I’m Going To Defend A Random Car From This Stupid ‘The World’s Worst Cars’ Book Every Day

You know what category of car book has always pissed me off? Books that claim to feature the “world’s worst cars” or some similar sort of sentiment. There’s an awful lot of these kinds of books out there, and my problem with all of them is the same: they conflate genuinely interesting cars with “worst” cars. Sure, some of the cars on these lists are genuinely bad – a broken dashboard clock is right twice a day, after all – but by far the vast majority of these cars are just ones that tried bold things or were different in some way, or suffered from marketing failings, or perhaps had one notable flaw, or something, but they’re almost never what I would consider “worst.”

I was thinking about this because I found one of these books – a small, brick-shaped volume called, simply, The World’s Worst Cars, written by Craig Cheetham and published in 2005. Interestingly, Craig has also written The World’s Greatest Cars and I presume he’s hard at work on The World’s Most Averagest Cars, coming soon to a fine bookmonger near you. Anyway, as I was flipping through this book I realized that I would be genuinely happy to drive almost any of the cars presented in the book. They all seem to be interesting cars! Not boring, with memorable technical or styling innovations and ideas; the operating principle for this book seems to be “cars that aren’t boring as all hell.”

So, with that in mind, I had an idea. I feel like these cars don’t deserve the awful treatment they’re given by being stigmatized and placed into books like this, so my plan is every day – keeping in mind how terrible I seem to be about doing things with any regularity – every day I’m going to run a simple program on one of my old-ass computers to pick a random number between 1 and 317 (the number of pages with cars in the book) and I will look at whatever page that random number refers to, and write up a quick redemption of that car.

This feels like a worthwhile plan, a good use of time, energy, and resources. So! Let’s get started! I fired up the Commodore PET, wrote the simple random-number picking program, and here’s what I got:

Okay! A nice low number was picked: 12. I’m just going with the first number the computer spits out, and I’ll only re-run it if it happens to be a repeat. So, let’s see what that car is!

The Aston Martin Lagonda! This one I think is a pretty easy start, because who the hell thinks of a Lagonda as one of the”worst” cars? Was it ahead of its time? Absolutely. Did they always work well? No, no they didn’t. Did they sell well? Well, it was always intended to be an exclusive, limited-production vehicle, and they eventual built and sold 645 of them, which was respectable. But it absolutely is an automotive design icon, a striking example of 1970s straight-edge wedge design pushed to an extreme, and the result is quite striking.

I mean, look at the damn thing! It’s a spaceship, just with nice huge wheels on it. In 1976, this thing really felt like the future. I know the book says it was from 1975, but the Aston Martin Lagonda from 1975 was an entirely different car, save for the 5.3-liter V8 making about 280 horsepower. The radical, wedge-shaped Lagonda was actually the Series 2, introduced in 1976.

Plus, it was a technological pioneer, significantly being the first production car to have an all-digital dashboard. The copy in the book refers to an “LCD” dashboard, but this is not accurate. The Lagonda had two different types of digital dashboards, one that used cathode ray tubes (CRTs) for displays, and a later one that used LED seven-segment numeric displays:

I’ve written about these fascinating dashboards before, especially the CRT-based ones, because they were wildly ahead of their time. The CRT dashboard was the first, so remember, this is 1976, and the CPU itself is only five years old and the personal computer revolution was just on the cusp of starting. The Lagonda dash used a Z80 central processor and three CRT displays with custom graphics and animated elements for each. This video isn’t great, but you can sort of see the CRTs in action here:

Our pal Doug DeMuro’s video about the Lagonda has some better CRT dash footage:

These definitely were finicky and had plenty of problems, which is why Aston Martin switched to the simpler numeric displays for the Series 3 cars (which were either LED-based of vacuum-flourescent displays – I’ve seen both referenced).

Even accepting that these early digital dash displays had plenty of problems, I don’t think we can underestimate the importance of a car that was the first to use an entirely new digital method of instrumentation, one that has become effectively expected on every new car made in the past few years. This is a pioneering car, and that alone should elevate it out of the Sewer of Worst.

Also, are you going to tell me that a car with this many lights, including pop-up lights, is somehow the worst?

No. You’re not.

Our own Autopian co-founder, Beau, happens to love these cars, and has one of the largest collections of Aston Martin Lagondas, including wagon versions and a fascinating one-off prototype two-door coupé version:

The charge that the Lagonda was not a reliable car is absolutely true. But the reasons why it was not reliable aren’t the sort of reasons that would qualify a car to be a Worst, like carelessness or genuinely stupid design or just bad quality. The reasons were far more Icarus-like, as this was a car that reached so far the reality of that 1970s and 1980s world it existed in just couldn’t quite meet the demands this car made. Even so, when these did work well, they were absolutely sublime: fast, comfortable, striking-looking machines that had real presence and brought barges full of drama and occasion anywhere they went.

You pull up in an Aston Martin Lagonda, even to this day, and people will turn to look. And they’ll feel something, something powerful, something akin to wonder and awe. Because this is a car that makes a statement, in design, in technology, and, yes, maybe a lesson in hubris, of reaching just a bit too far, too soon.

Nothing about this car, even its failings – which are significant – adds up to something that would categorize it as the “worst” of anything.

Aston Martin Lagonda, you are redeemed. If you own a copy of The World’s Worst Cars, please tear out page 12.

Now.

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