The Ford Granada
I saw this article on MSN today, about the biggest automotive flops of the past 25 years, and it got me to thinking of lemons I have driven. Most of them were Fords from the ’70s, because Dad was a Ford dealer and the ’70s was when I started driving. These were cars like the Ford Granada, pictured above. The Granada looked like a cereal box on wheels, and combined the worst features imaginable — absurdly bad handling, dismal appearance, grossly underpowered, poor gas mileage. It was not a car that you wanted to drive to impress a girl on the first date. There were many other Ford busts from that era — the gnome-like Ford Maverick, which could easily have been manufactured by a country behind the Iron Curtain, and the stylish Ford Pinto, which handled like Bambi on icy road conditions and was later associated with rear-end explosions, and the Mustang Ghia, with a roof coated in a pebbly white plastic substance that presumably was supposed to look like a convertible but instead quickly became brittle and broke apart after its first trip through the car wash.
Well, what the heck — they were free thanks to Dad, and as my grandmother was fond of saying, You get what you pay for.
More on the Ford Granada: Leisure Suits, Disco, and the Ford Granada
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