TFLtalk’s Emme, Roman, and Nathan rank their picks for the worst American cars of the last 40 years, and the comment section immediately pushes back. Viewers defend the AMC Gremlin’s bulletproof inline six, question whether a rebadged Suzuki or Daewoo even belongs on an American cars list, and make the case for AMC’s forgotten performance models. Watch the list, then see why longtime owners are not ready to accept it.
Ask ten car enthusiasts to name the worst American car ever built and you will get eleven different answers, most of them wrong by somebody else’s standard. When the hosts of TFLtalk sat down to rank their own top ten worst American cars, they expected disagreement over the exact order. What they got instead was a comment section arguing that half their list did not belong on it at all, and a genuinely detailed defense of a car most people only remember today as a punchline.
A List Built for Argument
Hosts Emme, Roman, and Nathan run through their own ranked list of the worst American cars of the last four decades in the loose, conversational style TFLtalk built its following on, treating the ranking itself as a launchpad for debate rather than presenting it as any kind of definitive, final verdict on the cars involved.
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The Car Everyone Expected Them to Defend Anyway
The AMC Gremlin appears near the low end of the list, but multiple commenters push back hard in its defense. Several say they owned one personally, citing its available AMC inline six as nearly indestructible and often lasting well past 300,000 miles before ever needing a real overhaul, numbers that surprise viewers who only know the car by its unusual, chopped off styling.
When American Does Not Mean What the List Assumes
A recurring complaint in the comments targets cars included on the list that arguably are not American designs at all. The Geo Metro, a rebadged Suzuki Swift built partly in Japan, and the Chevy Aveo, a Daewoo design built in Korea, both get flagged repeatedly by viewers as questionable inclusions on a list specifically framed around American cars rather than badge engineered imports.
The Owners Who Showed Up to Set the Record Straight
Beyond the Gremlin, several other AMC models get defended by name in the comments, the AMX, the Javelin, the Rebel Machine, the Scrambler, and the Hornet SC 360 are all singled out by longtime owners as legitimate performance cars in their own right, rather than the wannabe muscle car label the list’s tone seems to imply about the brand as a whole.
Reliability Versus Reputation
The debate keeps circling back to a distinction between reliability and reputation. Commenters argue that being basic, cramped, or simply unfashionable made a car easy to dismiss on a top ten list, but did not necessarily make it unreliable or badly engineered, with the Gremlin’s easy to work on layout coming up more than once specifically as a point in its favor.
A Channel Built on Opinionated Car Talk
TFLcar built its channel on exactly this kind of unscripted, opinion driven format across TFLtalk, TFL Truck, and TFL Classics, favoring lived in car knowledge and audience pushback over polished, scripted reviews written to avoid controversy, which makes this video’s comment section function almost like a second, unofficial episode responding directly to the first.
Why Crappy Is Always a Matter of Perspective
What starts as a simple worst of list ends up illustrating that crappy is rarely an objective engineering verdict at all. It is usually shorthand for a car that did not match its era’s styling expectations, even when, as plenty of former owners insist in the comments, the car underneath ran forever regardless of what anyone thought about how it looked in the driveway.
The Gremlin’s defenders in the comments are unusually specific rather than simply nostalgic. One commenter describes buying theirs new in 1974 for around 3,200 dollars with the performance oriented X package and a 304 cubic inch V8, noting it ranked among the fastest cars at their high school that year, a detail that directly contradicts the punchline reputation the car has carried for decades since.
Other owners describe Gremlins that ran with no carpet, a three speed manual, and genuinely no complaints beyond the car’s obviously stripped down and unusual proportions, reinforcing a theme that runs through nearly every defense in the comments, that the Gremlin’s reputation problem was always about looks and marketing rather than anything mechanical underneath the body.
