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These American sports cars are highly revered, but in truth, they aren't worth all the hype.

For the most part American carmakers are well within their comfort zone when they produce muscle cars, but sports cars are rather a different animal though.

It takes a lot of resources to produce any car, but with sports cars you need to add several months worth of fine-tuning to that. Although sports cars are inherently unreliable as commuter cars, that is, if they can even be used to commute at all, American sports cars have at times been completely devoid of any reliability.

In other cases the cars have looked the part only to be let down by their choice of powertrain. Having too much power can be just as bad as having too little, and they have been guilty of both extremes.

Related: People Think These British Sports Cars Are Awesome... They're Not

Even though their factory was in Belfast and therefore inherently Irish, they were still an American owned and run company. Costs were unfortunately cut all over the place and before anyone knew if they even still wanted one, the then CEO, John DeLorean got involved in a crazy drug smuggling case.

Drama aside, the DeLorean is a beautiful car in person. It is impossibly low to the ground and those gull wing doors just add to the theater of its brushed stainless design, but it was the woeful PVR-sourced V6 engine that really killed the car, happily taking away both performance and handling in one fell swoop.

Building a car company is an ambitious undertaking, but like most, they ended up overreaching by quite some distance. The Canadian company had grand ambitions of making a better, more efficient and safer car (SV stood for Safety Vehicle).

In their infinite wisdom they chose an AMC V8 for their car, the already heavy polycarbonate (plastic) body had to get lugged about by an underpowered, emissions sapped engine that liked eating its own oil pump occasionally. It turned out to be worse than most regular malaise era cars, more dangerous than them (they had a nasty habit of catching fire) and just plain sluggish.

Related: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Bricklin SV-1

It is very hard not to include the Iron Duke Camaro on any “worst sports car” list. Putting an engine like this in a sports car body was a crime.

90 horsepower was never going to be enough for this car, and it just leaves you scratching your head. Although these were fairly reliable, nobody really knows what GM was thinking.

While other manufacturers were hard at work developing muscle cars and the odd affordable people carrier to keep money coming in, Studebaker bet the farm on a sports car (original pictured).

We are all now acutely aware of the fact that it was a pretty poor decision. The car they came out with is pretty and performs well, but simply did not sell well mostly thanks to its fiberglass construction, which made it look and feel more like a kit car. It would subsequently get sold in this kit car form right up until 2006. The original Avanti made by Studebaker is a classic, but these kit cars are unfortunately more of a hit-and-miss affair.

Related: Here's What Makes The Studebaker Avanti One Of The Most Audacious Cars Ever Produced

To be clear the GT is not necessarily a bad car, it is just a below par supercar for hypercar money.

The performance car game has just changed so much over the years that these original GT cars made in the early 2000s are now just very expensive yard art.

Technically, this is an Opel. However, while GM were still determined to confuse everyone with their strange badge engineering quest, these little sporty cars got a Saturn badge.

With so much potential on offer, they just flattered to deceive, delivering uninspired real world performance that belies their specs and some seriously questionable 1900s GM build quality.

Related: Mallet Performance Hammers A 2007 Saturn Sky Into A 360-HP LS2 V8-Powered Classy Roadster

With a long production run, these cars ended up evolving into arguably one of the finest American supercars, it did not start that way.

The original Viper simply amounts to a really fun way to die, with far too much power for its own good and no way to tame that ridiculous V10.

Few sports car models were able to survive the oil crisis in the '70s, but the C3 Corvette somehow managed to get through it all, but to do that they had to turn it into this pile of sadness.

Making a paltry 180 horsepower from its 305 V8, it struggled to keep up with the fast improving hatchbacks coming out of Europe and Japan. Although the C4 Corvette might not be the most endearing model, it was a much-needed breath of fresh air (no pun intended).

Luke Zietsman is an all out automotive enthusiast based in The Philippines. If it has two or four wheels he has either owned it, researched about it or dreamed about it.