The Cars You Don't Brag About

I thought I would create a thread where we can all post our less then admirable creations for a little fun.

The cars must clunkers, jelapys, ratchets, beaters, ghetto, too-cheap, street trash, manufacturing defects, lovable failures, wastes of raw materials or any other synonym for ‘bad car.’

Production year does not matter. You may include a sales pitch if you would like!

I would like to showcase the 1974 Kit Car - X1000

The X1000 looks like a race car, smells like a race car and sounds like a racecar, however the similarities end there. Featuring a sleek European wedge body the car from a distance looks like a million dollar collectible, however don’t be fooled by the looks! The price depends on what package you get! The car is built from a Galvanized steel frame and fiberglass body, good stuff right?


All 4 corners feature McPherson struts nice and inexpensive. The engine is a 1.2l carbuerated bike motor, tuned to produce 109hp and revs to 8000rpm! With no cat and no baffles the car can be heard for miles around! Who needs to go fast when you sound and look fast? With a 5 speed manual transmission that makes the occasional clunk sound when entering 3rd gear it manages nearly 54 miles per gallon (UK)! The interior features 2 seats, one rear view mirror a steering wheel, 3 foot pedals and a speedometer, you shift by listening to the glorious rev!


The car comes in several different packages!

-Bin O’ Parts: we ship you a neatly packed used shipping container and requires complete assembly, the motor and transmission are pre assembled and only require fluids and some gaskets to fire up! This budget option retails for only $2000.00 (shipping time 6-8 weeks, will not ship on weekends or holidays)

-Semi-built: the car comes partially assembled, all you need to do is put the engine, transmission and interior in the car and a splash of paint and you can drive it! Retails for $2400.00 (1974) (shipping time 6-9 weeks, will not ship on weekdays or holidays)

-Prebuilt: The car comes fully assembled, with your choice of exterior paint! This car retails for $3,200.00 (1974 dollars, or $20,000.00 CAD current dollars) (shipping time 9-12 weeks, will not ship on Mondays, Fridays, weekends or holidays)

DISCLAIMER: No warranty is offered by the manufacturer or distributor of the X1000. Engine may light on fire when revved above 9000rpm, the actual product may not look as pictured above, shipping times are just an estimate and are not guaranteed, shipping insurance not available, not rated for race circuit use, may be a choking hazard, may not meet emission standards for your country/state, may not pass safety requirements for your country/state, not rated for high octane fuel, individual results may very

BIG FUN TIME!

Present Hachi S model to great market.


Hachi pack big fun into tiny engine. 1.2 liters all that is needed for long road fun! To perform like giant (translation not possible) in (translation inaccurate) toadstool. Engine behind head for more exciting noise (translation lost).

Great dream for you and friend. Turn up radio* to make more great feeling. Cruise like giant orb floater!


(two paragraphs of un-translatable text)

Buy now, good time tomorrow!

[size=75]*Please do not turn the radio above setting 15. Excessive speaker cone and magnet travel may cause damage to outer body panels or speaker magnets to stick to coachwork.[/size]

(Basically, I tried to make a crappy little MR sports coupe, gave it a 1.2L engine, and a relatively lean tune. I shied away from anything that might make it sporty like a decent transmission, aero, or tires, but gave it the illusion of sportiness by slapping on a DCOE carb. Cheap sports coupe? Yes. Something you want to drive with its lackluster 66 HP? Oh hell no. My '82 Subaru wagon was probably faster.)

Very nice! I can see it littering 2nd hand car lots with “price drop BUY NOW” signs!

I don’t have bad cars on my company, even i tried to make a bad car and the result is still good car even though my company is dying

Oh boy. This is a perfect opportunity to showcase the first car I ever made in Automation. Of course, since it was in an earlier build, I’ll have to remake it, but in essence it was my first attempt at a fast sports car and it ended up being slower around the track than a city runabout with 1/4 the power because I tuned it horribly badly xD

Will edit this post when I get it redone :smiley:

Oh, the forums has needed this thread for a long time!

Be that as it may, i figure people are making ‘extra’ bad cars just to submit, trust me PMC would never formally sell the X1000 to the public :-p

Exactly that. I made the Hachi specifically for this thread. :smiley:

Threw it together in about 10 minutes. I could have made it a LOT worse by using negative quality sliders.

(then I spent another 10 minutes actually tuning the thing in a serious manner and came up with what I think is actually a nice, inexpensive, and fun to drive model)

The X1000 aside from being very cheap and horribly loud would be a fun DIY project, order the bucket of parts and assemble with care

(First half of a story about a horrible car that ended up as an heirloom. np1993 will post the second half)

It was an unusually hot and muggy day in Louisiana, 1955. The July heat was merciless, and the stench of body odor wafted in thick, rolling waves as the bus came to a stop and opened its door. Jethro Bubba and his 13 year old son Jethro Jr. had never been happier to get off of the cramped, rattling transport. Not only for what they had to endure on a daily basis, but that they would no longer have to do so for their commutes.

