didn’t fit into the larger scope of the Mazda lineup.

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1: Nissan Juke (2015)

You must give the Nissan Juke credit for being a unique-looking SUV. The Juke had an underpowered engine which was the first thing that consumers disliked about it. Then you had the fact that the front fascia of the thing looked more like a bug than an actual car. The Juke had some potential but consumers just didn’t receive it the right way.

The Juke will undeniably go down as one of the most recent failures for the Nissan brand. The thing had a lot of promise if the market had been there for it. Sadly, consumers just weren’t digging its radical styling and the lack of power.

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