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!
OK, Honestly? I’ve never driven a car that felt underpowered. When I was driving my 72 Beetle, it felt like it had all the power it needed. My Outback with it’s wee little boxer? Plenty of power. My girlfriend’s Prius? Totally fine.
All of these cars I’ve taken on the freeway, several of them I’ve taken up to the mountains. They’re all fine. None of them will ever win any races but the Prius holds it’s own on chicago freeways, the beetle got me around in the insanity that was early 80s indianapolis (where every driver just knows they’re about to be picked to replace an injured driver at the 500) and the Outback carries me across the country on a regular basis.
The closest I could think to underpowered was a 24 foot Uhaul towing my car on a trailer- we ended up slowing down to like 30 mph going up and over some of the mountin passes, but then so did many of the semis on the road with us so I don’t know if that counts.
A Nissan Versa hatchback. It was a rental, and it didn’t have enough power to get out of its own way. Not great as you are navigating a new city for the first time and need to be able to speed up to switch lanes.
So not a car, but a truck.
My family’s potato farm runs 70s-80s Ford ten wheelers to haul the potatoes. About 50k lb loaded. One in particular was extra horrible. It had a Cat 3208, naturally aspirated, rated for 220 hp. This one was extra bad because of the 4spd auto that wouldn’t hold 3rd, preferring to lug in 4th. It also refused to downshift unless you literally stopped. I never had a long enough stretch of road to get it above 40 or so. That took over a minute, maybe two.
The 8 or 10 speed trucks were massively better, but still 0-60 over a minute.
Ex-wife’s 84 escort wagon automatic. I could run faster than that POS
You beat me to this one. . .we had ford escort that I learned to drive on, think it may have been an ’82.
I learned to drive on a 1973 VW Westfailia Camper. With a tailwind it could get into the 70s, but could not maintain speed in the mountains, and it was hell to try to merge onto freeways because you were usually barely going 40 by the time the merge lane ran out.
I second this. Drove one over passes Switzerland with 5 people inside…painful
Yep, we were a family of 5 too. Picked it up at Wiedenbruck, drove it around Europe for 3 months fully loaded with camping equipment, my father’s camera equipment, etc. Every bit of storage area was used. We didn’t hit a whole lot of mountains outside of Switzerland. We shipped it to the U.S. through VW’s “Tourist Delivery Program” where you could buy it through an American dealer (Cotton Goff VW, RIP) pick it up in Germany, drive it around for a while, and then drop it off at the VW shipping dock to be shipped to your dealer.
After getting it home is when driving it on vacation was a real chore. Driving it over the Siskiyou Pass, through the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas was a bitch. I think it’s no accident that over 220,000 miles it had 5 engine rebuilds…with an aircooled motor you don’t know when it’s overheating!
I had the misfortune of ending up with a Mitsubishi i-Miev loaner car for a couple weeks about 7 years ago. It was like being in a pop can with the power of two elderly donkeys and the road noise was atrocious
1967 Mercedes 200D diesel, with a 4 speed manual transmission. It was ridiculously slow, but the perfect speed for a teenage driver. And it taught me how to drive a manual because it would stall if you looked at it sideways.
We had a 1983 Honda CVCC with the 1.3 litre engine (at least it was a manual). Massive 59 hp. At the time we owned it in the late 1980s, it wasn’t terribly slow, surrounded by a bunch of other wheezy 4 pots out there. But there is this one hill on US 36 leaving Boulder before the Louisville/Superior exit where I could just not maintain the 55 mph speed limit even with a good running start. I drove it regularly for extracurricular activities.
‘95 base model Chevy Cavalier in purple. The “Easter Egg”. Also once had a late base model Dodge Dart as a loaner when I had a car in the shop. That thing felt like it couldn’t move out of its own way with the standard 2.0 engine
It’s a tie between a 2000s Smart CDi that I test drove here in Canada and one of the automatic Chevrolet ‘shitbox’ Chevettes my sister owned.
For the Smart, it had the 40.5hp diesel and a 0-60 time of around 20 seconds… not helped by that crappy automated manual transmission.
That one test drive was enough for me to know to never buy one. It would have been so much better with a proper manual transmission.
And the Chevette… it had a gutless carb’d 1.6L 4 cyl good for 60hp… much of it going to waste through the 3 speed automatic.
And an honorable mention to the VW Polo I rented in the early 1990s… 1L 4 cyl gas engine good for 45hp… It was similarly slow, but it had the manual, so it didn’t feel too slow. And in spite of the low power, I could still get it up to around 150km/h on the flat sections of the autobahn… and managed to get it up to 172km/h on a downhill stretch (probably with a tailwind).
1988 Pontiac LeMans 74 HP, she was a screamer!
My first car. 1967 Opel Kadett Rallye. 1100ccs of fury pumping out 67hp. I like how this notes that the top speed of 89 is ‘theoretical’. 14.5 seconds to 60. Somehow, this was in Arizona, the thing was equipped with air conditioning and the compressor was about as large as the engine. I never turned it on out of fear the car would no longer move.
The one that I DIDN’T win the race in.
1988 Ford Ranger 4cyl 5speed. It would not go over 63mph. Granted it was in awful shape and probably not running great.
Triumph Spitfire 1500. My buddy and I were on a road rally with the MG Car Club in Rochester, NY. We encountered a hill that we had to go all the way down to 1st gear to climb and we STILL needed to use momentum to even make that happen! Fun cars, though 🙂
Easy. I have two contenders. The SLOWEST thing I’ve ever driven was my friend’s 1980’s era Isuzu P’up. Diesel engine, automatic transmission. I think it was 50 horsepower or something but I needed to borrow it to go get something ( can’t remember what) and it was SUPER fucking slow. Zero power. Getting on the freeway was pretty scary. Floor it and nothing happened. Even all the way at the end of the downhill entrance ramp we were still doing 40MPH. And once it managed to get to speed, I had to keep the pedal all the way down the entire time.