TFLcar’s broader channel family, spanning TFL Truck for pickups and TFL Classics for older vehicles, gives this particular video’s hosts a wide frame of reference most single topic car channels simply do not have, letting them compare a car like the Gremlin against decades of other American vehicles rather than judging it purely against whatever happens to be popular or fashionable in the current new car market.
The pushback over the Geo Metro and Chevy Aveo inclusions points to a genuine definitional problem with lists like this one. Both cars were sold under American badges and through American dealer networks, but their actual engineering and manufacturing happened almost entirely overseas, a distinction TFLtalk’s hosts gloss over in the video itself but that several commenters treat as disqualifying for a list specifically framed around American cars rather than simply cars sold in America.
The AMC defenders make a related but distinct argument about the Javelin, AMX, and their siblings, insisting these were never lesser imitations of a Camaro or Mustang but genuine engineering efforts from a much smaller company competing directly against Detroit’s big three with a fraction of their budget, a scrappy underdog framing that several commenters feel this particular list fails to give AMC any real credit for.
A handful of commenters try to have it both ways, acknowledging that the hosts are just sharing opinions rather than issuing an official verdict, while still pushing back point by point on nearly every car included, a tension that keeps the discussion going far longer than a typical top ten video comment section usually manages before conversation simply moves on to something else. Whatever the hosts intended when they sat down to record it, the video has clearly become less about their specific top ten and more about the wider argument it keeps reigniting every time a new viewer stumbles across it. That is a fitting outcome for a list built around a word as subjective as crappy in the first place.
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Chuck Bean
Ha! The old Gem!
John Schober take a look
Had one! A gremlin
Pontiac Aztek,. Chevy Citation.
I knew a guy who had a ford 302 with a 4 speed manual in a Gremlin. And that thing moved.
Why does everyone think the Gremlin was a crappy car? It was the first American sub compact, the only sub compact that could be bought with a factory V8 and didn’t blow up when you hit it in the rear end. Plus can your small block muscle car do this?????? Give the Gremlin and AMC a break…..
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DAMsjRtOHXow&ved=0ahUKEwi3pe7TwbLWAhWKwFQKHbDvBroQtwIIKDAB&usg=AFQjCNG2p4-XmKX-8S3RyyY8lZZCqpp-Ag
Classy not crapy….11.72 @ 109.7 all day
AMC SHIT BOX
They should add the Ford TBird convertible 2002-2005, pretty to look at total crap …I paid mine off 4 years ago but you’d never know it because it breaks down so religiously it’s just like having a car payment, to this day mine only has 104k miles on it, but I guarantee Ive spent about eight thousand dollars in repairs!
Hence the fix or repair daily
I know but I’ve had three Mustangs and only one had a problem. .the intake manifold blew on it BUT, Ford reimbursed me for the $900 repair. …
I can do that one better. A guy put a 426 hemi dual quads tunnel ram in a Gremlin. He had to sit in the back seat. In a 70 Challenger drag car that engine/car combo was untouchable in this area way………… back in the mid 70s.
I will never forget when my Grandparents went from our home town of Seward Alaska to Anchorage Alaska with their beautiful Dodge Monico Brougham & came home after being talked into buying one of those crappy “K” cars by some scumbag. I was so pissed off. I thought my god that guy was stupid, My Grandparents would have bought a really nice car ? The doors on the piece of shit were like a inch thick is all, I couldn’t believe how cheap this chunk of shit was ?
Had one of these aX with a3.5 rear end it could pop the pins in the rear window with the V8, fun car
John Johns
AMC Gremlin ( pictured )
AMC Pacer
Ford Pinto
Wheelstand champion. .i love gremlins
I thought Vega, & Pinto would be #1 & #2!
the 86-87 chevy nova
I have and I’ve my 1985 citation ll with the iron duke 2.5 efi
I had one of them
And #1 goes to the fox body mustang!
Pacer
I had a Gremlin and that was a fun little car
AMC Matador from the 70s was the ugliest car I’ve ever seen.
Timothy O’Leary