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!
Mercedes W124 200D. Naturally aspirated 2 liter diesel with raging 71 horsepower in a car that weights 1430 kg. That car was my university degree in the art of overtaking, it took some real planning and forethought to pass a semi on a two-lane road. Slow as hell to accelerate (0-100 kph took 18.5 seconds), but could reach 150 kph (almost 100 mph in freedom units) with a long enough straight.
However, my father had a W123 200D, which had whopping 60 hp in a 1375 kg body. That engine was so gutless it had problems spinning its tires even on ice.
Propably one of the funniest part of these is that they could be had even with an automatic…
My first car, a ’63 Beetle. It was okay around town, but couldn’t keep up with traffic, especially up hill, on the Interstate.
When I was 18 I worked for a guy who ran the company out of his house. He sent me to pick up a load of sod… with his late 70’s Pontiac Sunfire (Monza clone), 2.5 Iron Puke with rings so loose it probably made less than 6:1 compression. Automatic, of course. The sod took up the entire hatch with the rear seats folded down, right to the ceiling. The rear bumper was about 2 inches off the ground. Max speed was about 17 mph.
This is an easy one – the 1989 Tempo GL sedan that we got as a hand-me-down from my mother-in-law shortly after our first son arrived. I’m not gonna complain too much because our other car was a 2-door, and having those back doors made dealing with a car seat at least a little easier. Being that it was our “family” car for a while, the lack of breakneck speed wasn’t an issue – plus we got it cheap (free actually), so there’s that. In retrospect, I think that driving an underpowered car makes you a better driver overall. When you know that you’re car can’t get you out of stupid situations that you choose to put yourself into, you tend to drive accordingly.
It was my first car, which was an 81 Dodge Aries with the 2.2L. I’ve never driven anything slower since then.
When my wife and I were younger we needed something larger than our Sentra that could handle a carseat a bit better. We bought a brand new 2008 Kia Sportage. I think 0-60 took longer than a hotpocket takes to cook in the microwave…
1980 Oldsmobile Diesel Custom Cruiser Wagon. Just about the biggest car GM made at the time, and I believe that the engine was rated at 120 HP, but I think that was if you hitched it up to 100 horses.
No Joke, it was so slow that it was dangerous. You couldn’t safely merge onto highways, or right turns from a light. Eventually, you could get it up to highway speeds. But that was it.
Even for the era, it was slow.
True story: 17 years old, driving with a friend from Port Austin to Birmingham, going down M 53, when these girls drove up by us. We were trying to be as cool as you can be with an Oldsmobile Diesel Custom Cruiser Wagon With Fake Wood Trim, then we hear this loud “TANG!!!”, and I lose what power I had. I was barely able to hit 50. The girls pull up next to us, hold their noses, and point to the rear of the car. We were billowing smoke. Not cool.
IIRC, the head or the block had cracked.
Later that week, we staged a race between the Olds and my friend, who was on foot. He beat me for two blocks, until I got up a head of steam in the Olds.
A friend had a 10-year old Geo Metro with an automatic transmission, and decided to drop acid just before we were supposed to get on the road. I had to take that thing on a busy interstate, and it was a terrifying experience. It couldn’t even maintain 65 mph on level ground, and I thought the engine was going to detonate.
Wasn’t helped any that they kept insisting that the trees were telling secrets, and then we had to pull over on the side so they could vomit.
I loathed that car.
My beloved X1/9 !
My first car was a malaise era holdover 1984 Cadillac Fleetwood. Amazing car, comfortable, sumptuous, room for all us high school kids if we wanted to all go somewhere in one car. But beset by the wheezy, slow as absolute hell HT4100 engine. Biggest bummer imaginable. At least the car was so comfortable you barely noticed that it took ten minutes to get up to freeway speeds. It’s just as well, at that age I belonged in the right two lanes anyway.
Now my dad’s Deville later on with the 4.9 V8? That’s a different story altogether….
Old VW busses with camping equipment.
Not-so-old VeeDub buses, too. Ever drive a EuroVan with the inline-five and automatic? If that isn’t draggy enough for you, try driving one up a mountain road….
That honor goes to my 850cc 34hp Mini Moke when it was new in 1965, I’m sure quite a few horses have scaped the coup since, Top speed, 110km/h with a tail wind, with a head wind you will not reach 100km/h.
