I live in New York City, which has allowed me the rare privilege of almost never having to drive a car, as well as never having to think about just how dangerous they are.
I don’t think I need to pull up specific statistics in order for most people to shrug and admit that cars are a pretty constant threat to life and limb. The more you think about how much time you spend hurtling along a road, piloting your own little 2-ton bullet while hoping everyone else knows how to drive theirs, the more you want to move out to Amish country.
Of course, safety features have come a long way to helping you possibly pull yourself from burning wreckage mostly unscathed, but occasionally, cars have been made that double down on being death traps. Here are five of the most dangerous ever made…
Ford Pinto
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The Ford Pinto was unsafe because sometimes, it would just blow up. That’s going to fail a safety test on not just automobiles, but pretty much anything that’s ever going to be near people. Microwaves, armchairs, lollipops, whatever — if humans are supposed to use it, it has to not explode. Even hand grenades are kind enough to only explode when requested.
The exact problem with the Pinto? When it was rear-ended, which is something that’s basically going to happen at least once to any car, there was a pretty good chance that the “filler neck,” or the part connecting the gas tank to the hole where you fill it up, would spring a leak, which would then spit gasoline everywhere. Of course, without an ignition source, that’s stinky and dangerous, but not deadly. Unfortunately, exposed metal in the Ford Pinto was also prone to producing sparks, meaning you were basically hauling ass in a human-sized Zippo.
Chevy Corvair
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The Chevy Corvair is, mechanically, a dangerous car to drive. If you didn’t keep it perfectly at Chevy’s recommended tire pressure, it was prone to fishtailing and flipping, which, given that most people have never used a tire-pressure gauge for anything other than making a cool square imprint on one of their fingers while in traffic, wasn’t likely to happen.
The Corvair being incredibly difficult to drive and not sold as such, though, isn’t enough in my opinion to earn it a place on this list — especially because according to skilled drivers, it’s actually a lot of fun to drive if you know what you’re doing. But what’s not defensible as a high-risk, high-reward design decision is the fact that the 1961 Corvair was also notorious for having a heating system that would pump toxic fumes into the cabin along with warmth.
Maybe so many people flipped them because they all thought they saw the Hat Man in the road.
BMW Isetta
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I feel I don’t need to particularly belabor the point of why the BMW Isetta was massively dangerous, as long as the picture above is visible. The Isetta’s cool, groundbreaking design feature was a door that was on the front of the car — meaning that you were climbing in and jetting out into traffic in what was basically a Ferris wheel seat that would be harder to escape from in an emergency.
It’s famously the car driven by Steve Urkel in Family Matters, which is not the kind of celebrity endorsement you want. He’s just lucky one of his suspender straps never got caught on the steering wheel and sent him into a wall, because as you can imagine, after a head-on collision in the front-door car, you’re not getting out — either because the door is broken, or because the steering wheel is already lodged in your brain.
Yugo GV
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Other cars are unsafe because of design flaws. The Yugo GV, on the other hand, was a design flaw in itself. It was a Yugoslavian hatchback that a desperate idiot attempted to import to the U.S. to sell as a dirt-cheap car option. The Yugo GV, which, I’m not kidding, stood for Great Value, was cheap for a reason, and that reason was that it was a massive pile of shit. It broke down constantly, and even in perfect condition, did 0 to 60 in a miserable 14 seconds and topped out around 86 miles per hour. The results of its crash tests should have put it in car remedial school.
Maybe its crowning, tragic achievement, though? A woman driving a Yugo in Michigan died when a strong wind blew it off a bridge.
DeLorean
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Sorry, nerds. The official dream car of socially awkward tech billionaires and guys who have Lord of the Rings themed weddings suffers from a similar problem to the BMW Isetta, but one that involves a little more lateral thinking. The issue is that if you manage to flip it, whether damaged or not, the “batwing” doors that provide the signature swooping silhouette the Delorean is known for are no longer capable of opening.
In other words, upside down, it has a little less “bat,” and a lot more “distressed tortoise” energy.