Second worst? When me and my wife took a trip to Colorado for a friend’s wedding and we rented a 4 door Chevy Aveo. I actually hated this worse than the Isuzu.. The Isuzu was weird. The Aveo was just awful in every way imaginable. Build quality was awful. It was slow and very underpowered. So much so that when there was a flat spot on the freeway and we were coming to a hill I floored it, got it up to 80, made it partially up the hill and it would slow down to 40MPH and not go any faster even with the gas pedal fully down all the way.
Rented an Aveo as well sometime in 2010, I think. Afterwards I wasn’t convinced the steering wheel was actually hooked to any solid materials, and I was geniuenly concered for the safety of anyone who owned one. I too was actually mad that they made a car that bad in the years they were available, a 1st gen Versa was basically a Lexus by comparison.
The Dune Buggy my step-father built. With an authentic 40 HP 1200 CC motor, it struggled to reach 50 mph. I mean pedal to the floor, it would only reach 50 mph unless you were going downhill.
I later put a larger 1600 dual port motor with dual carbs on it, and the front end would lift off the ground when you started off in 1st gear.
My first car was a Mustang… Ya right. It was a 74 Mustang II. I called it the glorified Pinto, it featured a 2.3 liter 4 with an automatic. 0 to 60 could be measured with a calendar. Disappointingly the gas mileage sucked as well, you were lucky to get 20 mpg with a stiff wind at the back. Probably thanks to the automatic.
The first car that I purchased myself, was a 1985 Subaru GL Wagon, it was a california emissions car with a feedback carb (ECU and a carburetor, I never figured out how it worked….). Thing ran like garbage (probably could have done with a tuneup, or something….first car, I just drove it).
Even when it ran the best, WOT in 5th gear was about 65mph on level ground, so that was my highway cruise control. We would try to video/time 0-60 runs, the digital cameras at the time (2002ish) would record a ~15 second clip of the start, save the clip, and then start a second clip showing it hit 60.
A bunch of the gauges didn’t work, and I replaced the cluster. In the process, I crushed a backlight bulb and burned out the fuse. This turned out to be the fuse for the ECU. The car still ran, but like complete shit. I drove it to work and school a couple times, and then ran out of gas (gas gauge didn’t work with the blown fuse, and I’d only driven like 80 miles…).
At one point I had a wheel fall off, which ground the end of the ball joint/nut completely off. The next day we were mudding in a friend’s back yard (it did have dual range 4WD!), and the ball joint came apart, which yanked the inner CV joint.
I had an ’83 Dodge Ares coupe! It had government issued appliance vibes and was definitely slow as Hell.
1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Was literally my grandmother’s car, given to my mom for free. When I came of age to drive, she let me have it. It was AWFUL. Giant floaty boat of a car that could barely make it up the hills where we lived. I’d be flooring it and barely pulling 10-15mph on a hill in a 45 zone as even sub-compacts with zero power zipped past me.
One of my high school friends had an RX-7, and he absolutely lorded it over me in his little sports car as I slowly floated to wherever I was going. I could fit more people though, so friends usually got stuck with me. At least the seats were comfy?
That car also taught me to distrust automation in cars, as I was on the freeway one time when the cruise control got stuck constantly accelerating. No harm was done, but 17-year old me panicking as the car accelerated out of control for no apparent reason is not a memory I’ll ever lose.
The great brick got the last laugh though, as it was eventually passed on to a family friend who got in a bad accident. The Olds was totaled, but the guy walked away uninjured. A less tank-like car might have seen him dead.
I had a 3rd gen Chevy (Geo) metro. 1.0 3 cyl 5 speed. Year 2000 production I think. Bought it for $800 back in 2015.
Engine and trans were bulletproof, but other parts of the car tried to kill me twice. First was the “frame horn.” Basically there was no front (detachable) subframe, and the control arm mounts were prone to rust. I learned this while driving through a circle in NJ and my left front wheel nearly detached. The previous POS owner did a great job concealing this defect with bondo/foam/paint.
I actually cut out the rust & fabricated/re-welded it back together. Drove it for another 2 years until the brake lines rusted out on me. Replacing the lines would have likely needed me to take the gas tank out, so that was the end of the line for me.
I ended up selling the car for $200 to some guys from Albany who needed a parts for their Geo rebuild. It’s wild how many Geo fanboys are still out there keeping these underpowered cars alive.
That said, I did enjoy driving this cheap-as-possible car, because you would have to drive the car at a 10 out of 10 pace to get anywhere without getting run over by a SUV.
I drove a 1990 Daihatsu Charade in high school – 20 year old car by the time I was driving it – so a few of the 53 horses had escaped. I could choose between AC or passengers – but not both at the same time unless I wanted to burn up the clutch. It was a good car to have during the gas crisis of 2008 though.
1995 Chevrolet K2500 with the 5.7
Truck was bulletproof, yes, torque for days.
The gas pedal was a volume pedal, nothing more. Full trailer? Empty bed? didn’t matter. It could not get out of it’s own way, but it was a blast to own regardless.
As others have similarly suggested, my ’84 Mercedes 300D. It was a non-turbo version and a 4 speed auto. I remember thinking that the accelerator pedal was more like an on/off switch. It was senseless to put the pedal anywhere other than on the floor. The sound of that motor was so distinct though. I hear them clanking and rumbling from time to time while out driving around and I miss it dearly.
My ’83 240D with a manual 4 speed was even slower. No acceleration, merely gathering momentum…. and I miss it dearly.