Car of the Year Revisionism, 1995 Edition: If Not the Cirrus, What?
There’s a nice comfortable cushion of years between the present and the 1970 and 1976 Motor Trend Cars of the Year, which gave our discussions about What Might Have Been a certain detachment. Today’s Car of the Year Revisionism discussion, however, takes as its subject a car that’s still with us in large numbers.
The Cirrus wasn’t exactly a smash hit (unless you count sales to rental-car companies), and it hasn’t left a deep impression in our minds. Perhaps MT might have made a better choice… and here’s your chance to look back with 16 years of hindsight and make some suggestions. If you’d like to include imports for the sake of argument, do so; the Maxima was the Import COTY for ’95. So, what’s it gonna be? The Neon? The Accent? The Aurora? The VAZ-21099?
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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So what's with the epidemic of head gasket failures? Is it due to Purchasing's parsimony or Engineering's incompetence? Can't blame it on the UAW. And evidently, Management just doesn't give a damn what goes out the door.
Design is completely subjective but I can't understand how anyone can find this car even remotely "beautiful". It's the typical bland and uninspired design that most American cars of that period had to my eyes.