Times Five

‘‘Project Global’’ saw carmakers team up to make some awful cars. Here are the five worst. Damien O’Carroll reports.

Dodge Caliber

To be fair, the Caliber could be had in one very specific good form – the diesel version that was fitted with a 2.0-litre Volkswagen diesel engine (back when a VW diesel was a

good thing) and a six-speed manual transmission that was a blast to drive, but no-one wanted.

But otherwise the Caliber was a fairly dismal affair with lots of hard, nasty plastic and appalling build quality (I had the roof-lining fall on me while driving one on test).

There was a small glimmer of hope that we never saw here, however – the SRT version that packed a 213kW turbo engine and a six-speed manual that was apparently an absolute blast to drive . . .

Jeep Compass

You would have to wonder who at Jeep thought ‘‘we need a weedy, apologetic Jeep that makes even a Wrangler look like a shining example of interior quality and also weirdly looks like it has a huge dent in the rear door’’. Because that’s what the Jeep Compass was.

Sorry Jeep, but even the admittedly cool fold down rear speakers in the tailgate couldn’t make up for the truly awful build quality, simply nasty interior plastics and weirdly awkward styling of this effort.

While later models would get far better interiors (after Fiat took over), the Compass would remain a fairly average thing until the all-new model debuted in 2017.

Dodge Avenger

Yeah, yeah, cool name and it even looked temptingly cool with its mini-muscle car looks – but don’t be fooled, the Avenger was as awful as anything else on this list.

The muscle car looks hid the fact that it was powered by the same 2.4-litre four-cylinder petrol engine as everything else on this list, driving the front wheels through a four-speed auto. Yep, four. In 2008 . . .

Like its stablemates, the Dodge tried to hide its appalling quality behind bling, with the Avenger offering up heated and cooled cupholders, a ‘‘Cool Zone’’ chiller in the glovebox and a 20GB hard drive infotainment system. But it was still awful.

Chrysler Sebring

The Sebring shared many of the Dodge Avenger’s gimmicks, but added even worse build quality to the mix. Yes, really.

On the New Zealand launch we played a game of ‘‘Can my finger fit in this panel gap?’’ both inside and outside the car, with the highlight being a glovebox lid that could take an entire thumb on one side and not even the tip of a pinky on the other . . .

Then there was the weird styling that desperately tried to make the Sebring look more interesting and stylish than it was and the bizarre creased bonnet, but the final insult was the awful, floppy convertible version that gave new, desperate meaning to ‘‘mid-life crisis’’.

Jeep Patriot

Clearly someone realised that a weedy apologetic looking Jeep (see the Jeep Compass) was a mistake, so a tougher-looking squared-off version would make things right, right?

Wrong. The Patriot looked way better than the Compass, but that was a very low bar to clear and the Patriot still had its own weird proportions, awful build quality and underpowered engine to deal with.

Like the Compass, it improved vastly over time (but never moved beyond ‘‘mediocre’’), particularly inside, but unlike the Compass it didn’t survive into a second generation, quietly being dropped when the new Compass came out.