This day, Jethro carried with him a battered briefcase full of federal reserve notes. Greenbacks. Cashola. And he was going to buy the first car their family had ever had.

Jethro had driven a few times before, and the idea of freedom was too much to resist. He scraped together his savings and traveled with his oldest boy to the big city of New Orleans to visit the brand new Gumbo Motors dealership.

And what he and his son laid eyes on was an absolute wonderland. Poor Jethro had little idea of the actual cost of a car, and was shocked by the prices etched onto the windows of the fine, roomy sedans that lined the first row of the lot. He was about to turn around when Jethro Jr. spotted a little red car parked around the side of the building. Jethro Jr. didn’t know his numbers very well, but that didn’t stop him from bounding up and opening the door to the Gumbo Stumpy. Jethro Sr. humored his boy and stuck around long enough to poke at it. Manual transmission. Two rows of seats. Smelled new, that was the most impressive thing he could say about it, based on what he saw of the interior.

Jethro Jr. begged his father to at least have the dealership fire it up. And that’s all she wrote. The wheezing song of the anemic 1 liter 4-banger was music to Jethro Sr.'s ears. It rekindled the dream of having a car… no matter how cramped and horrid… and being one of the only families in Ponchatoula (at the time) that had their own wheels.


Shortly after purchasing the Stumpy, Jethro realized that it had only two modes: molasses, and glacial. Its hi-lo (that’s right, 2-speed manual) transmission couldn’t get out of its own way if it fell out of the car. Which only happened once. On a hill. And not surprisingly it ended up beating the car down the hill. But that’s a story for another time.


As you can see, with a 0-62 mph performance of 52.8 seconds, Jethro never bothered taking the Stubby on the highway. Ever. As impulsive as he was to buy such a tragic pile of metal, he was at least a prudent driver. After all, he’d be damned if his life savings ended up in a wrecking yard any time soon.

When his dad died of a heart attack at the tender age of 35 (which was just a week after his 18th birthday), Jethro Jr. swore to carry on the car’s legacy.

And it lived on in the family, handed down from Jethro to Jethro for generations to come.

7 generations of Jethros did a number on stumpy. A 38" Alluminum race wing, won in a game of high stakes euchre was bolted onto the rear. When the 2 barrel cab died back in '96 it was promptly replaced with a single barrel carb taken off an old bombardier snow mobile, without proper tools to tune the carb it ran horribly lean. The exhaust rotted off, as expected being maintained by Jethro and sons, so it was replaced with peices of 1 1/4 inch PVC piper with old tomato soup cans filled with closed cell foam to fill in for mufflers.


The suspension after getting worn to peices was replaced with leaf springs from an old Ox cart. When the ‘JDM’ fad struck in the mid 2000’s the car received an Ebay ‘Demon Camber Kit’ for 22.99$ giving it that ‘stanced look’. Smaller rims on bigger tires were borrowed from a tractor when the original tires were wore down to the wire bands within. A can of Rustoleum spray on black paint was used to keep the exterior looking fresh. 0-100 was accomplished on over 80 seconds.


Holy crap on a crumpet I’d die of boredom before I got to 100. That is a true achievement, that 0-100 time. I’m just itching to give it a proper retune. And an engine swap. And a transmission swap. Hell, I’d swap the whole car out!

The high flow PVC pipe exhaust and 1 barrel snowmobile carb really help out the 0-100 time

Oh, so I went back and recreated the first car I ever built in Automation, to as close as I could get it (which is hard as there were significant balance changes). Turns out it isn’t nearly as crap as I thought it was, which has me confused. In fact, considering the tyres it runs, it’s awfully quick. Maybe it was the shockingly bad tuning. I’m going to tune it really badly (oh, so painful) and see just how slow I can make it LOL.

Impressive the Gumbo engineers managed to improve the 50-75mph by a hundredth of second or two before releasing the data sheet of the Stumpy. Even more so since the top speed was still stuck at 74.8 mph.

Well, over the years the car was somewhat run down but the time for the quarter mile is still more or less the same. Isn’t that all that counts? If not, it pulls even more g in corners, if the currently owning Jethro manages to stay in his seat doing so. The car is now rolling… slightly more, but that just shows to how breathtaking cornering speeds the downforce producing rear wing enables this car. In fact, it’s actually cornering at faster speeds than it manages on a straight!

On a more serious note, while these figures probably should mean that it’s impossible to accelerate this car to a speed to let it fail on the 250m circle track I hope these cars really can’t go faster through the corners of a test track than its straights. :smiley:

Well, this is my car… The CrapCar GTi

Ehm…, The chassis is based on a MK3 Toyota MR2, the fiberglass body is handmade :sunglasses: , and it has a 2.5L engine with 131 HP… Aaand for extra sportiness: 4-speed automatic w/ overdrive… :astonished:




Buy it now, and enjoy it not, because it’s crap!

^ I like it, its looks fancy enough to fool ladies at the club that you make a six digit income, until you start the car up :wink:

I’ll probably do the same. 1:18 with max quality and downforce…

It has a pretty decent sound (well, because there aren’t any mufflers or cat’s…), but it is very very slow…