I am so cheap:

[hiker16]

Toilet paper?!? When there are perfectly good leaves in the back yard?

[VDCdriver]

@oldtimer-11

I remember when the Citation first came out. Both Motor Trend and Car and driver raved about it.
The very same Car and Driver writer who raved about if, flew someplace and rented one and complained about what a piece of s**t it was.
It turns out that GM had taken some production spot welded bodies and seam welded them before building the cars and supplied them for road tests.
Shades of the Royal Pontiac 421 cu. in. GTOs.

Yup!
In addition to re-welding the bodies of the cars that they loaned to the car magazines, GM also tweaked those vehicles to eliminate the vicious torque-steer effect. The differences between a real world Citation (and its Pontiac, Olds, & Buick clones) and one that was specially-prepared for the car magazines was… major.

My Citation had to be repainted three times before I considered the paint to be acceptable. And, even with those re-paints, serious rust issues (particularly around the rear window) surfaced in a little more than one year.

My Citation was a 4 cylinder with stick shift. The clutch had a new self-adjusting design that was defective, right out of the box. GM eventually directed dealerships to disable the self-adjusting feature, but before that was done on my car, they had to repair the clutch linkage several times. Additionally, second gear “went out”, and the transmission had to be overhauled during the first year of ownership.

Nothing that the dealership did was ever successful in eliminating a fairly severe ignition ping on hard acceleration.

Like most other X-car owners, I had to have the motor mounts replaced by year three of ownership.

And, even though I can’t claim to have experienced this problem myself, thousands of X-car owners experienced severe lockup of the rear brakes under “normal” (not panic stop) conditions.

I am one of–probably–10s of thousands of X-car buyers who vowed to never again buy a GM product after buying one of those crappy cars.

For the edification of those who are too young to remember these cars:

Worst Car Wednesday: Chevy Citation-This Success Became A Mess

And:

Here's Why The Chevy Citation Has A Bad Reputation

[MikeInNH]

@oldtimer-11

I remember when the Citation first came out. Both Motor Trend and Car and driver raved about it.

Those mags just give awards to the companies that advertise the most with them.

The 10 Most Embarrassing Award Winners in Automotive History (caranddriver.com)

[old_mopar_guy]

The '81 Citation was one of the most recalled cars ever

[Nevada_545]

@old_mopar_guy

The '81 Citation was one of the most recalled cars ever

NHTSA only shows two recalls, one for a battery cable and one for a power steering hose.

The Lexus that I am working on today (IS250) has 16 recalls listed, 3 of those completed today.

[VDCdriver]

@Nevada_545

NHTSA only shows two recalls, one for a battery cable and one for a power steering hose.

For the '81 model, that is true, but the list for the '80 Citation was fairly long.

https://www.automd.com/recall/chevrolet_m/citation_mm/