Man, who doesn’t love a powerful car? The more power, the more better, amirite? Even when all that’s required is basic transportation, a little extra oomph is appreciated. No one visits their mechanic and says “I’d like a little less out of the engine.” And rest assured, any salesman accompanying a starry-eyed first-time econobox buyer on a test drive will invite them to mash the pedal (once up to about 30mph or so) before offering a suitably impressed, “it’s pretty peppy, right?”
But woe to those who find themselves behind the wheel of a truly underpowered car. Merely not-powerful is disappointing, sure, but livable. A bonafide underpowered car, however, is true misery. Frustrated drivers in real cars whiz past you the moment you clear the on-ramp. Not only is the left lane off limits, so is the center lane. Even the right lane requires a sharp eye on the rear view mirror, lest you overlook an angry moped rider crowding your rear bumper. A steep hill on the horizon? Better mat the pedal now and build up as much momentum as you can.
Tell us about your underpowered-car experiences. If you suffered through stewardship of a malaise-era machine, you no doubt encountered some steel sleds boasting V8s with big cubes but precious few ponies. Or perhaps you commuted in a hatchback that, while lightweight, was very lopsided when it came to power to weight and rewarded you with great fuel economy and zero fun. Hey, at least you were speed-trap proof.
What cars, trucks, and/or motorcycles wheezed you to school or work with the bare minimum of muscle? Let’s hear those stories!
The slowest car I’ve ever driven?
A 1994 Suzuki Sidekick 4-door. It wasn’t my car, but I was allowed to drive it by the owner when I needed transportation for college. It would go like a constipated snail. It had all of the cornering potential of a forklift hoisting up high a fully loaded pallet of anvils. And boy did it rattle like someone suffering from heroin withdrawls, or perhaps if Michael J. Fox had imbibed in some crystal meth.
It needed a tuneup, spark plugs, mass airflow sensor, and other work, so it was not making anything near the stock 80 horsepower. Because of that, 0-60 mph time was around 20 seconds, and it struggled to reach 70 mph. Just gently cornering at 15 mph through an intersection, I had gotten it up on 2 wheels inadvertently. It rattled far worse than my GT6 when it had the inline-6 in it, but especially at speed when being buffeted around by crosswinds or passing vehicles. Fuel economy was around 20 mpg driven normally, which was actually terrible for something so light and underpowered, although if I shifted it up at 2,000 rpm and stayed at a steady 35 mph in 5th gear, and coasted in neutral to stops, I could eek out 30 mpg(as a broke college student, this was important).
Eventually, the owner had a tune-up done and 0-60 mph time dropped to about 14 seconds, and while the speedometer only went to 85 mph, top speed increased to 100 mph and I was able to tell because in 5th gear 2k rpm was exactly 40 mph, and it would top out at 5k rpm in top gear. Totally different vehicle, and even more dangerous to drive afterward. Anything over 70 mph was frightening, because it felt like it was going to get ripped apart by wind shear. My plastic-bodied custom built 91 lb velomobile/microcar thing with 3 wheels and no windscreen has been downhill at 70 mph, and it felt much more stable and confident than this Sidekick at the same speed, and was quieter to boot. My Milan velomobile careening down a steep hill at 89 mph felt more planted and secure, than this Suzuki Sidekick did at 70 mph. To think that I once took the Sidekick to 100 mph… I’m very lucky to be alive!
I legitimately laughed out loud at this.
My answer to this is definitely the 35hp 1927 Dodge I had to roadtest yesterday at work, however, the ’85 Gemini with a whopping 65hp pushed through a 2 speed auto that I tried to haul up a mountain side definitely performed worse than the Dodge.
That’s a tough one… I can’t decide between the ’70 VW Bug, the ’88 Yugo GVL, or the ’76 Buick Estate Wagon (5200 lbs, 205 HP).
Two cars I have owned come to mind, a ’66 Fiat 600 and a ’71 Fiat 850 spider. They were probably the slowest of all cars I have owned or driven.
That’s easy. My parents bought a 1981 Buick LeSabre Limited with the 5.7L Diesel V8, brand-new. The salesman warned them to be careful when pulling out into traffic in the car, as its acceleration was sluggish. The specs were: 105 HP, 200 lb/ft of torque, no turbo, indirect fuel injection, 4000-ish pounds of road-hugging weight, 0-60 time approximately 19 seconds. It was comfy, but sloooooow. My sister was on a traveling soccer team and my Dad was looking for fuel economy with this pig. He got what he wanted, but (like all Olds 5.7L diesels) it killed its fuel injection pump at about 50k miles, and blew its head gaskets at 125k miles. We had it converted to gasoline operation by a local shop who swapped in an Olds 307 V8 with a Quadrajet 4-barrel. It was more fun to drive after that!
I had a ‘79 C10 that started life with an Olds diesel before being swapped for W31 Olds 350 gasser at some point. Drank gas, but man than truck was fast.
