- I'm so sorry that I'm a piece of (fart)
Throughout time, certain cars have risen
to painful heights of fame.
Gained a cult-like following,
with their reputation being strictly based,
around false information, flated statistics,
movie fame, or simply just great marketing.
But rarely do these cars actually live up to the hype
that they're surrounded by.
The USDM market is especially a really weird place,
when you start to consider the retro-futuristic stuff.
There's a lot of conservative nature about the USDM cars,
in the fact that not a lot of stuff changes
by more than 10 to 15% per generation,
unless they're actually forced to.
Which leaves a lot of weird, subpar performing cars
left to people with low budgets and huge egos.
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and be sure to stick around for the last car on this list.
You're really not going to like
what I have to say about it.
This is my list of the five most overrated USDM cars
on the market today.
The first car on this list may very well break your soul.
The Ford focus RS, hit the ground running
with its impressive stats on paper
and marketing aimed at cementing
the Ford performance name,
in the mind of young enthusiasts.
Ford used the focus RS,
to take their shot at the rally inspired
all wheel drive, turbocharged market,
with the Evo 10 and the STI directly in their sites.
But in typical USDM fashion,
they only made the car 10, 15% better than its competition,
which is super duper ultra awesome,
before and during its release.
But as the car has got about six months to a year old,
the hype started dying down
and the truth started coming out.
Sure, the RS was quicker than both the STI and the Evo,
but the new at the time STI and Evo,
was a pretty low set bar, to be honest.
And the RS fell victim to the same issues
that the Evo and the STI did.
And that's where they were,
they're kind of bad at everything everywhere.
Even though they handled marginally well
for a heavy hatchback,
they're very stiff riding cars
and they're a pain in the ass to commute in
and just like it's competition,
they lost tons of power through drive train loss.
These things are making under 300 wheel horsepower,
with a really peaky power band.
They climb to peak power around 5,000 RPM
and then they fall directly on their face after that.
This means that maximum thrust,
is within a very small window of its rev range.
Only allowing it to achieve mid to high 13 seconds
in the quarter mile.
Now, I know it's not all about quarter mile times
it's a rally car.
But the quarter mile is one of the best representations
of how a car's power is actually put to the ground.
And in this case, not very well.
Furthermore, these cars don't take that well
to modifications either.
You're looking at very basic bolt-ons
and then you're kind of capped out,
without the risk of catastrophic failure.
Now don't get me wrong, I love the look, the sound
and the whole idea around the focus RS.
But at the end of the day,
the performance is as lackluster,
as it's Evo and STI rivals
and still demands premium money.
I would know, I've tried to scoop a cheap one.
Anyway, because of all those reasons,
the Focus RS, is underdeveloped and overrated.
If the next car on this list was a person,
it would be wearing a stained white undershirt,
have a bunch of tribal tattoos, a fake gold chain
and 100% rocking a (bleep) goatee.
Everywhere I go,
there's some guy in a straight piped 2009 challenger,
weaving in and out of traffic, flipping people off
and trying to race anybody that even looks at them.
And they also think that everything that's not a Mopar,
is a piece of Jap crap.
The third generation challenger,
is arguably one of the most over-hyped,
modern muscle cars of all time.
And at over two tons,
its impressive for the time 370 horsepower,
the challenger RT, was only able to muster
very high 13's and low 14's in the quarter mile.
And this is pretty bad
for that much power and the hype.
To put that into perspective,
my PT cruiser with a downpipe
and a tune that ran high 13's
with a faster trap speed than the challenger.
Not only that, but the challenger wasn't as new
and as original as you may think.
Mopar used a ton of Mercedes parts
for the development and the production
of the challenger.
Including the W220 S-classes' control arm,
front suspension and the W211 E-Classes' ,
five link rear suspension and also the transmission
and the differential and the ESP system electronics.
Need I keep going? There's a huge list.
Now I'm not going to lie, Mopar absolutely nailed it
with the looks on this thing.
And they even paved the way for the pony-car Wars to come.
But the amount of ego associated
with people who think these cars are fast,
just because it looks like a muscle car,
is far too high.
You know what? I take back The archi thing.
This goes for all non-SRT designated challengers.
Non-SRT challengers are surrounded
by all the muscle car hype,
without the muscle car performance.
And for that reason,
the third generation Dodge challenger, non-SRTs,
are underdeveloped and overrated.
Let's move on.
Next up is a car that fell victim
to its own entry level price point
and massive aftermarket support.
The Dodge Neon SRT4,
is one of those cars that everybody wanted.
And it's okay, you can admit it, I won't judge you.
But it's not because Mopar built an actually good car,
but because Mopar brought it to life,
at the perfect time.
We're talking about the release
of a turbocharged car,
based on an entry level model,
with competitive pricing,
at peak Fast and Furious, Need for Speed time.
Which at that, the internet as an entertainment hub,
it was just starting to gain traction
And only one year after axing the SRT4 Neon,
YouTube launched and shortly after that,
the videos of heavily modified SRT fullers,
stomping on V8s,
would be ingrained into our minds,
for years to come.
