QOTD: What's Your Favorite Automotive 'Oops' Moment?

Last night, the Academy Awards officially let Steve Harvey off the hook. As the producers of La La Land were in the middle of their acceptance speech for Best Picture, event organizers rushed to let everyone know they had actually announced the wrong winner for the night’s biggest award. Oops.

There have been more than a few “oops” moments in the car biz, too.

Kia introduced the Borrego, an otherwise competent body-on-frame SUV, at the colossally wrong moment, landing with a thud at a time when gasoline was expensive and customers were shunning big cars. Tales of dealers hiding their allocation of Azteks in the far lot are not urban legends; I know for a fact this happened at a Pontiac store in my home province. And no one reading this site needs a history lesson on the Edsel.

The misstep of an entire model is an easy mark. Individual features aren’t immune to the Oops Factor, either. Witness the original iteration of MyFord Touch, riddled with bugs and response times which could’ve been measured with a calendar. Reports exist of early examples leaving Bill Ford stranded in an unfamiliar city, while far more entertaining is the story of an engineer receiving an email from a mechanic with a photo of a cracked infotainment screen … purportedly caused by an aggravated Mark Fields.

Mechanical innovations are not exempt from the Oops Factor. Twenty years ago, GM introduced Dex-Cool antifreeze, a coolant which was tinted like tasty Orange Crush to distinguish it from the industry-standard green hue. Dex-Cool was marketed as a long-life solution: no need to touch the stuff for five years or 150,000 miles. Over time – either through a design flaw or customers mixing Dex-Cool with traditional coolant – it tended to turn a muddy brown, clogging radiators and inhibiting, y’know, actual cooling, the sole job with which it was tasked.

Remarkably, not all miscues resulted in hits to the balance sheet. When Consumer Reports dumped the Civic from its Recommended list, Honda sat up and took notice, sending their compact sedan for a refresh just a single year into its redesign. Nevertheless, Honda went on to sell more Civics in 2012 – sans CR recommendation – than they had at any point in the previous four years.

I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my life, but I like to think I’ve learned from them. One can only hope the auto biz has as well. What’s your favorite moment of automotive schadenfreude?