I commented on this already, but my parents had an ’82 LeSabre Diesel. It was stupid slow but super comfy. We had relative good luck with ours, as it lasted longer than most. I helped my dad do the injection pump at around 72k, injectors at 112k, and then it didn’t pop head gaskets until nearly 172k. I remember my brother and I doing a top speed run, finding out that the 85mph speedometer was crazy optimistic, as it could barely hit 70mph going downhill.
Oldsmobile diesel. You “win”.
My first car was a ‘69 Beetle with an auto-stick. That was pretty damn slow, but a lot of fun, and my parents still have it in their garage!
But what felt like the slowest car I’ve driven was probably my cousin’s early 90’s Dodge Shadow with automatic transmission & A/C. I remember needing to turn off the A/C so we could actually get some sort of “acceptable” acceleration while merging onto a highway. Oof.
Oh!!! I totally forgot I had an ‘84 Fiero with the Iron Duke and auto transmission. Imagine my embarrassment when a classmate in a Ford Tempo beat me in a race that I’m fairly certain was also downhill. Oooooooof.
1967 Dodge Dart 4 door. 225 slant six. Don’t get me wrong, I love the slant six, it was an amazing engine, but it’s never going to win any awards for power in stock form. Add to it the V twin air-conditioning compressor, that was a very slow car.
I’m going to add in here a 1984 S10 Blazer with the V6 (I forget the size, it was not the 4.3 though. 2.9?). Man that thing would take forever to get to speed!
1982 Accord Hatch, 82HP. I’ve probably driven slower cars, but not daily’d.
I had one of those, it was great. You clearly don’t know slow. 🙂
I’m 32 so I’m a bit spoiled. Cars that are truly underpowered in this day and age pretty hard to come by. I’ve never driven anything that had so little power it was unsafe or difficult to use. The most anemic feeling car that I’ve driven and can remember well was a manual Crosstrek, which you can only get with the base engine.
A friend of my brother in law dailies it and when we were all on a trip for his bachelor party I asked if I could take it out to get some extra wheel time with a stick since I’d just learned how to drive one a few months earlier. I wouldn’t say it’s underpowered necessarily but the amount of effort it took to get it up to speed on country roads was no joke. The engine is wheezy and the gearing is weirdly long.
I would literally have my foot to the floor banging gears like an idiot and it took so much work to get that damn thing up to 65-70. It’s one of the only cars I can remember that just didn’t have any ability to push me back into the seat. You could flog that thing as hard as possible and it feels the exact same as driving it like a grandma. Useful car and I’m glad they offered it in stick for as long as they did. But damn is it slow.
My first car – 2001 Ford Focus saloon, 1.8L “90”hp diesel with manual shifter and misaligned timing belt. Great suspension together with best all season tyres on the market and an engine that needed 24 seconds to hit 100 kph made it… an interesting machine to drive. Top speed was somewhere at 140 kph, making me choose on motorways if I wanted go somewhere reasonably fast or have air conditioning on. Just keeping up with cargo vans on the road was quite a challenge for that thing.
The corners are different story – I didn’t want to lose that momentum so I got so used to zooming fast through bends that having to drive any other car got difficult for me, all of them just didn’t want to turn like I wanted.
1982 Buick LeSabre Limited Diesel. That 5.7L Olds diesel put out a very optimistic 120hp, so it was a good thing the velour seats were INSANELY comfortable because you were going to be in them for a while no matter where you were going. I think my brother and I clocked the thing at 0-60mph in about 15 seconds, and that was us driving it in anger. The worst part was the car only had less than 50,000 miles on it, so we couldn’t chalk it up to it being old or worn out.
1957 Fiat Multipla
1957 Reliant Regal Mk II Convertible
1970 – something – I forget – 850 Mini
1980 Audi 5000 with the 2.0l diesel. A 2900 lb car with 67 horsepower. It was slow enough that I once attempted to overtake a semi truck on a two lane, get halfway past it, then have to abort the pass because another truck pulled into the opposite lane a mile away and I wasn’t going fast enough to make it.
That’s tricky, I’ve driven several cars with not much power but not much weight. My first thought was an 87 Ford Fiesta 950 with 45 hp moving 1700 lbs, but a manual transmission and low gears made it keep up with late 80s UK traffic. The 75 Civic Hondamatic probably takes the prize followed by a 74 Beetle with automatic stick shift. In both cases it’s a small engine bogged down by a torque converter.
Not exactly underpowered, just over geared. My first car that wasn’t “the family Camry” was my grandpa’s 1996 Mazda b2300(Ford Ranger) with a manual transmission and it was a single cab. The 2.3 L Lima engine (found in the Pinto and Mustang SVO) honestly made acceptable power. 112hp new and probably making like low 90s when I got it. That might sound extremely low but this engine made all of it torque between 2,000 and 3,000 RPM, over 130 ft-lb at 2,400. So it had plenty of grunt for me to classify its performance as “zippy” around town. Although this is at sea level, where the air is thick and power is plentiful. When you took this truck up the mountains past 7,000 ft… It starts to struggle, it starts to struggle real bad. 3rd gear 5K RPM just to keep up with anyone who isn’t a semi truck.