This has led to an almost Mark four super-like phenomenon
where a lot of people thought every SRT fuller
was Uber fast.
Even owners of these cars
in stock form have inflated egos
because of this.
In they're frigging 230 horsepower Neons,
a bunch of nerds.
Now don't get me wrong,
the 2.4 liter turbocharged Mopar engine
from the PT cruiser, is a fantastic bit of hardware,
but it's not some overdeveloped race car engine
with exotic internals.
And this is why you see a ton of these cars,
left as project cars or being parted out.
People push the stock bottom end
too hard with too little care,
because they heard a story once
that some guy from Utah on the forums,
said he made 450 wheel horsepower,
with a big wheel stock turbo
and stock internals and E85's with big injectors,
just not realistic. Ask me how I know.
And don't even get me started
on the third year grind issue.
With that, the Neon SRT4,
offers about as much comfort
as a base model of Neon.
Power windows, not on the back doors,
soft touch materials, good joke.
I hope you like squeaks and rattles
and it's surrounded by a ton of undeserving hype
and for that reason, I dubbed the SRT4 Neon,
over-hyped and overrated.
The fifth generation of Camaro,
was a car that won over the hearts of many
who have been missing their beloved pony car,
since Chevrolet discontinued the Camaro 2001
for the 2002 model year.
It had gobs of horsepower for the time
and it had that retro-futuristic design on lock,
just like the challenger did.
And these things sold like frigging hotcakes,
but you know what they say,
the early bird gets the worm,
but the second mouse gets the cheese.
And that's exactly what happened here.
At the time, 300 horsepower was enough
to impress the market.
So when the new Camaro launched,
the 426 horsepower LS3 in a lighter package
than the challenger, was this crazy to us in 2009,
as the 700 horsepower hellcat is to us today.
But when the Camaro started releasing its numbers,
like an eager school boy who couldn't keep a secret,
the new Camaro was the car to beat
and it didn't take long,
for its competition to start taking shots.
Nowadays, the fifth generation Camaro,
even compared to its four-door brother,
the G8 GT, has trouble keeping up with the pack.
In not magazine testing situations,
the fifth gen Camaro SS was doing high 13's
in the quarter mile and they stood
no chance against the up and coming Coyote Mustangs,
or the SRT 392s, who we're all dipping
into the twelves with amateur drivers.
But the hype surrounding them,
seems to not have went away.
And the egos have only seemed to get worse.
And I think that largely has to do with one thing.
The Transformers movies.
Transformers cemented the new Camaro
into everybody's minds as a bad ass car.
Even if it's only an okay enough pony car.
Now don't get it twisted,
I'm not some Camaro hater.
I really, really, really enjoyed the sixth gen
in every way imaginable.
But the fifth gen was just so,
2010-ish Chevrolet with (bleep) build quality
and over inflated statistics,
to cause false hype.
Some may call this good marketing,
I call it overrated.
Next!
Rumors surrounding the C8 Corvette,
goes back to 2014.
And it's been six freaking years
since we jumped on that hype train
and it took way too freaking long to come to life.
The mid engine Corvette, has been outed so often,
spotted so much in the wild,
acting like they didn't want you to see them,
even though I'm pretty convinced
that that's exactly what they wanted.
And they leaked so much information about the car,
putting the C8 on a pedestal so high,
that when it actually came down
to the production model,
it produced less than stellar results.
I'd like to call this super syndrome.
Because by the time Toyota unveiled
their new sports car
at the 2019 North American International Auto Show,
it felt like we already had a pretty good idea
of what the car would look like
and how it would perform.
And thus, the excitement was gone.
Now don't get me wrong,
I'm not saying that the mid-engine Corvette
isn't exciting, nor am I saying
that it's not a super car slayer on a budget.
Corvette engineers have been doing this for decades,
except the C3. The C3 can sucks.
But you can't thrive on the hype
and then deliver something that you've led us
to believe was going to be world shattering
and give us something with lackluster performance.
And the other thing that really grinds my gears
is all of you are going to say,
yeah, well, the C8 starts at under $60,000
and that's just dumb, because when you boast
about the steps of the C8,
you're not referring to the base model,
without any of the performance stuff,
let alone the tires you get the Z51 package.
Now maybe they will win my heart,
when the Z06 comes out or even the ZR1,
but even then, we've already been hearing rumors
from really credible sources
that are saying the ZR1's going
to have a hybrid all wheel drive system.
Which is absolutely mind blowing.
But with all the ideas
and speculation in our minds about this,
how are they supposed to exceed our expectations?
I don't know if they actually can.
And for that reason, the C8 Corvette
is over-hyped and overrated.
But that about wraps up this special USDM episode
of over-under.
Be sure to leave a comment about what cars
you guys think are overrated
or what you think that I got completely wrong.
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we do real reviews, all kinds of really cool stuff.
And also head over to
https://www.fitmentindustries.com/
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while you're there,
don't forget to check out our giveaway,
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we'll leave link to that in the description.
I'm Sean from Fitment Industries,
Sean Bita Fi, on Instagram,
please stop sending me hate mail.
Peace.