And yet still, the most fun (or terrifying depending of you ask) driving experience you can have without breaking the speed limit.
Well, all the cars I have ever owned are underpowered:
1977 Datsun 120A FII 1.2L 69PS/95Nm/715Kg
1988 VW Passat 1.8L 8V 112PS/150Nm/1185Kg
2001 Citroen Saxo 1.1L 60PS/94Nm/825Kg (even less power than the Datsun!!)
2007 VW Eos 1.6L FSI 115PS/155Nm/1370Kg
2014 VW Golf 1.6L TDI 105PS/250Nm/1395Kg
The Golf is obviously (and feels) the fastest of them all and the tdi torque has a lot to do with it. The Citroen was the slowest of them all.
It’s actually my current daily driver. 34 extremely competent horses for a posted top speed of 120km/h that I’ve exceeded countless times.
I’ve had a Renault 6 with the big block 1100 cc engine. Altough it had only 45 hp I never felt it was underpowered. I once tried to max it but never dared to go over 120 kph. It felt much ore scary than 250 kph with my Honda CBR.
First, a bit of context: in 1990, the Brazilian government reduced the tax on cars that had an engine under 1000 cubic centimeters of displacement, so of course manufacturers raced to release models that would qualify. FIAT was the first, with the Uno Mille. My mother had the “luxury” version, with all its 56 horses (but only 860kg!).
Around the same time, my aunt won a car in a scratch lottery ticket, and was soon after stopped by the police on a routine check and found out her license had expired, so she needed someone to pick her up and drive the car, otherwise it would be impounded. This was the first and only time I drove VW’s answer to the Mille, the Gol (yes, you read that right, GOL, not Golf) with a 1 liter engine. They took the 1.6 liter and reduced displacement, and it made 50 hp, but on the other hand, fuel mileage was worse than the 1.6 it was based on. It took 22 seconds to reach 100km/h, and a few minutes to reach its top speed of 135km/h.
It was weird how they both seemed similar on paper, but my mom’s FIAT felt peppy and revvy, while the VW felt like a teenager being forced to go downstairs to say hi to their grandparents. The age-old technique of flooring it with every gearchange highlighted the quick response from the engine: “Uuuuugh, do I really have to? FINE!” and then an appreciable increase in noise but not in speed.
The equivalent law in the UK defined “under one litre” as ‘<1050 cc’, hence my first car having a 1047cc (ie, 1.047 litre) engine.
I have dealt with Brazil in a business context. Shipping product from Canada to Brazil. From what I can tell, the government there LOVES to make up new regulations, and does not give a damn what the actual consequences are. The main export of Brazil is bureaucratic red tape.
The biggest theme here has to be ok-ish cars crippled by bad transmissions. (Including my wife’s 92 dodge shadow w/ 3spd auto).
Hell, my TourX feels like a dog if you drive it like a normal car – all due to the poor transmission programming. Meanwhile, it has an insane amount of power to be mentioned in this discussion.
Shift manually, or learn how to trick the computer by flooring it when you wouldn’t think it necessary, and it’s great. But the standard programming sucks.
I used to have a 1995 Peugeot 205 1.8D.
This was only a year ago, too.
60hp of naturally aspirated diesel fury. However, it made peak torque at something like 2,000rpm and only weighed 850kg. It wasn’t fast in a straight line, but its diminutive size meant I could carry a lot of momentum around corners. It could annoy drivers of much bigger, more powerful cars no problem due to me driving it at 11/10ths all the time.
However, I think what I currently own is even slower. A Ssangyong Rexton. This is nearly 2 tons of SUV “powered” by a license built 5-cylinder Mercedes Benz sourced turbo diesel. 2.9 litres of turbo fury producing… 120hp. I also run it on waste vegetable oil, which can’t be helping the power output. It’s definitely a case of momentum driving. Things can get a bit sea-sick with such a high centre of gravity though. It seems to just go the same speed regardless of conditions, hills, whatever. It’s a steady plodder. I stick to 60mph on the motorway in it.
Then I jump in my other car (1998 BMW 323i) and it feels like a rocket ship in comparison.
My lowest powered car was a Citroen 2CV. 29bhp of twin cylinder fury.
