Note to Detroit . . .

What with the Detroit Three lobbying Congress for a bailout and promising all sorts of new, fuel efficient cars for as long as they continue to need tax dollars— hey, promises have no fuel consumption at all!— anyway, in order to avoid repeating the errors of the past, perhaps the Big Three ought to check this list of the 50 worst cars of all time.

Highlights:

1913 Scripps-Booth Bi-Autogo— “A 3,200-lb. motorcycle with training wheels, a V8 engine and enough copper tubing to provide every hillbilly in the Ozarks with a still . . . “

1933 Fuller Dymaxion— “one link in [Buckminster Fuller’s] vaguely totalitarian plan for the people to live in mass-produced houses deposited on the landscape by dirigibles . . . Deprived of wings, the Dymaxion was a three-wheel, ground-bound zeppelin . . . “

1956 Renault Dauphine— “It took the drivers at Road and Track 32 seconds to reach 60 mph, which would put the Dauphine at a severe disadvantage in any drag race involving farm equipment . . . “

1958 Lotus Elite— ” . . . was also a lovely little coupe, which made the moment when the suspension mounts punched through the stressed-skin monocoque all the more pathetic.”

The 1961 amphicar— “promised to revolutionize the act of drowning.”

The 1970 Triumph Stag— “a despicable, rotten-to-the-core mockery of a car . . . . The 3.0-liter Triumph V8 was a monumental failure, an engine that utterly refused to confine its combustion to the internal side . . . “

1975 Bricklin SV1— “the only Bricklin I ever sat in caught fire and burned to the axles.”

1978 Pacer— “You could actually see fumes of volatile petrochemicals out-gassing from the plastic dash.”

1982 Cadillac Cimmaron— “The horror. The horror. Everything that was wrong, venal, lazy and mendacious about GM in the 1980s was crystallized in this flagrant insult to the good name and fine customers of Cadillac.”

And forty-one more . . .