Craigslist Crapshoot

Welcome to Craigslist Crapshoot, our weekly search for the most bizarre, awesome, and/or terrible vehicles that the online classifieds has to offer.

Danger has a lot to do with luck and good timing. If you never flip, run into something, immolate, or choke on noxious exhaust fumes then even the most reputationally treacherous of vehicles will be a fine ride. Let’s have a look at some that just may be.
Tomsk gave us a 1964 Chevy Corvair Spyder turbo, a car that to this day is tainted with the aspersion that it is “unsafe at any speed.” That’s questionable in this case seeing as the non-runner seems perfectly benign while parked. Zero is a speed. Not to be outdone in the cars with potentially unfair bad-raps department Please Stand By offered up a 1976 Ford Pinto hatchback. The big-bumper cars like this had been re-engineered to address the fuel spill issue, but you can’t keep a good rumor down making this an excellent contribution.
The 1990 Suzuki Samurai given to us by tonyola gained the reputation for turning turtle at inconvenient moments—like when in motion—a scenario ramped up by a less than honest Consumer Reports test. In contrast, the Audi 5000S found by JayP achieved its infamy for unintended acceleration at the hands of poor reporting by CBS’ 60 Minutes.
Perhaps more deserving of its rep of twitchy on/off handling that could cause an unsuspecting pilot terminal butt pucker is the Toyota MR2 suggested by crank_case. Still, what a way to go, right?
Our winner this week, racking up the most votes, was—just as we started—a Corvair. This time however, a Rampside pickup located by Fuhrman16. The ad has been pulled by its seller—probably for safety reasons—but we have a photo as a reminder.
Congrats to Fuhrman16, and thank you all for your dangerous contributions. I’m feeling like I should take out some additional life insurance now having just read them all! Now, let’s see which bikes YOU might buy.