Lemon!: Sixty Heroic Automotive Failures

It's true that cars are getting better and better. But sometimes, despite the designer's best intentions, instead of a peach, we get a lemon! And while car enthusiasts will argue endlessly about what are the best cars, they'll argue even more ferociously about what are the worst. Lemon! is a collection of 60 courageous automotive disasters, from the 1958 Ford Edsel (by the 1960s "edsel" was used in the US as a byword for failure, and the 23rd edition of the Webster dictionary made it official) to the much-loved travesty, the P76 (when people took P76s in for warranty work, it was easier to list things that DIDN'T need fixing). From bad design, appalling execution, ridiculous pretensions, and ludicrous names, this detailed and hilarious look at automotive atrocities from the 1950s to the 1990s is a motoring Hall of Shame. With full color photographs throughout and plenty of wackiness, Lemon! will leave you not only laughing, but wondering how so many car makers got away with so much for so long.

It's true that cars are getting better and better. But sometimes, despite the designer's best intentions, instead of a peach, we get a lemon! And while car enthusiasts will argue endlessly about what are the best cars, they'll argue even more ferociously about what are the worst.

Lemon! is a collection of 60 courageous automotive disasters, from the 1958 Ford Edsel (by the 1960s "edsel" was used in the US as a byword for failure, and the 23rd edition of the Webster dictionary made it official) to the much-loved travesty, the P76 (when people took P76s in for warranty work, it was easier to list things that DIDN'T need fixing). From bad design, appalling execution, ridiculous pretensions, and ludicrous names, this detailed and hilarious look at automotive atrocities from the 1950s to the 1990s is a motoring Hall of Shame. With full color photographs throughout and plenty of wackiness, Lemon! will leave you not only laughing, but wondering how so many car makers got away with so much for so long.

Tony Davis, former editor of Drive and a well-known writer at the Sydney Morning Herald, has written about cars for nearly 20 years. He has driven some of the fastest, most expensive and most impressive vehicles ever built, yet retains a bizarre fascination with cars at the other end of the spectrum: those built by engineers who, as he puts it, "think a tour de force is a bicycle race." He lives in Sydney, Australia.