Automotive Atrocities! illustrates an increasingly popular genre: the car gallery. Authors take a theme — in this case cars that are supposedly infamous — and offer a few pages of info McNuggets. Repeat enough times to fill up a book.
Author Eric Peters added to this formula heavy-handed snark and an overwrought focus on himself.
He also tried to be humorous. Very hard. Did you know that the 1987 Suzuki Samurai “was more prone to rolling over than an excited Labrador Retriever”? (p. 89). Or that being seen in a Plymouth Horizon “was a more effective route to maintaining a celibate lifestyle than gaining 400 pounds and going back to Mom and Dad’s”? (p. 76).
Nestled amidst the snark were occasionally useful criticisms. For example, Peters quite rightly described the Ford Motor Company as ethically challenged for not fixing the Pinto’s gas tank, which corporate bean counters knew was vulnerable to rupturing in a rear-end collision (p. 70).
Snark can trump getting the facts right
Sometimes in his zeal to come up with a clever putdown, Peters pushed his argument too far. As a case in point, he decried the AMC Gremlin’s exposed gas cap as an unclassy “feature that only AMC could have thought of” when it was fairly common among small cars during the late-60s and early-70s. He also inaccurately stated that the Pacer’s six-cylinder engine “dated to the 1950” (p. 54) and that the Ambassador offered a “landau” vinyl roof (p. 121).
Presumably car gallery books like Automotive Atrocities! sell well or the big-box bookstores wouldn’t place so much emphasis on them. That’s too bad because they appear to be crowding out the more in-depth auto histories.
Automotive Atrocities! The Cars We Love to Hate
- Eric Peters, 2004
- Motorbooks International, St. Paul, MN
“This book is about vehicular Watergates — cars that scandalized standards of good taste and engineering, abused the public trust, and didn’t rehabilitate themselves into a guest shot on Miami Vice like G. Gordon Liddy. These cars forever scar the landscape with their orange-peeling, rust-mottled, oil-burning, poorly conceived, and underpowered selves.” (p. 8)
(1981-1983 DeLorean DMC-12) “Why John Z. — a brilliant former General Motors engineer and solid ‘car guy’ who helped father than original GTO while at Pontiac in the early 1960s — would expect a sports car as underpowered and overpriced as this DMC-12 to work is a question that has never been adequately answered. It is a classic example of wishful thinking and the perils of overconfidence.”(p. 33)
(1987-1991 Sterling 825 / 827) “Those who did buy one quickly encountered defeating problems such as dashboards that turned a hideous green in the sunlight and other fit, finish, and build quality issues related to the car’s chintzy British-sourced exterior pieces, which, after the car’s discontinuation, became all-but-impossible to find. Like Strom Thurmond did, a Sterling will run almost forever thanks to its Honda/Acura engineering. But it will look a lot like old Strom did, too.” (p. 108)
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