‘World’s Worst Cars’ Book Redemption: NSU Ro80 – The Autopian

Holy crap, I’ve almost gone a whole week for a daily feature! I’m normally terrible about recurring things like this, so let’s see if I can keep it going. The daily feature is, of course, where I get an old computer to pick a random page in the 2005 book, The World’s Worst Cars, written by Craig Cheetham, and then I do my best to redeem whatever car was being lambasted on that page. I do this because I firmly believe that this “worst car” book, along with so many other “worst car” listicles and articles and testicles are fundamentally just lists of interesting cars, not worst cars. So, with that out of the way, let’s fire up the Commodore PET and pick a random page!

By the way, I know that these old computers can only really pick pseudorandom numbers, and while I think its good enough for our purposes, the first two random numbers that the PET spat out today were repeats! Huh. That’s weird. But I guess it can happen, because, you know, randomness.

Anyway, let’s see what we get today:

Page 175! Fantastic. What do we have on page 175?

Holy shit, it’s the NSU Ro80! Sure, the Ro80 was a deeply flawed car, no question, but it is also a legitimate motoring icon! The Ro80 is a design masterpiece and a technological pioneer! It has no business being in a book called The World’s Worst Cars – would you put Nikolai Tesla in a book called The World’s Worst People just because he was weirdly obsessed with the number three and refused to talk to women wearing pearls? No, of course you wouldn’t! So why should the Ro80 be sentenced to be committed to this vile tome just because it (checks notes) had an engine that routinely failed after about 15,000 miles?

Really, you have to think of the Ro80’s twin-rotor Wankel engine as an Achilles’ heel as opposed to something by which you would condemn the whole car. Because the whole car was just too damn good.

NSU was an interesting company; they were mostly known as a maker of motorcycles and clever rear-engined little economy cars like the NSU Prinz. They became enamored with Wankel rotary engines in the late 1950s, and by 1963 they introduced the world’s first rotary-engined production car, the NSU Wankel Spider.

Wankel engines are beguiling things for companies that seem to genuinely love engineering, like NSU: they make incredible amounts of power from relatively low displacements, they have very few moving parts, they’re incredibly smooth, and they’re just weird and cool. They also are incredibly thirsty for fuel and consume some crucial parts, like apex seals, to the point where their longevity is, well, tragic.

The NSU Ro80, built from 1967 to 1977, was the world’s first twin-rotor production sedan, and even if we accept that its rotary engine (which made 113 horsepower from just 995cc, still impressive today) was flawed, everything around that engine was just magnificent. The body design, by Claus Luthe, who would later go on to BMW and define their design vocabulary in the 1980s and 1990s, was a masterpiece of aerodynamics (a drag coefficient of 0.355) and looked so clean and sleek and modern that it could be still fresh today.

In fact, while I was at the Other Site, I did a mockup of just that, adapting the Ro80 with plastic bumpers and modern lighting to see how it would look as a modern car, and I think it works:

The Ro80 I believe is a legitimate automotive design icon. It was also considered a fabulous car to drive, with race car-like inboard brakes, and the steering seems to have received some of the most effusive praise I’ve ever read; look at this quote from the magazine CAR in 1973:

“We doubt whether we have yet met a power steering setup the equal of the Ro80’s. There is no apparent delay in response…the car simply goes where you aim it, reacts instantly to steering wheel movement, and cooperates to the hilt when one is thrashing along a self-imposed special stage.”

That’s high praise! When these things ran, people adored them. They were fast Autobahn cruisers, comfortable and rewarding to drive, roomy on the inside, not too big on the outside, just an all-around fantastic machine.

Well, except for that engine. On the plus side, though, NSU was very generous with their engine warranty policy, replacing engines in customer cars multiple times; I’ve even heard that Ro80 owners, when passing one another on the road, would hold up a number of fingers that was equal to the number of engine replacements they’ve had as a form of greeting.

I think even Craig Cheetham himself knows the Ro80 really doesn’t belong in this book; he notes that it was “stunningly styled, incredibly comfortable, and fast,” which sure feels like a bit of guilty backtracking, because deep down, Craig knows that the Ro80 doesn’t belong in this book.

Yes, it’s flawed. But it’s also incredible. That combination in no way equals “worst” of anything. Therefore, I now demand that everyone grab their copy of The World’s Worst Cars and tear out page 175.

Thank you.

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