On Aug 30, 2012, at 2:18 PM, William Robb wrote: > On 30/08/2012 3:04 PM, Paul Stenquist wrote: >> Utter nonsense. It's one nincompoop's list. The 1961 Corvair, for example, >> is there only because an idiot wrote a book. And the 1995 Explorer is there >> by virtue of some bad tires. But since these cars are so awful, I'll take >> the Series III XKE V12 off someone's hands or that Biturbo Maserati. Hell, >> I'm even willing to shoulder the burden of a Ferrari Mondial. > > > My parents owned a Corvair. I was very young, and so only remember that it > was a car. > Apparently it was in the shop more often than it was on the road. I do recall > being towed in from a long way out of town when the car went down for no > apparent reason. > It wasn't around for long before my dad bought another loser, a 1962 Impalla > with an inline 6 that was easily as powerful as a couple of lawn mowers. If > you managed to get that one to hit 70MPH, it shook so hard that one almost > thought it would fly apart. > My dad and the General parted ways for almost 20 years after that, when, for > some reason, insanity took hold once again and he bought an Oldsmobile with a > V-6 whose push-rod channels hadn't been drilled straight, resulting in > destruction of the tops of them, and damage to the rockers. > My understanding of the Explorer, from reading I did, was that the tires > would have been OK on a lighter car (they weren't great tires by any stretch > of the imagination though), and had the inflation instructions been within > the specifications Firestone had set for the tire, but Ford knew better, and > Kknew that the fix for unstable suspension was to drop the recommended tire > pressure dangerously low so as to drop the center of gravity of the vehicle.
There is also the detail that a magazine had set up a test where they used a shotgun aimed at the right front tire, with a lanyard to the passenger seat. The passenger would then "spontaneously deflate" the tire without warning the driver. The car just went forward with a slight thumping noise of a flat. Most of the rollovers were apparently due to drivers freaking out and jerking the wheel around. -- Larry Colen l...@red4est.com sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