But about that under geared part, You would think for being a pickup truck it would have an official tow classification from Ford. And it does although Ford tells you to not tow with a 2.3 manual 2×4 with 3.45 gears. If I had 3.73 gears the tow rating jumps from “not recommended for trailer towing” to 4800 GCWR haha. Plus getting a little lower of a final drive would have made 5th gear more than just useful for flat section of highway holding a speed. The moment you encounter a hill with 3.45 gears you drop it into 4th maybe 3rd. And anything over 80 mph in the truck was really a chore because aero killed it.
Is this worthy of being in this rosster of underpowered automobiles? No, probably not, but I do miss driving that truck around. Enough power to have a hoot driving it below 60mph with the wonderful Mazda gearbox but not enough to get a young driver arrested or crash it doing something stupid. Overall an 8/10 truck, needs 3.73 gears a rear sway bar, and better cassette deck noise isolation from cell phones that didn’t exist in the 90s
They put that engine in Rangers until like 2001. My friend has one and even though it’s only 6 years older than my Tacoma the whole truck feels decades older – and my Tacoma has 100,000 more miles than his. Absolutely bulletproof little engine though. It’s belt driven cams but non-interferance and you can swap the belt in no time at all.
My ’83 Lynx made a whole 89hp, which you couldn’t really feel because it never ran.
My 83 Escort ran…most of the time…but it was slow. The car it replaced was a 73 Plymouth Scamp with a 318, which was pretty peppy
A Chevy Aveo rental car – small, cramped, cheap, and with two adults basically a golf cart power-wise. Second place was my Chevy Equinox, which other than the pathetic engine, was not bad as an SUV.
I say this as a Volkswagen 411 owner whose Type 4 lump hasn’t run right for most of her ownership of the car: the Chrysler 200 I had as a rental about a decade ago genuinely ticked me off. Just a miserable car that was baffled by hills. The transmission (still a four-speed? IIRC? In like 2013????) didn’t know what gear it wanted and the engine had all the pep of an exhausted fart that squeaks out as you sign/yawn out of sheer boredom.
See, the difference is that the Type 4’s power is adequate when it works. It’s sub-three-digits in horsepower, but it’s enough for a lightweight vintage car. The 200’s was not. Screw that car.
Never driven anything underpowered besides an old gas golf cart with 4 teenagers in it (including me at the time).
I think how you drive a vehicle and how much crud you got in it has more to do with it than sheer power numbers, also with a ton of gears you can go very far with very few horsepower.
Absolute slowest: Trabant 601 Kombi (Wagon) 2 stroke, 600cc. It did 0…60 MPH, eventually. Maybe under a minute, under favorable conditions, unloaded. Top speed maybe 75 on a good day.
Next up: Fiat Uno 1.3 n/a Diesel. Around 40 hp. My guess is it hit 60 MPH in around 45 seconds.
Maruti Suzuki 800 DX. It wasn’t that underpowered in terms of acceleration, as it was Kei-car sized and super light, but top speed was around 65-70 MPH. The 4-speed transmission just ran out of gearing.
I had a 1994 Geo Metro XFi , and according to it’s owners manual the official specifications page declared –
Engine power – 50 HP ( XFi model – Less than 50 HP )
Less than? What no actual tested rating ? WTH!
I’ve driven a few and still own one as a “fun car”.
My MGB is rated at 62.5 hp. Yes, there is a 1/2 hp in the official rating. It’s still so fun around town because you have to ring every bit out of it all the time.
My parents had a mid 80’s Buick Century with the Iron Duke. The official 0-60 was 15 seconds.
I learned to drive on my parents 1981 Chevy G20 Van that they had special ordered with the diesel. It had to be over 20 seconds to get to 60, but I can’t find any stats. They kept that van almost 20 years and it had over 270,000 miles on it when they sold it. But boy was it slow.
1983 VW Vanagon. 67 thundering horses for that van plus the several hundred pounds of windsurfing equipment my dad hauled everywhere. Learned stick on that 2-foot long floor shifter, broken speedometer (never became an issue). Loved that brown beast.
Vanagon was the first thing that jumped in my head.
Have a 1990 Vanagon Westy with the 2.1 WBX and a 5speed manual and the best I can say is its adequate. Makes a lot of noise at least so people get out of your way which is great as you need to keep the momentum up to get around.
Its feels faster than my old 1983 Tercel 4wd Wagon.
A 1989 Olds Cutlass Cruiser. With the Iron Duke under the hood. Slow doesn’t begin to describe it. Out of spite when we purchased its replacement, the engine blew a head gasket. Good riddance.
The 1980-or-so school-bus yellow diesel Chevette that got passed down through both my sisters and finally to me to use. I think it was 51HP. That thing could MAYBE get to highway speed if some small miracle happened, but you wouldn’t want it to.