1971 Ford Pinto

Corbis

They shoot horses, don't they? Well, this is fish in a barrel. Of course the Pinto goes on the Worst list, but not because it was a particularly bad car — not particularly — but because it had a rather volatile nature. The car tended to erupt in flame in rear-end collisions. The Pinto is at the end of one of autodom's most notorious paper trails, the Ford Pinto memo , which ruthlessly calculates the cost of reinforcing the rear end ($121 million) versus the potential payout to victims ($50 million). Conclusion? Let 'em burn.

1971 Chrysler Imperial LeBaron Two-Door Hardtop

The glamorous Imperial marque was, by the late '60s, reduced to a trashy, pseudo-luxury harlot walking the streets for its pimp, the Chrysler Corporation. By 1971, only the Imperial LeBaron was left and it shared the monstrous slab-sided "fuselage" styling of corporate siblings like the Chrysler New Yorker and the Dodge Monaco. Appearing to have been hewn from solid blocks of mediocrity, the Imperial LeBaron two-door is memorable for having some of the longest fenders in history. It was powered by Chrysler's silly-big 440-cu.-in. V8 and measured over 19 ft. long. The interior looked like a third-world casino. Here we are approaching the nadir of American car building — obese, under-engineered, horribly ugly. Or, it would be the nadir, except for the abysmal 1980 Chrysler Imperial, which had an engine cursed by God. The Imperial name was finally overthrown in 1983.