I’m not sure it counts as underpowered though. Sure, 0-60 took half a minute and the top speed was 71mph, but when driving it flat out (which was the only way I ever drove it) it was fun and engaging and frequently stuck behind much faster vehicles which a huge proportion of other people choose to drive really, really slowly.
I had that car when I lived in Yorkshire, which is haphazardly littered with picturesque but very steep hills. It always made it to my destination.
That engine made nearly 50bhp/litre, which was my benchmark for terrible power density until I started reading magazines with American cars in them.
I replaced the 2CV with another Citroen of about the same weight (700ish kg) but with nearly three times the power. That was a huge improvement. My Elise was about the same weight but with 160bhp, and that felt like the perfect amount of power.
I daily drive a 34hp Renault 4, and that bit about driving flat out in these cars is spot on. I hate that “underpowered” is thrown around so liberally to refer to low-hp cars. Cars like the 2CV or the 4L feel adequately powered.
There’s underpowered and then there’s terrible. I would say that my 2.5 Outback is underpowered, in fact I just completed a full 7 hour road trip today and there were a couple of times where I was getting shouty at it. But the most underpowered I’ve ever driven? My ‘88 Mazda 323 1.3 carb is a good start, but at 15 probably was a good thing
Yep, any Subaru that you can find right now brand new at a dealer, that doesn’t have a turbo, will definitely be the slowest new car money can buy. I spend a lot of time in rentals and the first time I got into one I thought it was broken, but then I saw they’re all like that, wheezy engines, porky weight, lossy permanent awd and garbage CVTs. Cherry on top is the horrendous gas mileage.
Slowest ever was my first car, Dacia Lastun with 500cc carbed V-twin.
The first gen Crosstrek was just about the slowest new car I had ever driven.
I’ve been lucky to have had relatively powerful cars throughout my driving life. The slowest car I drove regularly was a 1993 Camry that at least still had three-digit horsepower.
My underpowered car experiences were both my late grandmother’s cars in Malaysia. One was an 80s Nissan Sunny and the other (after that got stolen) was a late 80s/early 90s Suzuki Jimny. (Despite being in her 80s she rode a moped most of the time, so my dad and I usually got to use her car.) At least they were lightly built, so there wasn’t too much weight to move around. But making a right turn (remember, right-hand drive) across a busy road was always a bit nerve-wracking, especially when they were the only practice I got driving a manual. Thankfully I was just putting around town so I never had to drive either of them where merging or passing was required.
I wish I had gotten the chance to drive more different cars there. Some of them (like the 3-speed auto Protons and Peroduas some of my relatives had, or my aunt’s 240D) I’m sure would have been an “experience”.
I have driven many small underpowered cars, but the most miserable driving experience I ever had was driving a 2019 Nissan Sentra we rented on a trip to PA. This power train was so anemic it took me three attempts to pass an Amish guy on a horse and buggy on a country road.
Most underpowered? That would, hands down, be the first generation Toyota Hiace flat deck I drove when I was an apprentice. 1350cc and fuelled by a dedicated CNG system (Compressed Natural Gas). CNG was popular in New Zealand at the time, however in this application, its glacial ‘acceleration’ could be measured with a sun dial. 0 – 60? possibly.
Oh wow. Not sure if CNG is the same as LPG, but if the power loss is similar that HiAce must’ve been really damn slow. But at least it had those first-gen HiAce looks going for it.
Yes, CNG is Methane, whereas LPG is mostly Propane & Butane. Much bigger power loss with CNG…astonishing actually.
’99 Renault Clio 2. I’ve owned the car for 11 years now, enjoying its 60hp of raw fury. It’s a light little thing so it’s still fun, but over taking definitely takes some planning, and that car taught how to down shift and extract every little bit of “performance”
Geo metro four door hatch, automatic, running on only one cylinder. It was so slow we raced it against a 14 year old on crutches and lost. It was actually faster to have three hawaiian teenagers push it up hill than to try to use the engine, we tested it. Still it was silly and fun to try to teach my little brother to drive in.
My first VW bus. A ’64 sunroof deluxe that pedal to the metal would eventually get to 54 mph absolute top speed. The upside was that the sunroof did not leak, and I was in Seattle at the time. I miss that bus. Even with the 90 degrees of freeplay in the steering wheel, I still miss that bus. Utterly reliable, but slow.